Whatever stage of the pension planning journey you are at, you have found the right place to gain clarity over your current situation and how to improve it.
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Calculating what income you can afford in retirement is just one half of the retirement planning equation. The other half is understanding how much income you’ll need to support your desired lifestyle.
We use the widely recognised Retirement Living Standards to help you estimate your personal income needs. These specify three standards of living: Minimum, Moderate, and Comfortable with income requirements for each that reflect real-world costs based on independent research.
Included in the free version, the Budget Calculator allows you to tailor your retirement income needs in line with your own circumstances or preferences, using the same expense categories that were used in the research for the Retirement Living Standards. You can select a Minimum, Moderate or Comfortable standard for each category of spending — or specify an exact figure using the sliders.
This provides a quick and easy way to allow for your own personal circumstances and preferences without already having a budget, while still using the Retirement Living Standards as a foundation. This tailored income target feeds directly into a comparison with your calculated affordable income, allowing you to see if you are on target and to adjust your plans accordingly.
Thinking as a household rather than two separate savers often unlocks better decisions. Your pensions may be different sizes, taxed differently, and may start paying out at different ages (for instance, State Pensions commencing in different years). Modelling everything together allows an affordable combined retirement income to be calculated.
This is what our premium Plan As A Couple feature provides. It projects your partner’s pensions, savings and other retirement benefits alongside your own and calculates an affordable combined retirement income for the two of you.
To put that figure in context it is compared with the couple‑level Minimum, Moderate and Comfortable benchmarks published by the Retirement Living Standards. Their couple budgets build in the economies of sharing while recognising two people still need more than one, giving you a robust yardstick for joint planning.
Whilst artificial intelligence has been increasingly used as a convenient tool for gathering information about financial planning over the past few years, concerns around the risk of “hallucinations” (AI confidently providing incorrect or outdated answers) meant it could not be relied upon to provide correct answers.
However, 2025 has seen the advent of reasoning models which are less prone to hallucinations because they break problems into logical steps, allowing for more accurate and consistent answers based on internal coherence rather pattern-matching alone.
To go a step further to improve confidence in the answers, we use three models in collaboration to check for possible hallucinations.
A full subscription to all three of these premium models would cost you around £50 per month. However, restricting focus to retirement planning alone allows this feature to be included in our premium subscription of just £49.99 per year.
Here is a list of the free features, providing a valuable tool to all users.
See the actual figures behind the charts set out in tables.
For your pension fund and ISA, see the opening and closing balances for each year and a breakdown of all the items that make up the movement.
For your retirement income, see the gross and net values of each source of income.
These are some of the features planned for rolling out over the coming months. If you have a feature in mind that you would like to suggest, please get in touch at calculatemypension@gmail.com.
Currently, planning as a couple is done by separately modelling each person and then combining the affordable incomes to compare with a couple's income needs. There is no interaction between the simulations. An interactive simulation would allow:
Holding a cash buffer can reduce the impact of a market crash. Here's how this strategy would work:
This allows you to see the reduction in income resulting from a higher level of cash, but also the reduced impact on income in the event of a market crash.