Corpus

In the context of mutual funds and personal finance, corpus refers to the total accumulated value of an investment portfolio or fund — the combined principal amount invested plus all returns earned through capital appreciation and reinvested income up to the current date. For mutual funds, the corpus is equivalent to the scheme's total Assets Under Management (AUM) — the aggregate market value of all securities held across all investor folios in that scheme. For individual investors, the corpus represents the total wealth accumulated through systematic or lump sum investments over time — the financial goal most investors are working toward for objectives such as retirement, education funding, or purchasing a home. The target corpus is a central concept in goal-based financial planning in India — a retirement corpus calculator, for instance, uses inputs like current age, retirement age, monthly expenses, and inflation rate to determine the total corpus needed at retirement to sustain a desired lifestyle. AMFI and mutual fund AMCs widely use corpus as a metric in investor education — emphasising how starting early, staying invested, and leveraging compounding can grow even modest monthly SIP contributions into a substantial corpus over 15 to 30-year horizons.