Ask any question about pensions or retirement planning and get a detailed answer. You will receive two distinct, side-by-side answers: one strategically reasoned by GPT-4.1 , and the other grounded in real-time accuracy by Gemini 2.0 Flash. Confidence in the responses is greatly enhanced by having a second opinion in agreement. Two minds are better than one!

This feature projects your partner's pension (and other retirement provision) alongside your own, calculating an affordable combined retirement income, based on the assumption that you and your partner retire at the same time.

It also provides the recommended combined income levels for a couple for the Minimum, Moderate and Comfortable standards of living from the Retirement Living Standards website and compares this with your affordable combined income.

Whilst the retirement living standards provide a useful guide to the level of income you might need in retirement, they may not reflect your own personal circumstances or preferences. They use a "one size fits all" approach by necessity. However, each individual may prioritise each category of spending differently.

The budget calculator allows you to tailor your retirement income needs in line with your own circumstances or preferences, using the same categories as the Retirement Living Standards website. You can select a Minimum, Moderate or Comfortable standard for each category of spending — or specify an exact figure using the sliders.

Fine-tuning assumptions for fund growth, inflation, and charges allows you to see how your retirement plan holds up under different conditions:

• Fund Growth: Your future income depends heavily on how your investments perform. Adjusting this helps you explore best-case, worst-case, and average scenarios — giving you a more realistic picture of potential outcomes.


• Inflation: After a long period of low inflation, the 2020s have seen inflation shocks that could not have been predicted. Entering higher inflation values will allow you to test how significantly future inflation affects your affordable retirement income. You will be surprised how devastating sustained higher inflation rates can be to your affordable income.


• Fund Charges: Even small fees can have a big impact over decades. Adjusting fund charges helps you understand how much of your income might be lost to fees — and whether switching to lower-cost investments could improve your results.

A crash in the stock market just before or just after retirement can have a devastating effect on your pension fund and what you can afford to take as income. The premium version allows you to model the effect of a fall in your fund values of a specified percent at a specified age.

From that you can work out how many more years you would need to work to recover from a crash, or how much less income you would be able to afford.

This feature allows you to vary the mix of income between pension and ISA, to find the optimum mix to minimise the amount of tax you pay over the long term.

The free version automatically uses pension income up to the personal allowance to maximise tax-free income. But this feature allows you to fill a specified proportion of the basic rate band (lower rate bands in Scotland) with pension income and take the rest from your ISA, as long as you have ISA funds remaining.

You can easily see the overall effect on the tax you pay over your whole retirement with the Total Future Tax Rate figure in provided with the Key Metrics feature.

If you are still paying off a mortgage or have children at home, your retirement planning may include an increase in pension contributions at a certain age. Specify the age at which you plan to increase your contributions and the amount of the increase. You can do this for you pension and your ISA.

If the results tell you that your affordable retirement income is less than you need, this feature provides another way you can increase your initial income.

By setting income reductions in the later years of your retirement, you can see how this frees up funds to allow a higher income in the early years.

You will be able to specify two percentage drops in income at specified ages. Your affordable income is automatically recalculated to see the effect.

If you have a defined benefit pension that allows early retirement, the premium version allows you to investigate retiring early at different ages.

It will allow you to input the early retirement factors specific to your scheme. You can then see the effect of taking a reduced income at different ages and how that affects your overall retirement income level as well as its tax efficiency.

Access to three additional charts relating to tax payments:

• Tax By Tax Band: See the breakdown of your tax payments in each retirement year split by tax band. This makes it easy to see how you might adjust your plans to reduce overall tax payments.


• Tax By Source: See how tax is calculated on each source of your income.


• Tax Free Allowance: See the cumulative tax free allowance as up to 25% of your pension income is tax free but only up to a lifetime maximum of £268,275. When this limit is reached you will see a significant increase in tax, so it is worth considering adjustments to your drawdown plan to avoid this.

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.

Tax Calculator: The premium version includes a tax calculator that allows you to see the effect of different income levels on your tax and national insurance.

Salary Sacrifice Calculator: It also includes a salary sacrifice calculator that allows you to see the effect of salary sacrifice on your take home pay and pension contributions.

More calculators will be added in the future.

Premium members can log in at a later date and resume their investigation with the same inputs from where they left off. There is a button to clear all inputs and start again if required. The inputs are stored securely and are not shared with any third parties.