Frequently Asked Questions

Start with the planner: six questions, then your plan read back in plain English. That is all most people need. The calculator has every input on one screen when you want to go deeper, and your numbers carry over between the two. Everything here is a projection for planning, not financial advice.

The planner asks six questions, offers optional extras for the things you are worried about, and shows every assumption it makes. The calculator exposes every lever across the About you, Your pots, Markets & inflation, Tax, State Pension and Fine-tuning tabs, including ISAs, gilt ladders, SIPP to ISA migration and the reserve floor. Both build the same plan: start in either and switch any time, and your figures carry over. The planner leaves the fine-tuning options at their defaults, so it is deliberately a little more cautious than a fully detailed plan.

A pot value, the age you want to retire, the age to plan to, and a rough annual income target. Everything else has sensible UK 2026/27 defaults you can refine later.

Your plan as a story: short chapters in plain English on whether the money lasts, when the State Pension lands, and what the tax looks like. Behind it sits the year-by-year detail, every figure for every year, which you can open from the story or the Year-by-year tab. You can move between the two whenever you like.

Rather than guessing inputs, Goal Seek works backwards from a question such as "When can I retire?", "How much can I safely spend each year?", or "What pot do I need?", and searches for the answer that reaches the chance of success you're aiming for. Use the Goal Seek button at the top of the calculator. The result is a projection to explore, not financial advice.

Yes. Copy share link generates a link that encodes all your inputs. Anyone who opens it sees the exact same scenario, so you can bookmark it or send it to a partner or adviser. Nothing is stored on a server; the figures travel inside the link itself. When someone opens your link, the plan is shown but not saved on their device unless they choose to keep it, so your numbers do not quietly become their plan.

It models holding part (or all) of your pot in income-paying investment trusts and living off the dividends they pay, rather than selling units to fund spending. Set the slice to, say, 20-40% to combine it with normal drawdown, or to 100% to fund the whole plan from dividends. The capital is never sold to pay you; only the dividends are spent. You can add it on the planner ("Want part of your income to come from dividends?") or in the calculator's Fine-tuning tab.

No, not as a new buyer. A figure like 8% is usually "yield on cost": this year's dividend measured against what someone paid years ago. A new buyer today gets the current yield, which for a diversified basket of UK income trusts is roughly 3.5 to 4.5%. The high yield-on-cost figure really just shows that the dividend has grown over the years, which is the genuine appeal, but it is not a return you can go and buy. The model uses a starting yield you set (default 4%, after charges), not a flattering yield-on-cost number.

The share price falls, but a dividend is paid out of company profits, not the share price, so the income usually keeps arriving. That is the whole point: because you are not forced to sell anything at a low point, a crash hurts far less than it does in normal drawdown. The risk you take on instead is a dividend cut. In a deep, broad downturn even steady trusts can trim their payout, so the model builds in a crash-year cut (correlated with the bad market year) and a small reserve to cushion it.

Three things, none of which a rosy headline yield mentions. A dividend cut in a severe downturn. Concentration, if you lean on a handful of trusts or one part of the market, a problem there hits your income directly, so a spread across sectors and regions matters. And inflation outrunning the dividend, your income needs to keep growing in real terms, or its buying power slips even while the cash figure holds. The plan shows you an honest "if dividends fell 20%" line so you can sense-check it against your essential spending.

It depends where the trusts are held. Inside a pension (the default), the dividends are taxed as income when you draw them: 25% tax-free up to your lump-sum allowance, the rest at your normal rate, split across both partners' allowances for a couple. Inside an ISA they are completely tax-free. The model never charges dividend tax inside the wrapper, only the income tax on drawing from a pension, which is exactly how it works in real life.

It carves out part of your pot into a low-variance, fixed-yield bucket (around 4–5% at current gilt yields) that funds your first few years, so a market crash early in retirement doesn't force you to sell investments cheap. Each year a rung matures and pays out in full; any surplus over what you spend is swept into your reserve. Modelled inside your SIPP by default, or outside it if you tick that box. This is a modelling tool, not financial advice.

Instead of spending your ISA and savings before your pension, it draws taxable pension up to the top of the basic-rate band each year (using both partners' allowances) and only then tops up from the tax-free reserve. This often avoids the higher-rate tax in later years that spending the ISA first can cause. It changes the order money is drawn, not how much you spend.

Each year it draws your SIPP up to the top of the basic-rate band, beyond what you need to spend, and sweeps the net proceeds into your ISA, up to £20,000 per person. It moves money from a wrapper where withdrawals are taxed into one where future growth and withdrawals are tax-free, using tax bands in low-income years that would otherwise go to waste. You pay a little tax now, so it pays off if your rate later is the same or higher. It is not an inheritance-tax play: ISAs sit in your estate too, and pensions are actually outside it until the April 2027 change. Large deliberate recycling breaches HMRC rules; this is a projection, not advice.

It ring-fences a fixed amount of your combined ISA, savings and cash as an untouchable buffer, in today's money. Once your reserve hits that floor, further income comes from the pension instead, even if that pushes you into higher-rate tax. Leave it at £0 for no floor (the reserve can be fully spent).