Know what is behind the numbers
Illustration only — not financial advice. Outcomes are not guaranteed. Review the model's assumptions and limits before making decisions.
Reports, backups and spending setup
PDF report, plan backup and CSV. Export report (PDF) downloads a noneditable six-page overview on your device, with no financial-data upload or print dialog. Long lists and annual tables may be abbreviated; plan backups and CSV retain full detail. It uses the current valid plan and growth scenario. Invalid retained edits pause exports until corrected. Every page states: Illustration only — not financial advice. Outcomes are not guaranteed. Export plan restores an editable plan; Export CSV provides annual data. Store these personal financial files securely.
Annual spending. Starting point & spending sets ages, core assumptions and the annual budget. Outgoings detail itemises regular costs, including housing, and scheduled items. Valid changes update and save automatically; no Apply is needed. CSV costs are annualised (monthly × 12; yearly × 1), using penny precision. Confirmed CSV import sets a Custom budget and keeps phases. Changing annual spending, household size or living standard replaces the item breakdown; starting-point and phase-only edits preserve it. Regular costs follow spending phases; care is added from the later phase. Existing fixed housing portions remain separate until their budget is replaced. Inflation applies once from the plan start. Care and housing costs are assumptions, not forecasts or entitlements. Phase boundaries stay fixed when starting age changes. Cash targets remain independent of spending.
Annual timing and property transactions
Annual model. Each row is a full year, starting at your chosen age, with no partial-year apportionment. Year-one reserve funding happens before investment returns. Its tax provision is reconciled with all other income and withdrawals in that same model year, not given a separate annual allowance. Growth, interest and dividends use balances after initial funding; subsequent spending and reserve refills occur at year end. Income pays spending and tax, and surplus income goes to cash. Withdrawals include spending, initial reserve funding and subsequent refills; transfers do not create assets. No employment, contributions, benefits or inheritance tax are modelled. Property is included only through the optional equity-release, downsizing and second-home sale settings.
Equity release. When enabled, a chosen net lump sum enters cash once at the start, before reserves and returns. Gross borrowing equals that cash plus the old mortgage repayment and financed fees. Borrowing itself is not taxable income; interest earned on the released cash uses the existing savings-tax model. The fixed effective annual loan rate compounds for every complete model year with no repayments; property grows at its separate nominal rate, unaffected by the investment scenarios. The horizon is not a lifetime-mortgage maturity date: actual repayment triggers such as the last borrower's death or permanent move into care are not simulated. Loan interest is capitalised, not deducted from spending or tax. Home value less debt is displayed separately without a no-negative-equity cap or sale costs. Financial-asset metrics include any unspent released cash, but exclude the house and loan and must not be read as total net wealth. The same property and debt path applies to every withdrawal policy, so neither is included in strategy ranking. Existing mortgage payments in your budget must be removed manually if repaid by the release.
Property downsizing. When enabled, the sale and purchase complete at the start of the chosen year, before returns and spending; at the plan's start this is before reserve funding. Prices grow from today's values at the house-price rate. Costs are the estate-agent percentage plus VAT, sale and purchase solicitor fees plus VAT and other costs (all inflation-linked), and SDLT on the purchase price at England/NI main-residence rates from the versioned tax-year rules. Released money = sale − purchase − costs − outstanding mortgage − any equity-release loan (repaid before that year's interest). It is not taxable income; the main-home gain is assumed exempt. It goes to surplus cash or a new General Investment Account whose cost basis equals the amount invested. A negative release is rejected. Downsizing uses the same inputs for every strategy and is included in the maximum-spending search. Spending, including housing costs, does not change automatically.
Cash buffers, downturns and recovery
Cash protection. New plans have no cash-pot targets unless you add them under Pensions & savings. Suggested targets are twice annual spending for downturns and 50% for emergencies, rounded to the nearest penny; choosing them is optional. Existing saved targets are preserved. Each target rises with inflation, independently of subsequent spending edits. Targets are funded from existing assets, not added to wealth; emergency is filled first. A strictly negative weighted market return activates the downturn reserve before surplus cash and investments, and this priority continues through recovery. Otherwise the reserve is used after other accessible funds are exhausted, before emergency cash. Emergency is always last. Refills are permitted only in strictly positive-return years outside recovery after spending is covered; they can require taxable sales. Lack of funds is shown as an explicit target gap. Surplus cash is used before investment withdrawals in all strategies.
