What is a safe withdrawal rate?
The percentage of your retirement corpus you can withdraw each year with a low risk of running out of money over a long retirement. This calculator offers three tiers — Just Enough (3.3%), Sleep Well (2.9%, our recommended default), and Set & Forget (2.5%) — or you can enter your own rate.
Why is Mandala's safe withdrawal rate more conservative than the famous 4% rule?
The 4% rule (a 25× corpus) comes from US market history — steadier long-run equity returns, lower average inflation, and many retirees have Social Security as a floor. India's numbers are different on every one of those points: Nifty's annual returns have ranged from +72% to −52% (far more volatile than the US indices the 4% rule was built on), inflation has averaged 5–7%+ for decades, and debt/FD returns are taxed at your income slab rate rather than a favorable long-term capital-gains rate. Most self-employed and business-owner retirees — a large share of who this calculator is for — also have no employer pension under them. So Mandala's three tiers aren't the US number with an arbitrary margin bolted on — they're sized for a 30-year Indian retirement against this app's own modeled returns, inflation, and tax assumptions, the same assumptions the full three-bucket model backtests against real Nifty history.
What's the difference between Just Enough, Sleep Well, and Set & Forget?
All three are sized for a 30-year retirement — they differ in margin of safety. Just Enough (30×, ~3.3%) is the floor: it doesn't ask you to save more than the numbers call for, but leaves less room to absorb a bad early sequence of market returns. Sleep Well (35×, ~2.9%) is Mandala's default — a genuine buffer above the floor, enough to ride out the rough early years that do the most damage to a retirement corpus, without over-saving. Set & Forget (40×, ~2.5%) is for a longer horizon (early retirement, 40+ years) or if leaving a legacy matters to you — built so you shouldn't need to revisit the plan regardless of what markets do.
Why does this calculator ask for an inflation rate?
Your expenses today aren't your expenses at retirement. If retirement is years away, the corpus you'll actually need is your today's-money corpus grown at your assumed inflation rate to that future year — otherwise you'd undersize the target.
Is this the same as Mandala's three-bucket retirement model?
No — this is a simple corpus-sizing calculator. Mandala Personal's three-bucket model additionally sequences how you actually draw down that corpus year by year across market conditions, using your real tagged holdings — a materially deeper plan than a single target number.