Aakarsh Dalmia  CFP®

Tools

Five questions worth answering yourself.

These are the calculations I run in the first meeting anyway. You may as well have them, and arrive at the conversation already knowing roughly where you stand.

Each one runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is stored, nothing is sent anywhere, and there is no form to fill in first.


What a calculator can and cannot do

Every one of these turns assumptions into a number. Change the inflation rate by a percentage point and the answer moves by lakhs, which tells you something important: the output is not a fact about your future, it is a statement about the assumptions you chose.

Used well, that is exactly what makes them useful. Run the retirement number three times, at five, six and seven per cent inflation, and you learn more from the spread than from any single figure. Used badly, a calculator becomes a false comfort, a screenshot that says you are fine.

None of these outputs is advice, and none accounts for your tax position, your dependants, your existing portfolio, or how you actually behave when markets fall twenty per cent. That is the part worth talking about.