A guided journey

You've just stopped. Now what?

Money goes out now instead of in, which is a genuinely different discipline. The habits you set in these first two years tend to survive for twenty — so it's worth setting them on purpose.

You have just switched from saving to spending, and it is a genuinely different discipline. While you were saving, a market fall was a discount. Now the same fall is a permanent loss of the units you had to sell to eat. Everything that follows comes from that one change. The habits you set in these first two years tend to survive for twenty, so it is worth setting them deliberately rather than drifting into them.

Calculator 17 · Catastrophic loss avoidance

First job: check the buffer is real

If you did nothing else before stopping, do this now. Enough in cash and short bonds that a bad market is something you read about rather than something you are forced to sell into.

Two or three years of the gap — your spending minus your guaranteed income — is the usual answer, and it is smaller than most people assume, because dividends, interest and pensions cover part of it before you sell anything.

What to look at

Buffer you hold against buffer required. If you are short, close it from income and distributions over the coming months rather than selling a large block today.
Drawn from safe assets, year 1 — the actual amount that has to come out of the safe pot.
If you trimmed spending. Willingness to flex reduces the cash you need to hold, which means more of your money can keep working.

Decide now where the buffer lives and what refills it. A buffer with no refill rule quietly becomes a spent buffer. The usual arrangement: dividends and interest flow into cash rather than being reinvested, and you top it back up in good years. Write the rule down.

Open calculator 17 →

Calculator 02 · Flexible withdrawal strategy

Choose an income rule, and write it down

This is the decision that most repays being made now, while you are calm, rather than in the middle of a bad year when your judgement will be at its worst.

The page compares three approaches: a fixed amount rising with inflation (the 4% rule), a fixed percentage of whatever you have, and dynamic guardrails that cut spending if the drawdown rate climbs too high and raise it if markets have been kind. Guardrails are usually the best compromise, but the reason to choose in advance is not that one is optimal — it is that a rule written down in year one takes the decision out of your hands in year four.

What to look at

Not just the success rates — worst years and average income, guardrails. A strategy that survives on paper while producing an income you can't live on is not a strategy.
Rules start at and first year they bite. Knowing in advance what would trigger a cut, and how large it would be, removes most of the fear of it.
The income floor you must not go below input. Set it to your genuine essentials, then see which strategies still work.
The which account should you draw from first section — with the caveat that the site models no tax rules, so read your country's page before acting on the ordering.

Write the resulting rule on the same page as your six numbers. One sentence is enough: "We draw £X, rising with inflation; if the drawdown rate goes above Y% we cut by 10% for a year."

Open calculator 02 →

Calculator 04 · Asset allocation after 60

The mix you carried in is rarely the mix you want now

Most people arrive at retirement holding whatever they held while saving, because nothing ever forced them to change it. That mix was built for a period when volatility was an inconvenience. It is now a cost.

The right answer is not "move to cash". A 63-year-old planning to 95 has a thirty-two year horizon, and cash loses roughly a third of its purchasing power over twenty-five years at modest inflation. The right answer is enough safety to cover the years where selling would hurt, and enough growth to survive the decades after that.

What to look at

The stress test against real crashes rather than the headline percentages. Abstract risk is easy to accept; "this is what 2008 would have done" is not.
Essentials at risk. If your non-negotiable spending depends on markets, that is the thing to fix first and possibly the only thing.
The purchasing power over time chart, which is where the cost of being too cautious becomes visible.
The years of spending you want held safe input — it should match the buffer you set in step 1.

If you need to shift the mix, do it over months rather than in a day. And if you now hold bonds you didn't examine closely, calculator 12 is worth twenty minutes — long bonds are not the safe part of a portfolio, and a great many retirees learned that the expensive way in 2022.

Open calculator 04 →

Calculator 11 · Market timing risk

Read this before the first bad month, not during it

The single most avoidable loss in retirement is getting out of the market after a fall and back in after the recovery. It requires two correct decisions, and almost nobody makes both — the second one is far harder, because getting back in means buying while the news is still bad.

