How much should I save each month to reach a goal?

Work backwards from two things you choose: the amount and the date. Divide what is still to go by the months remaining for a floor figure, then adjust for the growth you assume and for the cost itself rising by then. Time matters more than the rate — the same target needs roughly twice the monthly amount over five years as over eleven.

Start with the gap, not the goal

The amount you need each month is set by what is still missing, not by the headline target. If a ₹20 lakh goal is already half covered by money you hold, the job is ₹10 lakh, and treating it as ₹20 lakh produces a monthly figure large enough that most people abandon the plan in the first month.

The rough floor is simple arithmetic: what is left, divided by the months remaining. That ignores any growth on what you put aside, so the real requirement is lower — but it is a useful sanity check, because if the floor figure already exceeds what you have spare, no assumption about growth will rescue the date.

Rough monthly = (target − already covered) ÷ months remaining

Time does more work than the rate

Doubling the runway more than halves the monthly amount, because contributions have longer to compound and there are simply more of them. Changing the assumed rate of growth, by contrast, moves the answer far less over the horizons most goals run to. This is the single most useful thing to know about goal saving.

It follows that the two levers with real force are the date and the amount, both of which you control directly. When a goal will not fit, moving the date is usually a smaller sacrifice than the monthly figure implies — and it is a change you can make with certainty, unlike a rate you can only assume.

The cost is a moving target

A ₹20 lakh car in six years is not a ₹20 lakh problem. At 6% general inflation the same car costs around ₹28.4 lakh by then, and some categories move faster than the general figure — education and healthcare in India have historically run well ahead of it, while electronics have often run behind.

This is why Muktify lets you set a growth rate per goal rather than applying one number to everything, and leaves the box blank by default: an empty box means "track my general inflation assumption", which is different from a deliberate zero meaning "this cost never rises". Getting that distinction wrong quietly changes the answer.

Every goal has a price beyond its price

Money spent on a dated goal leaves the pot that was compounding toward everything else, so a goal costs its own amount plus the growth that money would have produced in the years between. Muktify shows both — what the goal costs, and how far it pushes your Freedom Day — because the second figure is the one that never appears on a price tag.

That is a fact about the arithmetic, not an argument against the goal. A house or a sabbatical may be worth years of a later retirement, and only you can weigh that. What the app can do is make the trade visible before you commit rather than after.

See all of this on your own numbers

Muktify works out how long your money would last without a paycheck, and what a big purchase really costs you — free, in about two minutes, with no bank login.