How Much Must You Save to Have $1M at Retirement? The Monthly Number for Every Starting Age
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By Spencer Li, CFTe · Last updated: 26 October 2026
Starting from zero, you need to put away about $1,441 a month for 30 years to reach $1M, if your money grows at 4% a year. Give yourself 40 years and that drops to about $846 a month, while squeezing the same goal into 20 years pushes it up to about $2,726. Every figure on this page assumes you deposit at the end of each month, that interest compounds monthly, and that there are no fees or taxes. The return is an assumption you pick, and no market promises to pay it.
I first published this table in January 2017, using the formulas from my finance 101 class at university. This month I ran every number again from scratch, added the CPF interest rates as a yardstick, and put inflation back into the picture, because a million dollars in 2056 will not buy what a million buys today.
Where did the original table come from?
The first version of this post was a spreadsheet screenshot and three tips. People kept asking me after seminars how much they had to save to retire with a million. So I worked it out for three time horizons and five rates of return, and put it all in one picture.
There you go. I tabulated the figures for easy reference.
I rebuilt the formula this month and the screenshot still matches to the dollar. Saving for 5 years at 2% a year, starting from nothing, takes $15,861 a month, which is exactly the top left cell.
The two right-hand columns deserve a warning label, though. A 20% or 50% return every single year is a maths exercise rather than a plan, and the bottom right cell shows why. At 50% a year for 20 years, the formula says you need $2 a month to end up with a million. Two dollars a month. When the arithmetic starts telling you that one cup of kopi a month makes you a millionaire, the assumption has broken, and the same goes for any sales pitch that leans on that kind of number.
How much do you need to save each month for $1M?
With returns closer to the ground, the table looks very different. I rebuilt it for four time horizons and five return assumptions, from 0% up to 8% a year.
| Years of saving | 0% | 2.5% | 4% | 6% | 8% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | $8,333 | $7,344 | $6,791 | $6,102 | $5,466 |
| 20 | $4,167 | $3,216 | $2,726 | $2,164 | $1,698 |
| 30 | $2,778 | $1,868 | $1,441 | $996 | $671 |
| 40 | $2,083 | $1,214 | $846 | $502 | $286 |
Monthly deposit at the end of each month, starting from $0, compounded monthly at the annual rate divided by 12. No fees, taxes or inflation. The rates are assumptions, and none of them is a forecast.
The 2.5% and 4% columns are there because they are rates you can look up. For 1 October to 31 December 2026, the CPF Board pays 2.5% a year on the Ordinary Account and 4% on the Special, MediSave and Retirement Accounts, according to its own interest rate page. The 6% and 8% columns are what-ifs, and nothing on this page says any investment will pay them.
Now look at what the million is actually made of. Take 30 years at 4%. You put in $1,441 a month for 360 months, which comes to about $518,700 of your own money, and interest supplies the other $481,300. Stretch the same plan to 40 years and you put in only about $406,100, while interest does $593,900 of the work.
That gap is the whole argument for starting early. The extra 10 years cost you no extra effort at all, and they cut the monthly bill by about 41%. Time is the cheapest input you have.
If you want to check a cell yourself, Excel and Google Sheets will do it in one line. Type =PMT(4%/12, 30*12, 0, -1000000) and it returns 1,440.95. Change the rate or the years and you have your own row.
Finding your row takes a minute, and sticking to it for 30 years takes a routine. For trading, the free 15-minute swing trader checklist is the one I use.
Is $1M even enough to retire on?
On 30 December 2022, a reader on Reddit’s r/singaporefi asked the question most people are too polite to ask: “is 1m really enough to retire?”
It is a fair challenge, and the honest answer is that it depends on what you spend, and that the million shrinks while you wait for it. SingStat’s figures put Singapore’s consumer price inflation at 0.9% in 2025 and 6.1% in 2022, and averaged over the 30 years from 1996 to 2025, prices rose by about 1.7% a year, which is my own calculation from SingStat’s annual series.
