How much is enough?
Build a pot across an ISA, a LISA and a pension, then spend it down and see how often the money lasts. A thousand return paths rather than one average, because the order the good and bad years arrive in decides the answer. Everything is in today's money and runs in your browser.
Chance the money lasts to 95
83%
Workable, with room to be unlucky — but not much.
Spending it could support
£45,400
A year, at 85% confidence. You are planning to spend £50,000.
Median pot at 60
£1,837,282
Where it fails, the money typically goes at 83.
Line is the median path. The darker band holds the middle half of outcomes, the lighter one the tenth to the ninetieth percentile.
Timing
What you have
Added each year, until you retire
Retirement
Markets
Method. A thousand paths of annual real returns, drawn lognormally around the mean you set. Real means after inflation, so the spending figure you type keeps the same standard of living for the whole plan and there is no second inflation assumption compounding against the first — which is why the numbers here look smaller, and truer, than a calculator that shows you a nominal pot.
Withdrawals come from the ISA first, then the LISA once it unlocks at 60, and the pension last from 57, because a quarter of the pension is tax-free and the rest is charged as income at the usual bands. That order is worth more than most people expect, and it is why a plan can be well funded in total and still fail: retire before 57 and only the ISA can carry you.
Returns are drawn independently each year. Real markets are not quite that well behaved — crashes cluster and valuations mean revert — so treat the tails as optimistic rather than conservative. State pension and any defined-benefit income are treated as guaranteed and inflation-linked.
For planning, not advice. I am not a financial adviser, and a model that agrees with you is not a reason to act.