Retire Easy Website & Software

Thrugelmir

Has anybody any experience of the Retire Easy website and in particular the software?

http://www.retireeasy.co.uk/

mania112

can't say i've ever heard of that website. Which in itself might say something.

Deneb

I have been using it for a couple of months, and quite like it, although it has its limitations. I actually prefer it to the Royal London planner.

My caveats are that you can only change some of the figures used in assumptions by whole percentage points, and I would like to be able to save a default plan, so that you can return to it quickly after making changes to various figures to test different scenarios.

Another issue I found was that I am currently subscribing to a personal pension which I intend to drawdown over a period of about 7 or 8 years to supplement my and my wife's DB pensions and other pensions that come into payment before we reach SPA, to provide us with a level income to our SP ages. The software won't let me model this if I enter the pension as a pension - it only allows for the payment of a PCLS and the withdrawal of the remaining fund as a specified constant percentage of the total pot each year. I got round this to an extent by entering the value of the pension pot as a personal investment instead of a pension, and prioritising investments to be used first to bridge any shortfall in desired income.

You can however download your plan into excel. The resulting file does need a bit of tweaking if you intend to do anything with it - I've found it useful to be able to download a plan based on a broadly desired set of assumptions and then tweak it further by adding my own formulas to various cells.

If I were competent enough with excel to devise my own fully featured spreadsheet I might have gone down that route instead, but I'm not. Other than the commercial software that is marketed at professional advisors and costs an arm and a leg, there seems to be a dearth of UK biased retirement planning software. RetireEasy, Money Vista (now the Royal London FP) and Money Hub were the only three I could find.

When I first registered, it was a subscription service. I paid up on the basis that the annual subscription worked out at about £5 a month and if it turned out to be a disappointment I could request a refund or just not renew in twelve months time. A few weeks ago it changed to being free for personal use, so I contacted the company to ask if they would refund my subscription and to give them their due, they refunded it in full straight away.


Edit: Just noticed Mania's reply which was posted whilst I was typing this. I actually found references to the site in a number of financial publications and newspaper/magazine articles including Which and Investors Chronicle whilst searching the web for UK financial planning software. Some of the articles are referenced on their website. They also have a sister site www.retireeasypro.co.uk targeted at IFAs.

Thrugelmir

mania112 wrote: »

can't say i've ever heard of that website. Which in itself might say something.

I only came across through reading Investors Chronicle hence my enquiry.