Suppose prices rise 2% a year from here. Then $1M in 30 years buys roughly what $552,000 buys today. Wait 40 years and it buys about $453,000 of today’s shopping.
So I treat $1M as a target rather than a finish line. It is a round number that forces you to start, and the real test is whether the income it can produce covers the life you want, which only your own budget can answer.
I should also be honest about my own table. Rates change. As at October 2026, the CPF Board has promised the 4% floor only until 31 December 2027, and after that the rate follows a formula tied to the yield on 10-year Singapore Government Securities. So even the column that looks safest is an assumption about the next 30 years. Morgan Housel makes the right point in The Psychology of Money: a plan is worth more when it would be great at 8% a year but still fine at 4%.
Tip 1: Why is saving so hard when the maths is so simple?
After my first paycheck, I went out and quickly spent half of it on a “gift” to myself, as a reward for seeing the first stack of cash land in my bank account. I learnt fast that I did not need the gift, and that saving was very, very hard, especially when you know another paycheck is coming next month.
If there is one piece of advice on how to actually save, it is this: pay yourself first. On payday, move money out of your paycheck into a savings or investment account before you spend a cent on anything else. Set it up to happen automatically, so it is gone before you can talk yourself out of it.
Behavioural economists have tested a stronger version of the same idea. Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi designed a plan called Save More Tomorrow, in which employees agree in advance that part of each future pay rise goes into savings, automatically, until they opt out. Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow why it works so well. Nobody’s take-home pay falls today, so there is no immediate loss to resist, and the extra saving feels like a raise you never received rather than money taken away. In one company’s plan, as Hersh Shefrin reports in Beyond Greed and Fear, the saving rate went from 3.5% to 11.6% over 28 months. That is more than triple.
The trick works with human nature instead of against it, and paying yourself first is the same trick at home. Do note that it has a limit. Oliver Burkeman points out in Four Thousand Weeks that it does not work if you earn only enough to survive, and in that case the first job is to raise the income.
The first few months are tough. New habits take time to form, and the money you moved out on payday will feel like money you lost for a while, but once the habit sets you stop noticing it. If you have children, it is worth teaching them this young: “pay yourself first, and then spend what you have left” is a good way to instil financial discipline in the next generation.
Saving works best as a routine you stop thinking about, and the same goes for trading. My free 15-minute swing trader checklist is the daily routine I use myself.
Tip 2: What does a truly diversified portfolio look like?
The word portfolio makes many people picture five to ten stocks held for 20 or 30 years. I have always seen it more broadly, as money spread across asset classes and across time horizons, and the simplest way I know to explain it is fast money and slow money.
Fast money is trading. It means shorter-term positions that need your time and your skill, and it can lose money just as quickly as it makes it, which is why it has to run on rules rather than hope.
Slow money is the long-term pile. That covers dividend stocks, an index fund, which pays a dividend as well, REITs and longer-dated bonds, and it grows more slowly while asking far less of your attention.
Most people would like to live on fast money their whole life, but that is unrealistic. As we age we have less energy and less time to stay engaged with the markets, so the long-term aim is a portfolio large enough to lean on the slow money when the fast money slows down.
So diversify on two axes. Spread across asset classes, meaning stocks, bonds, REITs, ETFs, commodities and currencies, and spread across time horizons, from fixed deposits and buy-and-hold positions to shorter-term trades. Both piles matter. If you are choosing where to hold all of this, I keep a page on how I compare brokerages.
Tip 3: Why is staying consistent the hardest of the three?
Anyone who has tried to lose weight knows the answer is to exercise and eat well, and also knows how few people keep it up past January. Learning to trade works the same way. Stick to one or two setups and repeat them week after week, which sounds easy until week 30.