The point of running this now is inoculation. You are far more likely to hold your nerve in the third bad month if you have already seen the arithmetic on a calm afternoon.

What to look at

Stayed invested against missed the 10 best days. The best days cluster inside the worst periods, which is exactly why stepping out is so costly.
Chance of one clean round trip, and then the chance of getting several right. It falls off a cliff.
The panic seller card, which is the realistic version rather than the theoretical one.

If you are already anxious, that is information rather than weakness. Calculator 18 treats the causes as structural — how often you check, how many holdings you hold, whether you have a written rule — because they usually are, and structural things can be fixed. Checking the balance less often is not avoidance; at daily frequency you are looking at noise with a slight downward emotional bias.

Open calculator 11 →

Calculator 10 · Spending ramp

Permission to spend the good decade

This one exists to counterbalance everything above it, and for many people it is the most valuable page on the site.

The habits that built the savings — deferring, saving hard, treating spending as failure — do not switch off on your last day of work. A great many people who could comfortably afford more spend twenty careful years and leave a large sum behind, having quietly skipped the decade when they were well enough to enjoy it. That is a planning failure. It just isn't the one people worry about.

What to look at

Ramped first-year budget against if spending stayed flat. The shaped version usually allows meaningfully more in the early years for the same lifetime total.
The phase by phase card — go-go, slow-go, no-go — and where you actually are on it right now.
The overspending risk card, which is the honest limit on the permission.

Open calculator 10 →

If year one is bad

It might be. Here is the order to do things in, decided now rather than then.

Spend the buffer. That is what it is for. The instinct is to preserve the cash and sell something instead. It is exactly backwards — the buffer exists precisely so that you don't have to sell into a fall.
Apply the rule you wrote in step 2, and nothing more. If it says cut 10%, cut 10%. If it doesn't trigger, don't act.
Trim the discretionary, not the essential. A postponed trip is recoverable; a cancelled insurance policy may not be.
Do not rebalance into a panic, and do not stop rebalancing either. If you have a scheduled date, keep it. Buying the thing that has fallen is what rebalancing is, and it feels wrong every time.
Don't sell shares to make a mortgage payment if there is any alternative. Calculator 23 shows why this specific combination does so much damage.
Re-run calculator 15 with the new balance — but not more than once. Watching the number daily converts a market event into a personal crisis.

Four habits worth setting now

One annual review, on a fixed date. Re-run the six numbers, check the buffer, apply the rule. An hour a year. Put it in the calendar with your birthday.
Check the balance monthly at most. More often tells you nothing you can act on and costs you something every time.
Keep the written plan where you can find it in a bad week. Its job is to be read by a worried version of you who needs to know that a calmer version already thought about this.
Have one conversation a year with whoever else this affects. Partners frequently hold very different assumptions about the same plan, and the first two years is when that is cheapest to discover.

Two things to do in the next twelve months

Finish the paperwork. Calculator 08 scores the whole checklist, not just the will. Powers of attorney are the item people skip and the one that causes the most difficulty, because by the time it is obviously needed it is usually too late to arrange.

Look at care honestly, once. Calculator 07 is uncomfortable and it is the largest single financial risk in later life. Looking at the probability-weighted cost rather than the worst case makes it a planning problem rather than a fear. Do it once now, and you will not have to think about it again for years.

The other guides

Each one walks a sequence of calculators rather than leaving you to pick.

Should I clear the mortgage?

The one question that needs eight calculators, worked through in the order the argument actually runs.

Five years out

Six moves in order, for the window that carries more weight than any other.

What actually goes wrong

The five ways retirements fail, and the early warning sign for each.

General information only — not financial, tax, legal or investment advice, and not a recommendation to do anything in particular. This is a reasonable order to think in, not a plan for your circumstances. Every result on this site follows from assumptions you enter yourself; change an assumption and the answer changes. These tools contain no tax rules, government pension rules or means-testing logic — take local advice for all of that.