What will your retirement cost, and what should you save each month?

Retirement planner

Inflation

Your lifestyle is entered in today’s dollars and grown at 2.5% a year up to your retirement year, then kept growing through retirement so your spending power holds for the whole period. MAS targets medium-term price stability rather than publishing a long-term rate; 2.5% is Singapore’s long-run average since the 1960s, and the last twenty years have averaged closer to 2%, so this errs on the cautious side.

Nest egg

The lump sum that funds that growing lifestyle until your planning age. It uses the exact real rate, (1 + return) ÷ (1 + 2.5%) − 1, with each year’s spending set aside at the start of that year.

Monthly savings

The level amount that, invested monthly at your chosen return, grows to exactly the nest egg by your retirement date.

CPF LIFE

The headline figure leaves CPF out, so it stays conservative. Switch CPF LIFE on and the payout you enter is treated as today’s dollars, grown at 2.5% a year until 65, then held level in dollar terms for life — which is how the Standard Plan works. The shaded band on the chart is the part of the nest egg those payouts cover. The Escalating Plan starts lower and rises about 2% a year instead.

Pinning a scenario

Pinning keeps the current curve on the chart as a dashed outline and both are then drawn on one shared scale, so the two are directly comparable rather than each filling the frame.

Check your CPF payouts with the official tools: Retirement Payout Planner (below 55) and Monthly Payout Estimator (55 to 79).

Protection estimator

Income replacement

Your income, times the level you choose, times the number of years your family would need it. It is a plain multiple in today’s dollars: no inflation is added and no investment return on the payout is assumed, which is what keeps it comparable to the 9× and 4× rules of thumb.

Debts and dependants

Added in full, so loans are cleared and big future costs are funded as lump sums.

Existing cover

Subtracted from the total. What remains is the gap.

Benchmarks

Shown for comparison: 9× annual income for death and TPD cover and 4× for critical illness, as recommended by LIA Singapore and the MAS Basic Financial Planning Guide. The 4× figure assumes about five years of recovery before returning to work, which is why five years is offered as the critical illness setting above.