It is remarkably difficult to do something simple and boring over and over again. In fact, the boredom wipes out more traders than any single bad trade does. The ones who last keep reading, keep reflecting and keep honing the craft, because most people are happy to invest money but not the time it takes to learn.
Housel puts the saving side of this in one line: building wealth “has little to do with your income or investment returns, and lots to do with your savings rate.” The return is the column you cannot control. The monthly deposit is the column you can.
How much return counts as good depends on your goals. Returns vary from year to year, and the higher the return you aim for, the more risk you have to carry, including the risk of a year that sets you back. Decide when you want to retire, read off the rate your row needs, and then ask honestly whether you could sit through the bad years that come with it.
Consistency is easier with a routine than with willpower. The free 15-minute swing trader checklist is the one I run every day.
How do you track whether you are on target?
Back in 2017, a Google search turned up a checkpoint table that I found useful, credited to Business Insider. It tells you how many times your salary you should have saved at each age.
With a Google search, I found a useful table to track your progress, credits to businessinsider.sg! Source: BusinessInsider.sg
Do note that it is an American table from that era, with its assumptions printed beside it: a 7% return before retirement, retirement at 65 and 2.5% wage growth, so read it as an idea to copy rather than a Singapore benchmark.
The better tracker is one you build yourself. If you are handy with Excel, set up a sheet with your income, expenses, savings, investment returns and projected net worth by the year you want to retire, and update it once a month. The table above gives you a target, and the spreadsheet tells you whether you are walking towards it or quietly drifting off course.
For many people the first step is simply to start saving, and with every step you take, you are one step closer.
FAQ
How much do I need to save each month to have $1M in 30 years?
Starting from zero, about $1,441 a month if your money grows at 4% a year, $996 at 6%, and $2,778 if it earns nothing at all. These assume monthly deposits, monthly compounding and no fees or taxes.
What formula works out the monthly savings?
The PMT function in Excel or Google Sheets. =PMT(rate/12, years*12, 0, -1000000) returns the monthly deposit that reaches $1M, so 4% over 30 years gives 1,440.95.
Is $1M enough to retire on in Singapore?
It depends on what you spend, and inflation shrinks it while you wait, because at 2% a year, $1M in 30 years buys roughly what $552,000 buys today.
What interest does CPF pay in 2026?
For 1 October to 31 December 2026, the CPF Board pays 2.5% a year on the Ordinary Account and 4% on the Special, MediSave and Retirement Accounts. The 4% floor has been extended to 31 December 2027.
What does “pay yourself first” mean?
It means moving money from your paycheck into a savings or investment account on payday, before you spend on anything else, ideally automatically.
Why does starting earlier make such a difference?
Because interest gets more years to work on a smaller pile of your own money, so at 4% a year, 40 years of saving needs about $846 a month, against $1,441 for 30 years.
So which row of the table are you on, and did the number surprise you? And which of the three tips do you find hardest to keep? Let me know in the comments.
If you are still in your 20s, I wrote about building a $1M portfolio by 30. For the other side of the story, read the 3 biggest financial regrets of retirees in Singapore and 5 reasons why Singaporeans may never get to retire. And if you want to learn the fast-money side properly, my free trading guides are the place to start.
And if you want a trading routine that fits around a full-time job and a monthly savings plan, grab the free 15-minute swing trader checklist.
About the author. Spencer Li is The 15-Minute Trader and the founder of Synapse Trading. He is a Certified Financial Technician (CFTe) with 15+ years of trading, run from 70+ countries. He holds a B.Acc and B.BM from SMU. Every trade he takes is public, dated, losses left in. He teaches rules-based swing trading in 15 minutes a day, one system for any market.
Education, not financial advice. Synapse Trading is not licensed by MAS to advise on investment products. Trading carries risk of loss, and past performance is not indicative of future results.
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Educational content only, not personalised financial advice. Trading carries risk, including loss of capital. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Synapse Trading is not licensed or regulated by MAS.
