Pension calculator: will your pension be enough?

The calculator builds the plan the Landfall apps would build from the same answers, for one person. It projects that plan a tax year at a time to age one hundred, with this year’s rules. Income tax, National Insurance and the tax on pension withdrawals are worked out each year for the nation you live in.

While you work, your pension contributions go into the pot, yours and your employer’s. The rest of your pay after tax is spent, and a State Pension paid while you still work is saved. Your State Pension is worked out from the National Insurance years on your record plus one for each year you work before it starts.

Once you stop work the plan draws what each year needs from your ISAs and your pension, taking the tax-free share of each pension withdrawal and filling your basic rate band before anything else, which is how the apps draw a pension too. Spending eases from age 75, by 18.8%, as the apps assume for later life.

Growth is 5.5% a year on a pension before charges of 0.5%, and the same growth on an ISA before charges of 0.1%. Prices rise by 2.5% a year, your salary with them, and the State Pension by 3%. Each of these is an assumption from Landfall’s own store, listed below, and the apps let you change every one.

The headline is the flat yearly spending the plan can pay from the year you stop work to 100 with nothing left short, found by running the projection again and again at different spending levels. In today’s money means later years’ pounds are scaled back by the same inflation, so they compare with your pay today.

Returns vary from year to year, and the apps’ stress test shows how often a plan like this would hold up. How these figures apply to you turns on your own circumstances, and a regulated financial adviser can advise on your own case.