Origin Story

In 2005, Ed's Dad was approaching 60 and wondering if he could afford to retire. Wanting to help, Ed took a week off from his day job at Standard Life and set about building a pension calculator in Excel, creating a detailed cashflow model coded in VBA. Using the calculator, Ed's Dad was able to establish that he did have enough in pensions and savings to retire. He took the plunge and is still enjoying his retirement today.

Fast forward 17 years, and in 2022, Ed's brother was looking for a way to make sure his plans for retirement at age 58 were on target. Ed built another pension calculator in Excel, more flexible than the 2005 version and designed for anyone to use. It focused on the question "What income can I afford?" rather than "When will my money run out?”. Using this new, improved calculator, Ed's brother was able to understand how much he would need to save to achieve his retirement goals.

In November of that same year, OpenAI released ChatGPT. Ed was an early adopter of the technology and could see it was a game-changer for productivity. He learned everything he could about AI and its potential use-cases. Initially, he focused on how it could be used in education, as he was home-schooling his daughter and supporting her through her GCSEs. Later, Ed realised that with the tools AI made available, he could now create an even more powerful version of his pension calculator - and share it with the world.