Retirement Savings Goal

Retirement target by remaining years

Start from the corpus you want, the years you have left and the real return you expect. The monthly contribution that gets you there is PMT = FV × i / ((1+i)^n − 1), where i is the monthly real rate and n the number of months. In Brazil, EC 103/2019 set the minimum retirement age at 62 for women and 65 for men, with a floor of 15 years of INSS contributions (20 years for men who joined after the reform). Take the legal age, subtract your current age, and that gives you n.

A typical CLT worker puts in around 12% of salary to INSS once you count employee and employer shares, but the public pension can't pay more than the INSS ceiling, somewhere near R$ 8,157 in 2025. Whatever you want to spend above that has to come from your own capital. The handy shortcut here is the 4% rule (William Bengen, 1994): hold a portfolio worth 25× annual spending and you can pull out 4% a year, adjusted for inflation, for three decades.

Applications

People use it to size monthly contributions to PGBL/VGBL, Tesouro IPCA+ or balanced ETFs, and to check whether their current pace actually lands on target before the legal retirement age. It also shows what waiting costs you. Each 5 years of delay can roughly double the monthly contribution you'll need.

FAQ

What if I retire before the legal age? You can do it on private capital alone, which is the whole idea behind FIRE. The INSS checks only start at the legal age, or a bit earlier under the points rule, currently 92/102 for women and men.

Should I count INSS in the target? Yes. Take your annual spending, subtract the INSS benefit you expect, and only then apply the 25× multiplier. The private corpus you need drops a lot once you do that.

What real rate is reasonable for Brazil? For a diversified portfolio, figure 4%–6% above inflation. A sensible base case is 5%; if you want to plan conservatively, run the numbers again at 3%.