UK retirement planning tools

philiphodges

MK62 said:

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.....👍

(I am one of the founders of Guiide).  Couples planning is coming later this year (https://guiidewordpress.azurewebsites.net/how-we-are-approaching-couples-planning/).

GenX0212

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.

I've been playing around with Voyant quite a bit recently. To access the free trial you have to pretend you're an advisor but you can put in any old rubbish as contact details. All you really need is an email address for your login. The trial only lasts a month so after that you have to register anew and start over from scratch.

Useful features include being able to enter your expenses and classify them to identify your basic, leisure and luxury needs; also being able to plug in some big market crashes early in the retirement phase and see what impact that has on your spending plans. 

I'm not really convinced by how it chooses to draw down on different pension assets e.g. it was taking money from my pension pots and keeping my wife's SIPP completely untouched ignoring the fact that she would be able to drawdown from it and avoid paying any tax until her SP kicks in in ten years time.

You can see your expenses vs income, plan/pot, debts, assets on side by side graphs. I have no debts so haven't explored that side of the functionality, am ignoring my property for pension planning purposes and I'm modelling a retirement starting in one year so I can't say a lot about the income/savings functionality either.

You can have multiple versions of the same base plan e.g. create a base plan and then have a separate version with £40k spent on a new car every five years and can flip between the two to see how it impacts your plan/pot

Trying to use the portfolio allocation for your investments is a bit hit and miss (trying to map against my fund factsheets) and the resulting forecast growth rates to be on the high side leaving me with a £4million pound legacy (I'm really not expecting that sort of performance!). You can adjust the allocations to lower the risk/return but then that sort of undermines the point of having the allocation in the first place.  

The Monte Carlo analysis seems to depend on you entering the Portfolio allocation and having a series of 'goals' rather than just modelling your expenses? I suppose I could remove the annual holiday expenses and input them as repeating goals? Alternatively you can enter fixed rate growth.

There are loads of online guides and videos available for a quick Google search. Here's a good starter, it's long but really easy to follow. Not sure if links are allowed so Google for: "UK_VoyantAdviserGo_Guided Case_Study"

My summary: It's a good interactive tool but check your inputs and the growth assumptions carefully. The generated reports seem to be a bit one dimensional and too many numbers - these are presumably what an advisor would leave their client with at the end of a consultation. I was intending to use the reports feature to present the 'grand plan' to the wife but will probably just stick with saying " it'll be fine " 

Any hints/tips as to how to get the best out of the tool would be welcome.

ossian

https://myfinancefuture.com/ This looks similar to Guiide but has a bit more functionality.  IIRC it costs £99 for a years access to the paid version.  I am thinking about doing that for IHT planning but I think the answer to that is to run down the pension first even though it means more income tax. Things have turned on there head with the proposed 2027 change on Pensions and IHT.

GenX0212

ossian said:

https://myfinancefuture.com/ This looks similar to Guiide but has a bit more functionality.  IIRC it costs £99 for a years access to the paid version.  I am thinking about doing that for IHT planning but I think the answer to that is to run down the pension first even though it means more income tax. Things have turned on there head with the proposed 2027 change on Pensions and IHT.

Thanks, Just had a quick play with that one. Simple enough to use but not sure I like the lack of transparency in the figures and assumptions. Maybe the paid version is better but there's not enough in the free version to convince me it's worth paying for.