Retirement

20–30 years, then 25 more

The only goal you cannot borrow for, and the one inflation damages most — because it keeps working for decades after your income has stopped. The mistake almost everyone makes is discounting at the nominal return rather than the real one, which understates the corpus badly.

Your child's education

10–18 years

The hardest deadline of any goal: the fee is due in a particular month whatever the market is doing. Education costs have also risen faster than general prices, so planning at CPI inflation quietly leaves a gap. Start shifting out of equity about three years before the course begins.

Marriage

10–20 years

Similar arithmetic to education — a known date and a cost that inflates — but with more flexibility on the amount and usually a little on the timing. The education planner does this calculation; put the wedding budget in place of the course fee and set the age accordingly.

Buying a home

3–8 years

A shorter horizon than most people assume, which changes the answer: money you need in four years does not belong mostly in equity. Work out the down payment first, then check what the EMI does to everything else you are trying to fund.

Saving tax

Every year

Before buying anything for the tax break, work out whether the old regime is even better for you. For a great many salaried people it is not any more, and an ELSS investment bought purely for Section 80C then achieves nothing on the tax side.

Regular income

Now onwards

Turning a corpus into a monthly income without exhausting it. The number that matters is not what you can draw but what you can keep drawing — and whether it can rise with inflation for as long as you need it.