How much money do i need for my retirement

This is a recurring question one encounters many times in life.

The answer is not straight forward. To answer this many aspects need to be considered.

1. When one wants to retire and how many more years one needs to survive with the corpus. With increasing life expectancy and increasing living costs, one needs to consider this aspects very carefully. Hence it is better to take higher life expectancy and a reasonable factor of living expenses. If I want to retire at 50, one may be better off considering 35-40 years of remaining life and 6-7% annual inflation. However, this is subjectively.

2. What is the status of living one wants to maintain. The higher the status of living, the higher the expenses and higher the corpus should be.

3. What are the responsibilities one has to take care off. One needs to take care of children to some extent. However, this level may vary. For boys, one has to foot the bill for their studies and bring them up to some level(till 25 years). For girls it may be marriage. But it will be useful if one makes children independent and train them to be on their own from the beginning. This will reduce expectation that my parents will give me this much money etc.

4. External factors like inflation and rates etc. Though one is not directly in control of these aspects, one can understand and prepare for these. This will help them by giving necessary grounding to weather these changes.

After going through the above, it may feel that one can never retire. But with some discipline, one can get enough corpus and optimize one's expenses so that one can retire peacefully at 60 at least.