How much money is enough to retire comfortably?
Rs 1 crore? Rs 5 crore? Rs 10 crore? Or the increasingly intimidating Rs 40 crore number that often appears in retirement-planning conversations?
Radhika Gupta, MD & CEO of Edelweiss Mutual Fund, wants people to stop obsessing over a giant retirement number before they have even started investing.
“You do not need 40 crores to retire,” Gupta said at the India Today Woman Summit 2026.
Her concern is that throwing around massive retirement numbers can have the opposite of the intended effect. If someone believes they need Rs 40 crore to retire, they may conclude that building enough wealth is impossible and decide not to invest at all.
Instead, Gupta says retirement planning needs to start with a much simpler question: what will you actually spend?
According to Gupta, the amount required for retirement depends on an individual’s lifestyle, location, existing assets and whether they have a paid-up home.
For someone in their 40s or 50s, she suggested starting with the expenses they would need to meet if they did not have a job, excluding the cost of a home if that home is already owned.
Those expenses then need to be projected into the future, taking inflation and lifestyle changes into account.
The point is that there is no single retirement number that works for everyone.
Someone living in Mumbai with a fully paid-up house will have a very different financial requirement from someone renting in a smaller city. A person supporting dependent children will also have a different target from someone whose children are financially independent.
Gupta gave examples to make the point.
Gupta said that in Mumbai, one of India’s most expensive cities, a person with a paid-up home and around Rs 5 crore to Rs 7 crore could potentially retire comfortably.
She also gave the example of a family member living in Delhi who has a fully paid-up home but children who are not yet earning. Because of those additional responsibilities, she said a portfolio of around Rs 7 crore to Rs 8 crore would put that person in good shape at 60.
These are not universal retirement targets, but examples of how the calculation changes depending on individual circumstances.
That is also why Gupta pointed people towards retirement calculators rather than blindly chasing a headline number.
The calculation needs to account for the money a person needs, inflation and how their lifestyle and spending may evolve.
While the final retirement corpus may run into crores, Gupta’s argument is that the starting point does not need to be large.
She said investors can begin with as little as Rs 100 in a mutual fund, noting that many people spend more than that on a movie-theatre snack.
“Investing is a habit. It’s about discipline,” she said.
This is particularly important for young investors, she argued. Her 10% saving rule for people in their 20s is less about immediately building a huge corpus and more about creating the discipline to invest regularly.
Once that habit is established, the amount can increase as income rises.
The danger with focusing only on a target such as Rs 10 crore or Rs 40 crore is that it can make retirement planning look like an all-or-nothing exercise.
Gupta’s approach is more incremental: calculate what you need, start investing early, increase your savings rate as your income grows and keep revisiting the number.
Her 10-30-50 framework fits into this approach. She suggests investing 10% of post-tax income in your 20s, 30% in your 30s and 50% in your 40s.
The objective is not to magically reach a fixed number but to steadily increase the amount of wealth working for you.
And that is why, according to Gupta, someone hearing that they need Rs 40 crore should not give up before they have started.
“You don’t need 40 crores to retire,” she said.
The more useful question, she suggested, is: how much will I actually need to live the life I want after I stop working?
(Disclaimer: The views, opinions, recommendations, and suggestions expressed by experts/brokerages in this article are their own and do not reflect the views of the India Today Group. It is advisable to consult a qualified broker or financial advisor before making any actual investment or trading choices.)