Looking for a good pension calculator

El_Torro

For various years now I have been relying on the Hargreaves Lansdown Pension Calculator, often recommending it to fellow posters, whether they ask for a recommendation or not. Unfortunately I've just noticed that HL in their infinite wisdom have changed their calculator. Not only do you have to answer a series of banal questions on the way to the final calculation, it now even asks for your name and e-mail address before you can proceed. Being clever I even gave them my actual e-mail address so no doubt I'll be receiving loads of spam about getting pension advice, despite already being an HL customer (don't worry, I don't pay them for advice, I just have a SIPP and S&S ISA with them). 

In case anyone is interested the link to the new and not improved HL pension calculator is https://www.hl.co.uk/pensions/pension-calculator

Apart from it being unwieldy the calculator also seems less user friendly once you get to the end result. I need to play around with it a bit more but it seems to have lost at least some of the functionality that the old calculator had. 


So on to my question: Are there any other pension calculators out there that people use that you consider good? Some of the functionality I am looking for:

Being able to adjust the growth rate, including understanding what assumptions the calculator is using for inflation
Being able to quickly adjust the age at which I plan to retire
Easily being able to see the size of my pension pot on date of retirement. Some of the other calculators I've looked at just tell you what your monthly / annual income will be without even telling you what your pension pot will be, or how they calculated your income

snarffie

I quite like this one, although it doesn’t have the exact features you want.
Not sure how accurate it is either.

https://www.aviva.co.uk/retirement/tools/my-retirement-planner/

i agree that the HL one has gone down the pan.

vacheron

I've used many. but Guiide is just superb.

It does everything you've listed you want (you can change the growth rate for both investments and savings independently) , it also produces a full PDF report, lets you enter final salary schemes and other investments, shows you graphs of income and your ongoing investment balance into retirement, and how much and from where you should be withdrawing your funds.

Takes a few minutes to enter the data the first time you use it, but once you have registered it remembers it all so you can easily tweak it later.

https://www.guiide.co.uk/

I know this sounds like I'm sponsored by them, but I'm not, it's just really good! 

squirrelpie

snarffie said:

I quite like this one, although it doesn’t have the exact features you want.
Not sure how accurate it is either.

https://www.aviva.co.uk/retirement/tools/my-retirement-planner/

i agree that the HL one has gone down the pan.

It doesn't seem to be terribly accurate, in fact it seems to be unusable. It claims my state pension is "State Pension £16,123" although I've told it nothing about my situation.

Notepad_Phil

squirrelpie said:

snarffie said:

I quite like this one, although it doesn’t have the exact features you want.
Not sure how accurate it is either.

https://www.aviva.co.uk/retirement/tools/my-retirement-planner/

i agree that the HL one has gone down the pan.

It doesn't seem to be terribly accurate, in fact it seems to be unusable. It claims my state pension is "State Pension £16,123" although I've told it nothing about my situation.

I think it's deferring your pension for umpteen years as it's decided you can't retire until after 67.

If I put a date of birth of 01/01/1950 then it somehow reckons that I'm not going to retire or take the state pension until I'm 75, so it uses the new deferral rules and ups the state pension to £18,890. If I put 01/01/1960 then it reckons I'll retire at 66 and so uses the right state pension value as it reckons I won't defer it.

Why it reckons I'd not want to retire until I'm 75 if born in 1950 is quite beyond me as I can't see anything obvious in the questions that would indicate such a retirement date.

ali_bear

If you have an Aviva pension it will use your planned retirement date as stated in your account. 

westv

squirrelpie said:

snarffie said:

I quite like this one, although it doesn’t have the exact features you want.
Not sure how accurate it is either.

https://www.aviva.co.uk/retirement/tools/my-retirement-planner/

i agree that the HL one has gone down the pan.

It doesn't seem to be terribly accurate, in fact it seems to be unusable. It claims my state pension is "State Pension £16,123" although I've told it nothing about my situation.

It will assume you will receive the full state pension at the relevant age. Presumably the £16k is with estimated inflation. 

Moonwolf

vacheron said:

I've used many. but Guiide is just superb.

It does everything you've listed you want (you can change the growth rate for both investments and savings independently) , it also produces a full PDF report, lets you enter final salary schemes and other investments, shows you graphs of income and your ongoing investment balance into retirement, and how much and from where you should be withdrawing your funds.

Takes a few minutes to enter the data the first time you use it, but once you have registered it remembers it all so you can easily tweak it later.

https://www.guiide.co.uk/

I know this sounds like I'm sponsored by them, but I'm not, it's just really good! 

Totally agree, the only one I have used that is UK tax friendly and properly mixes DC and DB schemes.

squirrelpie

Thanks to everybody who responded to my post

As I said, unusable!

pterri

vacheron said:

I've used many. but Guiide is just superb.

It does everything you've listed you want (you can change the growth rate for both investments and savings independently) , it also produces a full PDF report, lets you enter final salary schemes and other investments, shows you graphs of income and your ongoing investment balance into retirement, and how much and from where you should be withdrawing your funds.

Takes a few minutes to enter the data the first time you use it, but once you have registered it remembers it all so you can easily tweak it later.

https://www.guiide.co.uk/

I know this sounds like I'm sponsored by them, but I'm not, it's just really good! 

Another vote for GUIIDE. Has the right level of detail for me, I expect there are others that are even more customisable but who’s got time for that nonsense? Unlike others (as said above) it allows you to add DB pensions, most of the basic ones don’t have that facility. Can also add other savings such as an ISA and I put in a pot for when I’ll be using accessing my AVCs. The stress testing is useful as well and you can put in a target income, I think it defaults to the basic/median/comfortable number that are used widely. Really good once set up.  

Smudgeismydog

Only observation I can add to the GUIIDE calculator, is that it defaults everything to age 55 for me. My SPA is 67, so the age I can access my DC pensions is of course 57, and I seem to be unable to show my existing dependents pension is already in payment (again, it will only let me use a commencement date age of 55).

Wasn’t sure how to get round this 🤔