No, your SWP won't eat through your retirement savings

Summary: How can investors grow their wealth through mutual funds without eroding the corpus while running an SWP? - Hiren Shah You spend decades building a corpus. Then retirement arrives, and you think: how do I actually live off this money without watching it disappear? One of the most common tools for this is a systematic withdrawal plan, or SWP. Just as a systematic investment plan (SIP) lets you invest a fixed amount every month, an SWP lets you withdraw a fixed amount every month from your mutual fund corpus. It is the retirement income equivalent of a salary. Predictable, regular and drawn from what you have already built. The fear, however, is real: what if the withdrawals eat through everything faster than expected? What if the money runs out before you do? The answer depends entirely on one thing: whether your corpus was built for the life you want to live. Let the numbers show you why. Building the corpus Say you invest Rs 10,000 every month into a mutual fund delivering a long-term average return of 12 per cent. No step-ups, no changes, just a steady monthly contribution for 15 years. You put in a total of Rs 18 lakh over this period. At the end of year 15, your portfolio is worth Rs 48 lakh. The extra Rs 30 lakh came from compounding—the process by which your returns start generating their own returns over time, so your money grows on itself, not just on what

This article was originally published on March 23, 2026.