An NRI in Dubai sizing a retirement corpus for a return to India

Situation

A 36-year-old project manager in Dubai earns AED 32,000 a month with no personal income tax and remits savings home.

The plan is to retire in Hyderabad at 55, where today's equivalent lifestyle costs about ₹90,000 a month.

The mistake being made: sizing the corpus against today's ₹90,000 rather than the inflated figure 19 years out.

What they calculated

Inputs used

Current age / retirement age

36 / 55

Post-retirement horizon

30 years

Today's monthly expenses

₹90,000

Assumed inflation

6% p.a.

Existing corpus

₹48,00,000

Expected pre-retirement return

11% CAGR

Post-retirement return

7% CAGR

Monthly AED surplus

AED 11,000

The numbers

• ₹90,000 a month inflating at 6% for 19 years becomes about ₹2.72 lakh a month at age 55.
• Funding ₹2.72 lakh a month for 30 years, with the corpus earning 7% and expenses still inflating at 6%, needs roughly ₹8.4 crore.
• The existing ₹48 lakh compounding at 11% for 19 years reaches about ₹3.4 crore on its own.
• The gap of roughly ₹5 crore needs a monthly SIP near ₹1.02 lakh at 11% over 19 years.
• The AED 11,000 monthly surplus converts to roughly ₹2.5 lakh, so the plan is fundable with material headroom.
• A 5% annual step-up on the SIP reaches the same corpus with a starting contribution of about ₹72,000.

Outcome

The target moved from a vague 'about ₹4 crore' to a defensible ₹8.4 crore once INR inflation was applied properly.

A step-up SIP was chosen over a flat one, freeing roughly ₹30,000 a month of early-years cash flow.

Currency risk was addressed by remitting on a fixed monthly schedule rather than timing the AED/INR rate.

A review cadence was set: re-run the corpus every two years or whenever the retirement date moves.

Questions this raises

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