Investment recovery. A downturn is a negative opening-balance-weighted total return across DC, stocks & shares ISAs and GIA, including GIA dividends. A cash-flow-independent nominal market index starts at 100. Recovery targets its level immediately before the downturn, not the wealth you would have had without the downturn, inflation-adjusted purchasing power or amounts already withdrawn. In each of the next 1-3 years, absent an explicit override, one common price return is calculated for these investments so that the index compounds back to that level over the remaining years; the weighted GIA dividend yield is deducted from the required total return to avoid double counting. Cash ISAs are excluded. Explicit overrides (including scenario shifts) take precedence. A further negative return restarts the chosen period while keeping the original recovery target; a low final-year override extends recovery until the target is reached. Recovery can end early if an override reaches the target. The downturn pot is used first and refills are paused for the whole completion year; normal assumed growth resumes the following year. Running out of invested assets ends recovery without creating replacement assets. These calculated returns are a modelling assumption, not a promise of recovery.
Strategy comparison and after-tax end wealth
Minimum tax versus recommendation. Minimum-tax mode compares 24 allocation recipes at each funding stage: six GIA/ISA/DC orders, with optional use of the pension personal allowance, GIA capital-gains allowance, or both. It first funds the requested amount and avoids emergency use, then selects the lowest incremental current-year tax; ties prefer retaining assets with higher assumed returns. It is a bounded search, not an exact continuous tax optimiser. Recommended mode compares eight full-horizon policies (including minimum-tax mode and pension basic-band harvesting). It ranks spending coverage first, reserve-target coverage second, then after-tax terminal wealth. It selects one policy for the whole horizon, using the entered return schedule with hindsight. It does not dynamically optimise every year's allocation across all possible paths.
After-tax end wealth. This comparison estimates a one-off liquidation of remaining GIA and all DC pots in the next model year, using a fresh set of annual allowances, remaining pension tax-free allowance, carried losses and that year's State/DB income. It deducts incremental tax above the pension-only baseline. ISA and cash principal remain tax-free. DC funds still locked at that point are valued on the same hypothetical basis, not assumed accessible. A real multi-year withdrawal plan may pay substantially less tax. This valuation is not deducted from the projected balances or included in the lifetime-tax column.
Tax rules and future uncertainty
¹ Estimated taxes. Includes pension income tax, taxable cash interest, dividends and realised GIA gains; ISA returns and withdrawals are excluded. Baseline personal allowance is £12,570, tapered above £100,000. England/Wales/NI pension rates are 20% / 40% / 45%; Scotland uses 19% / 20% / 21% / 42% / 45% / 48%. Savings use UK bands, the £5,000 starting-rate band and £1,000 / £500 / £0 savings allowances; savings rates are 20% / 40% / 45% in 2026/27 and 22% / 42% / 47% from 2027/28 (Finance Act 2026), including for Scottish taxpayers. Dividends use a £500 allowance and 10.75% / 35.75% / 39.35%. CGT uses a £3,000 exemption and 18% / 24% rates. In-model capital losses carry forward. Personal allowance is allocated to pensions, then savings, then dividends.
Future rules are uncertain. Model year one uses 2026/27 rules and year two onward uses the legislated 2027/28 rules, repeated for later years; unannounced future changes are not modelled. The fixed option keeps thresholds at their frozen cash values (currently legislated until April 2031). The indexed option inflates annual thresholds and allowances from year two; rates and the remaining pension lump-sum allowance do not inflate. Neither is a prediction of future law. Protected pension allowances, tax reliefs, tax-code timing, emergency tax, foreign income, bond funds taxed as interest and complex capital-gains pooling rules are excluded.
Funding gaps, today's money and model limitations
² Unfunded means spending or tax that eligible assets could not cover. It is not carried forward as debt; balances never become negative. Both cash pots and all other accessible funds are exhausted before a shortfall is reported, but inaccessible DC funds may remain. “Spending covered” counts years until the first gap, not a guarantee of lifetime solvency. Reserve-target gaps are tracked separately from spending shortfalls.
Today's money. Year-one cash flows are unadjusted; year-two cash flows are discounted by one year's inflation. End balances are discounted by the number of completed years. Assets include gross DC balances, not their after-tax liquidation value.
Illustration, not advice. Returns use your annual assumptions, optional year-specific overrides and calculated recovery returns. Lower/higher-growth scenarios shift ordinary and explicitly overridden DC, share-ISA and GIA price returns by 2 percentage points. Calculated recovery returns instead adjust to the resulting loss and remaining recovery period; they are not shifted again. Cash-ISA rates, cash interest, GIA dividend yield and inflation are unchanged. Return sequences are illustrative, not market forecasts or probabilities. Re-run with different downturn dates, sizes and recovery periods. No strategy guarantees maximum wealth. Care costs and longevity beyond the chosen horizon are not forecast.