UK retirement planning tools

westv

Roger175 said:

bluenose1 said:

I use guiide.co.uk and it says it works out the tax efficiently when withdrawing.

I use it in conjunction with my excel spreadsheet and have found it really helpful for comparing different strategies eg when to start using my DB pension etc.
Very easy to use.

I also like guiide.co.uk, but I have a feeling it only works if you are already 55, furthermore, it's a shame you can't use it for a couple. 

A lot of calculators only seem to work for individuals. No idea why.

Pat38493

LateGenXer said:

Great overview, Pat38493.

I too found Guiide's concept of efficient tax drawdown interesting, but got frustrated with the limitation of not modelling couples, and no LTA modelling.  It also didn't answer questions such as when is the best time to withdraw the TFC and how to apply it to reduce income tax later on.

I ended writing my own calculator, first for my own purposes, but eventually decided to make it more generic and useful for others.  FWIW I've made it available on lategenxer-rtp.streamlit.app .

Nice tool - I had a quick look but I didn't see a way to enter any guaranteed income sources other than State Pension or am I just not looking properly?

LateGenXer

Pat38493 said:

Nice tool - I had a quick look but I didn't see a way to enter any guaranteed income sources other than State Pension or am I just not looking properly?

Thanks.  That's indeed one of the known limitations (among a few others mentioned in the about section.)  It's one I plan to address eventually (modelling is trivial, but a decent/robust web UI for multiple sources will be the trickiest.)  At this moment I'm gauging general interest and requests before I invest time in adding features I don't immediately need.

westv

How on earth do you go back to a saved plan with Guiide? There's no log in anywhere.

Somebody

westv said:

How on earth do you go back to a saved plan with Guiide? There's no log in anywhere.

Don't you just sign in and then "Track" which is the 4th option at the top?

westv

Somebody said:

westv said:

How on earth do you go back to a saved plan with Guiide? There's no log in anywhere.

Don't you just sign in and then "Track" which is the 4th option at the top?

Just signing in needs a login page - which I said I couldn't find. - but I have now.

SavinNewbie

LateGenXer said:

Pat38493 said:

Nice tool - I had a quick look but I didn't see a way to enter any guaranteed income sources other than State Pension or am I just not looking properly?

Thanks.  That's indeed one of the known limitations (among a few others mentioned in the about section.)  It's one I plan to address eventually (modelling is trivial, but a decent/robust web UI for multiple sources will be the trickiest.)  At this moment I'm gauging general interest and requests before I invest time in adding features I don't immediately need.

Thanks for making this avaiIable. Good to see something where you can model partners pension too. I see your model takes tax free cash and puts into ISAs in the first few years which can then be used to reduce pension take. I think it might be more tax efficient to pay some tax at 20% and leave tax free cash to grow inside pension. If you spread the tax free cash wouldn't this minimise possibility of paying  40% tax once TFC is exhausted? Can't get my head round this.

MallyGirl

@LateGenXer - thanks for the link. I hadn't noticed this tool before. It does mirror my own spreadsheets more closely than some of the others. I also have me - the non tax payer for most of the retirement - contributing £3600 gross into a pension up to 75. Small beans gain compared to some of the other options but every little helps!

daveharruk

Of those I've tried, Voyant has a reasonable user interface, has the ability to model fairly complex situations and seems to be the one that is most used by financial advisors. I found it helpful to get a trial for my own education. It does, however, still have a limited number of tax regimes so isn't as useful if you plan to move abroad during retirement. Its biggest drawback of course is its lack of availability to the general public, although I'm guessing that they would quite happily let you pay the £150 a month if you really found it that useful. Of the tools that are available to the general public, Guiide is the best I've found but it does still have some significant limitations, the major one being lack of planning for a couple, the very limited cashflow modelling that it supports such as if you take 25% TFLS up front then they assume you will spend it (i.e. you have to manually add it back in if it is part of your plan) and also the fact that you have to go back through the steps linearly even after you've entered all the information if you want to tweak something later. I did look at retireeasy too, and although it is not massively expensive, there is not even a free trial and the description of even the basic version looks less functional than Guiide. It seems that there is still a market gap for a tool that sits somewhere between FIRE inspired/US slanted tools like cfiresim and more complex cashflow modelling/algorithmic based tools like Voyant and Timeline.

Pat38493

daveharruk said:

Of those I've tried, Voyant has a reasonable user interface, has the ability to model fairly complex situations and seems to be the one that is most used by financial advisors. I found it helpful to get a trial for my own education. It does, however, still have a limited number of tax regimes so isn't as useful if you plan to move abroad during retirement. Its biggest drawback of course is its lack of availability to the general public, although I'm guessing that they would quite happily let you pay the £150 a month if you really found it that useful. Of the tools that are available to the general public, Guiide is the best I've found but it does still have some significant limitations, the major one being lack of planning for a couple, the very limited cashflow modelling that it supports such as if you take 25% TFLS up front then they assume you will spend it (i.e. you have to manually add it back in if it is part of your plan) and also the fact that you have to go back through the steps linearly even after you've entered all the information if you want to tweak something later. I did look at retireeasy too, and although it is not massively expensive, there is not even a free trial and the description of even the basic version looks less functional than Guiide. It seems that there is still a market gap for a tool that sits somewhere between FIRE inspired/US slanted tools like cfiresim and more complex cashflow modelling/algorithmic based tools like Voyant and Timeline.

There are a couple of IFA companies that offer canned retirement planning courses for DIY investors, which include a single user copy of Voyant as part of the training.  You can then renew the Voyant access for about £120 a year - in fact I have just recently purchased one of these.