Worked example
What a Plan actually looks like
Nobody should spend £1,500 on a document they've never seen. So here is one, start to finish — the people are invented, the arithmetic is not.
Nobody should spend £1,500 on a document they've never seen. So here is one, start to finish — the people are invented, the arithmetic is not.
He's 54 and owns a plumbing and heating firm with four staff. She's 52 and works four days a week for a housing association. Two grown children, one still at home. They came to us with a question they'd been circling for three years: can Dave stop at 61?
£310,000 across four pensions — two of Dave's from before the business, Sarah's local government scheme, and a small SIPP nobody had looked at since 2019. £48,000 in cash and ISAs. A house worth £395,000 with £62,000 left on the mortgage.
Dave took £12,570 in salary and roughly £40,000 in dividends. Sarah earned £31,000. Between them, about £70,000 net once the tax was done.
“About three and a half thousand a month.” Both said it without hesitating. Both were confident.
£4,180. The Healthcheck found it in two minutes. Nearly £700 a month they could not account for, which over the nine years to 61 is around £75,000.
Almost nobody is right about their own spending, and almost everybody is confident. It's not carelessness — it's forty-odd transactions a week across cards, apps and direct debits. But a plan built on £3,500 when the truth is £4,180 is a plan that quietly fails about eighteen months in, and nobody can work out why.
“Retire comfortably” can't be modelled. So the first job was turning it into things that can be.
Not fully — he wanted to keep two days a week for a couple of years. Worth about £14,000 a year until 63.
In today's money. Less than they spend now, because the mortgage would be gone and the children's costs falling.
A deposit, some time in the next five years. Non-negotiable, which matters — it comes out of the plan whether it fits or not.
Dave assumed £150,000 on a sale. We modelled it at zero, then again at £150,000, because a plan that only works if the business sells is a bet rather than a plan.
Every year from now to 100, with UK tax applied properly at each step. Here's what came back.
The money runs out at 88. Not a disaster, and not comfortable either — both of them have a decent chance of seeing 88, and Sarah's family history suggests she should plan past it.
It lasts past 100, with roughly £280,000 left. Which tells you something important: their whole plan was resting on an asset nobody had valued.
Run two thousand times with the good and bad years reshuffled, the no-sale version held up in only 41% of them. That number changed the conversation entirely.
Not “you can't retire”. It meant the retirement date and the business sale were the same decision, and they'd been treating them as separate ones.
Each answer in years, because “a 12% reduction in terminal wealth” means nothing to anybody.
Minus 7 years. The biggest single risk on the page, and the one they'd never considered — because it isn't about how bad the fall is, it's about when it lands.
Minus 5 years, if they contribute what they said they'd want to. Worth knowing before it happens rather than during.
Minus 2 years. Smaller than they feared, which was a relief and genuinely useful.
Minus 4 years of headroom. Longevity isn't a risk in the normal sense, but it behaves like one in a projection.
Five things the numbers were telling them. Each one ends in a question, because they're their decisions.
It's roughly half the plan. Nobody had ever valued it, and Dave had no idea whether it was saleable without him in it. What would it take to make this business worth something to somebody else?
Redirected, it's about £75,000 by 61 and moves the no-sale answer from 88 to 92. Is any of that £700 buying you something you'd miss?
Not the whole retirement — those three years specifically. Would holding two years of spending in cash at 61 be worth what it costs in growth?
It's inflation-linked and it's the floor under everything. Does that change how you feel about her going to three days?
That's all. Now you know the price, is it still non-negotiable? They said yes immediately, which is a good answer.
No fund recommendations. No “you should consolidate those pensions”. Those are regulated advice and we're not authorised to give them — where a decision genuinely needs one, we say so and can introduce you to Equity & General (FCA 474163), optional and with the commission disclosed beforehand.
Four things, with dates. Not twenty.
Properly, by someone who does it for a living. Half the plan rests on a number Dave invented.
Four weeks of actually looking, using the Healthcheck categories rather than guessing.
Nobody knew what was in it or what it cost to run. Find out. That's admin, not advice.
Neither had one. On this projection the estate is over the nil-rate bands, so it also puts a number on the inheritance tax — which is a conversation for Buzz Legal, not for us.
Dave is stopping at 62, not 61 — his choice, after seeing what one year did. He's spent six months making the business less dependent on him, which was worth more than any change to their saving. And they found £480 of the £700, which was enough.
No. They are invented, and deliberately so, because publishing a real client's finances would be a betrayal even with permission given. What is real is the arithmetic. Those figures come from the same engine that builds every Plan, run on that set of inputs, so if you put their numbers into the free projection on this site you will get the same answers back. Their circumstances are drawn from patterns we see constantly: an owner-manager whose business has never been valued, a spouse with a public sector scheme doing more work than either of them realised, and a monthly spending figure that turned out to be wrong by several hundred pounds. Every one of those is ordinary rather than exceptional.
The shape will. The sections are the same six every time and they arrive in the same order, so you always get your position, your goals, the projection, the stress tests, what it means, and what to do in the next ninety days. What differs is which parts carry the weight. For a couple with defined benefit pensions the stress tests look completely different, because a guaranteed inflation-linked floor changes what a bad market can actually do to them. For somebody with rental property the tax section becomes the long one. For a single person with no dependants the longevity modelling matters more and the estate section matters less. It is a piece of work about your position rather than a template with your name typed at the top.
Because a plan that only works if an asset sells is a bet, and you should at least know which bet you are making. Modelling it at zero shows you the floor: what happens if the sale never comes, or comes at a fraction of the hoped-for price, or falls through in the year you needed it. Modelling it at £150,000 shows you the version Dave already had in his head. The gap between those two answers is the honest measure of how much of the retirement rests on one sale. For Dave and Sarah that gap was most of the plan and nobody had realised. It also shows you where effort is best spent, which for them turned out to be the business rather than the saving.
Then it is worth considerably more than a comfortable one, because there is still time to do something about it. The failure mode that actually hurts is discovering the problem at 68, when working another two years is no longer realistic and spending less means giving up things that matter. Dave and Sarah's no-sale answer came back at 41%. That is not a pleasant number to be handed across a table, and it is the reason they now have a business somebody could buy. A bad answer at 54 is a project with nine years to run at it. The same answer at 68 is something you simply have to live with.
About three weeks end to end, and most of that was us doing the modelling rather than them doing anything. Their side of it came to three pieces of work: the two-minute Healthcheck to establish what they actually spend, roughly an hour talking through what they wanted retirement to look like in terms specific enough to model, and ninety minutes going through the finished document and arguing with it. The weeks in between are where the projection gets built, the stress tests get run and the thing gets written. Three weeks is typical. It runs longer when pension values are slow coming back from providers, which is the usual hold-up.
The projection runs in your browser in about a minute. Nothing is sent anywhere and no email is needed to see the answer.
Thirty minutes with a planner to work out whether you need a Plan at all. Some people leave that call having been told they don't.
One written document — every year to 100 with the tax done properly, what breaks it priced in years, and the ninety days after. £1,500.