3-Bucket Retirement Planner
Split your corpus across liquid, balanced and equity buckets with periodic rebalancing - built for sequence-of-returns risk.
The three-bucket retirement strategy splits a corpus into a liquid bucket for near-term expenses, a balanced bucket for the medium term and an equity bucket for long-term growth, refilled by periodic rebalancing.
Personal details
Investment buckets
Tax, rebalance & corpus
REQUIRED CORPUS
₹0
Blended tax-aware real return
TOTAL PROJECTED
₹0
Existing FV + SIP corpus
SURPLUS
₹0
Projected - required
RECOMMENDED SIP
₹0/mo
To close the gap
How this is calculated
The bucket strategy exists to solve one specific problem, and understanding that problem explains the whole design.
If equity markets fall sharply in the first years of your retirement and you are forced to sell units at depressed prices to fund living expenses, the corpus may never recover — even if markets rebound strongly afterwards. This is sequence-of-returns risk, and it is why two retirees with identical average returns can end up with completely different outcomes. Bucketing addresses it by keeping several years of expenses in assets that do not need to be sold at a bad moment.
The corpus is divided three ways. Bucket 1 holds liquid or ultra-short funds at around 5%, and funds the first slice of each year's withdrawal. Bucket 2 holds balanced advantage funds at around 11%, covering the medium term. Bucket 3 holds equity at around 15% and carries the long-term growth. Bucket 3's allocation fills whatever remains after the first two, so the three always total 100%.
Tax is handled differently for each bucket, and this is where the calculator departs from simpler tools. Buckets 1 and 2 are taxed annually, so their effective return is simply the pre-tax rate reduced by your capital gains rate. Bucket 3 is not — under a rebalancing strategy it is sold only at rebalance events, so gains compound untaxed between them. Over a five-year rebalancing interval that produces an effective rate of 13.52% against 15% pre-tax, rather than the 13.13% a naive annual-tax assumption would give. The gap is small per year and significant over three decades.
Those three effective rates are weighted by allocation into a blended return, which is then converted to a real return against inflation and used to compute the corpus you need.
The year-by-year projection then draws down each bucket according to the withdrawal split and refills the near-term buckets from equity at each rebalancing interval, so you can see how the structure behaves rather than trusting a single output. Where a simple calculator gives you a number, this one gives you the mechanism.