Can it meet what you need?
Each strategy is tested against your hard floor, ruin risk and cash reserve independently. A failure names the constraint it broke.
Where this number comes from
What each is worth to you
The guaranteed, inflation-linked income for life that would leave you equally well off — so the comparison is in pounds, not points.
The whole trade-off at once
Security against income, for every setting these strategies can take. Where the whole pot is yours to position, the family fills a cloud; where only its tax-free quarter is, it sits at a single point — and that difference in how much is yours to choose is itself worth seeing. Pick a name below to find its cloud; hover any point to read which member it is.
Income through retirement
Net income in today's money. Click a card above to change the strategy shown.
Does the answer survive your assumptions?
Every assumption in this tool is a judgement. Each is moved on its own, both ways, to see what it does.
The shape of each strategy
Up to three at a time, on axes that each mean something on their own. The outline is the shape; the bars beneath give the numbers in their own units. The enclosed area is meaningless — it depends on the order the axes happen to be drawn in — so it is never filled solid and never quoted.
Where each one wins and loses
Shown side by side in their own units and never summed: Hard floor security, ruin and shortfall below Comfortable income are three views of one risk, so adding them would count downside three times.
One life in full
The same strategy, followed through a single scenario year by year. The charts above summarise a thousand of these.
The percentiles (the median is the 50th) are ranked on survival-weighted lifetime net income. Changing sex, age, strategy, withdrawal rate, equity share, floors and so on usually changes that ranking, and two lives next to each other in it can have completely different market histories: many different sequences of returns end in roughly the same lifetime income. So the life shown here stays fixed as you move the sliders, and you see one market history under different settings. Press a button to pick again.