UK retirement planning tools

SavinNewbie

Pat38493 said:

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.

Which IFAs? I'd be interested in that course.

MK62

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 .

Thanks for that......I'm sure quite a few on here will find it very useful.....👍

Pat38493

SavinNewbie said:

Pat38493 said:

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.

Which IFAs? I'd be interested in that course.

One of them is the guy that does the Meaningful Money podcasts and youtube channel.  Search for Meaningful Academy, retirement planning class (discount codes available from podcast).

The other is one of the other famous youtubers around retirement planning - I think it might be James Shack but not 100% sure - you will find it on the website if so.  There may be others as well but those are the two that I have seen.

I am not aware of any similar offers for the Timeline software, and Timline have recently locked their system so you have to pay them £1 to get a one month demo (previously you could get a demo system with 3 clients that carries on working indefinitely, or at least up to now).

daveharruk

Which IFAs? I'd be interested in that course.

One of them is the guy that does the Meaningful Money podcasts and youtube channel.  Search for Meaningful Academy, retirement planning class (discount codes available from podcast).

The other is one of the other famous youtubers around retirement planning - I think it might be James Shack but not 100% sure - you will find it on the website if so.  There may be others as well but those are the two that I have seen.

I am not aware of any similar offers for the Timeline software, and Timline have recently locked their system so you have to pay them £1 to get a one month demo (previously you could get a demo system with 3 clients that carries on working indefinitely, or at least up to now).

James Shack does have a free spreadsheet which is definitely worth a look (as I remember it's linked to in some of his yt vids) and it's recently been updated based upon people's feedback. Slightly OT (because of its US slant), Rob Berger likes newretirement and I agree with him as it has a beautiful, modern interface and is also actively being improved by a really enthusiastic team, as well as having a basic free version that is actually pretty functional - so maybe either they will start supporting other countries or someone else will borrow some of its best parts for a UK supporting tool.

Simoncello

daveharruk said:

Which IFAs? I'd be interested in that course.

One of them is the guy that does the Meaningful Money podcasts and youtube channel.  Search for Meaningful Academy, retirement planning class (discount codes available from podcast).

The other is one of the other famous youtubers around retirement planning - I think it might be James Shack but not 100% sure - you will find it on the website if so.  There may be others as well but those are the two that I have seen.

I am not aware of any similar offers for the Timeline software, and Timline have recently locked their system so you have to pay them £1 to get a one month demo (previously you could get a demo system with 3 clients that carries on working indefinitely, or at least up to now).

James Shack does have a free spreadsheet which is definitely worth a look (as I remember it's linked to in some of his yt vids) and it's recently been updated based upon people's feedback. Slightly OT (because of its US slant), Rob Berger likes newretirement and I agree with him as it has a beautiful, modern interface and is also actively being improved by a really enthusiastic team, as well as having a basic free version that is actually pretty functional - so maybe either they will start supporting other countries or someone else will borrow some of its best parts for a UK supporting tool.

A USA-based YouTuber I follow also keeps mentioning NewRetirement. 

Looking at it, it's very USA-specific though...  Is there a UK tool that is similar? 

I want to sense-check my own Excel spreadsheet(s) and assumptions with a retirement planning tool that: 

- Understands and factors in UK taxes/tax rates (Capital Gains, Income tax, personal allowances, etc)

- generates cash-flow forecasts

- stress-tests different spending and investment return rates

- takes inflation into account

I have built my own spreadsheets to do most of the above and I think they're pretty robust, but we all know what that's like - there will be errors somewhere(!)

Rob9nicholson

Have any of you looked at "evolvemyretirement"  ?  This seems to fit in the gap between timeline/voyant and home made spreadsheets. 

handful

Rob9nicholson said:

Have any of you looked at "evolvemyretirement"  ?  This seems to fit in the gap between timeline/voyant and home made spreadsheets. 

That looks quite good on the face of it and not extortionate. Good reviews on Trustpilot as well. Thanks

daveharruk

handful said:

Rob9nicholson said:

Have any of you looked at "evolvemyretirement"  ?  This seems to fit in the gap between timeline/voyant and home made spreadsheets. 

That looks quite good on the face of it and not extortionate. Good reviews on Trustpilot as well. Thanks

Thanks, yes, I have tried evolvemyretirement - on the face of it this did seem to work quite well, particularly because it copes with couples (which guiide currently doesn't). Also, I like the fact that it runs through a lot of potential scenarios. However, this also led to some issues - the main ones being that it takes an awfully long time to run its "optimisation" process, another being that to get detailed information (which might assuage the feeling I had of it being a "black box" system which makes it quite hard to validate the information it gives you) you have to get a subscription (although it is quite reasonable). Also, the user interface is a little on the old-fashioned side (newretirement which was suggested above is absolutely fantastic from that point of view but as was pointed out, has a distinct US slant in everything) - in particular, browsers which support auto fill-in for form fields seem to really make it quite frustrating to enter information at times.

Finally, I didn't understand some of the results - here is one: "From planning year 29 onwards, your target guaranteed income will be 148%. This means that you will voluntarily buy new annuities in any particular year (from year 29 onwards) provided that this increases your total guaranteed income to 148% of your total spending". Is this saying that in year 29, I would buy annuities for an amount that would be 148% of essential + discretionary spending (at that time, i.e. accounting for inflation) minus state and DB pensions?

handful

daveharruk said:

handful said:

Rob9nicholson said:

Have any of you looked at "evolvemyretirement"  ?  This seems to fit in the gap between timeline/voyant and home made spreadsheets. 

That looks quite good on the face of it and not extortionate. Good reviews on Trustpilot as well. Thanks

Thanks, yes, I have tried evolvemyretirement - on the face of it this did seem to work quite well, particularly because it copes with couples (which guiide currently doesn't). Also, I like the fact that it runs through a lot of potential scenarios. However, this also led to some issues - the main ones being that it takes an awfully long time to run its "optimisation" process, another being that to get detailed information (which might assuage the feeling I had of it being a "black box" system which makes it quite hard to validate the information it gives you) you have to get a subscription (although it is quite reasonable). Also, the user interface is a little on the old-fashioned side (newretirement which was suggested above is absolutely fantastic from that point of view but as was pointed out, has a distinct US slant in everything) - in particular, browsers which support auto fill-in for form fields seem to really make it quite frustrating to enter information at times.

Finally, I didn't understand some of the results - here is one: "From planning year 29 onwards, your target guaranteed income will be 148%. This means that you will voluntarily buy new annuities in any particular year (from year 29 onwards) provided that this increases your total guaranteed income to 148% of your total spending". Is this saying that in year 29, I would buy annuities for an amount that would be 148% of essential + discretionary spending (at that time, i.e. accounting for inflation) minus state and DB pensions?

I had a bit of a play over the weekend and yes it does seem to take an age. I also didn't like the fact there are a limited amount of "credits" with the standard subscription. I used up 3 by mistake whilst updating some information  in the background. Defintely a bit clunky and it doesn't reassure me that everything has been considered in the plan. I will play further when I have a bit more time. Ironically, I need to retire to give myself more time but don't currently have time to do the planning!

gadgetgeezer10

Funny how I find myself searching for an answer to the same question, and come across my original post from 2 years ago! I found Guiide a while back and had a call with their product guy on feature development - nice chap. 
I'm still searching for a UK version of the American "New Retirement" software app by boldin.com
Perhaps Guiide will get there eventually.