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Show HN: Fire UK Calculator and Visualiser
- gregn610 3y agoNice. Does GIA mean General Investment Account? Maybe some tooltips?
- kmlx 3y agoyes. GIAs are taxed. ISAs (individual savings account) aren’t, but have a cap at £20k per year.
- hermitcrab 3y agoNice job. I also didn't know what GIA was and would appreciate some tooltips.
- dom96 3y agoyeah, good suggestion. Will make a note to add some tooltips
- nly 3y agoTbh most of the interesting retirement planning problems are in planning for life events along the way. The advantage of proper modelling solutions like Voyant is that you can see your cash flows across your entire life and see what happens long term if you pay down your mortgage by 10% more or 10% less for the next few year, or if you add a change in 5 years time where you start paying £1500/mo for childcare I'm currently slamming my pension for example because I know in the near future, if I have kids or remortgage (due in 3 years), I won't be able to afford to do so (on my current salary)
- dom96 3y agoTrue. But I would say there is a place for simpler tools too, and that is what I aim to build with this calculator. Plus you can go a long a way to factoring in big life changes even with the simple inputs currently provided. Btw did you misspell Voyuent? I can't find it anywhere.
- nly 3y agoVoyant https://www.planwithvoyant.co.uk/content/en_GB/index.html https://www.planwithvoyant.co.uk/content/en_GB/index.html Unfortunately the cheapest sort of access to this product is around £120/yr via an advisor sponsored subscription, but the insights they provide are nothing short of comprehensive I pay it, but it is pricey for something you might want to look at just once or twice a year. A freely accessible alternative is called Timeline (https://www.timeline.co/ https://www.timeline.co/, sign up as an advisor and add yourself as a client), but it's nowhere near as comprehensive at calculating all your tax burdens and optimizing things etc. There's a fair amount of tactics in working over the tax system to achieve better outcomes.
- bitdivision 3y agoI tried signing up to timeline, unfortunately have to pay for a trial in order to see the plan for a client
- zparky 3y agoA tool [0] that has a free tier and was quite fun to play around with was posted a little bit ago, projectionlab. [0]: https://projectionlab.com https://projectionlab.com
- Joeboy 3y agoThis doesn't factor in the state pension, right?
- dom96 3y agoIndeed it doesn't.
- nly 3y agoWhat about tax on private pension withdrawals?
- dom96 3y agoIt's on my todo to implement this in some form, but not accounted for yet. But you can reduce the returns percentage on your investments to account for it. Note though that pension tax relief also isn't accounted for in the numbers, so take that into consideration when adjusting.
- xnorswap 3y agoThe default assumption here that someone has £30,000 per year to put into savings seems a little bit high for most UK salaries?
- reedf1 3y agoI think the assumption is that you need a high salary to do FIRE generally.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 3y agoIt's definitely dependent on COL in area where you choose to retire, and what your expected spending is in retirement. Whether you decide to have children also has a pretty big impact. DINKs with a relatively modest income can still FIRE with substantial nest-eggs if their saving % is aggressive. There's also been a cultural shift around FIRE in the last 10 or so years. The original mindset was focused on pretty extreme thriftiness and a general DIY approach to lowering annual expenses to maximize saving rate. Nowadays, the focus is much more on getting the biggest number possible, and maintaining a fairly affluent and luxurious (by early FIRE standards) lifestyle into retirement. To some extent that shift was fed by the money-printer near zero bound interest rate boom years of '08 to '19, so it will be interesting to see whether it maintains that trajectory.
- intelVISA 3y agoIf that were true then the UK would have a bigger startup scene than the US? No decent SWE works for less than $200k p/a even if that means going solo (contract/entrepreneur) when facing a devalued local market
- reedf1 3y agoLondon has some of the highest dev salaries in Europe. But, you'd be lucky to get close to a US SWE salary here. Not that those jobs don't exist (I have one), but definitely the US SWE salary experience is not representative of the UK.
- Tycho 3y agoReally nice piece of work. Very easy to understand. It would be good if it could tell you a retirement spending number given all the other constraints (assuming you want to draw down most of your funds eventually).
- dom96 3y agoThanks! Just to make sure I understand your suggestion correctly: you mean you input your earnings and age of retirement and the tool tells you how much you should spend to use up all of your money by the time you are dead? Might be nice, but I'd say you can figure that out fairly easily by just adjusting the numbers in the tool as it is currently.
- Tycho 3y agoYes, that’s what I mean. And you are right, adjusting the numbers works. I suggested it after upping my monthly savings inputs and then noticed that at end-of-life there was still a huge pension pot. Then I fiddled with the spending figure.
- sgb_QQ 3y agoCheck out https://savingtool.co.uk https://savingtool.co.uk for a similar tool, but it does tax calculations too.
- dom96 3y agoNice, thanks for the suggestion. Definitely feels a lot more advanced (which can be both a bad and a good thing).
- mattlondon 3y agoThis is slightly confusing - it seems to factor in some magical S&S ISA income regardless of what amounts I put into existing S&S ISA. I am assuming it thinks that I will always entirely fill a S&S ISA allowance each yaer in addition to pension contributions, mortgage, bills, food etc. I think that is a bit of a flaw and I guess that means none of the figures can be trusted.
- sgb_QQ 3y agoIt assumes that you invest your surplus fully into an S&S ISA up to the annual limit. If that isn't true, you can adjust spending. Full disclosure though, it doesn't currently support GIAs. That would typically come after you've filled a S&S ISA which doesn't apply to most people.
- Liquid_Fire 3y ago> That would typically come after you've filled a S&S ISA which doesn't apply to most people. Much more likely to apply to people with a high salary going for FIRE, though.
- ralferoo 3y agoNice tool for experimenting with a couple of hypothetical cases, like what if I save a bit more or spend a bit less. It was quite surprising how much delaying retirement by one extra year makes to the outcome! I noticed that it doesn't seem to take into account the state pension, which could be a considerable chunk for some people. You can kind of simulate this by reducing your spendings, but the state pension age might be later than your retirement age, so this isn't a perfect work around. Also the link seems to use standard query parameters, which makes sense, but as it's all running in Javascript, it'd maybe be nice to get the parameters after # instead so that they aren't sent to your server when re-loading from a link. Coupled with an IP address, there's a chance you might be accidentally logging PII information otherwise.
- dom96 3y agoGood point. I will look into switching to using # instead.
- jackjeff 3y agoIt’s really good. I agree with the state pension comment. Maybe add as an additional income with a few settings set to suitable defaults - start age (66) - weekly amount (£203.85) - yearly increase (3%) I’m not super optimistic about the triple lock being a thing for much longer. But I feel like there’ll still be something (albeit very late and very small in inflation adjusted terms). Having this in the calculator can let you play with the different scenarios.
- sea-shunned 3y agoI agree that adding state pension would be useful, though that's another layer of maintenance... Real slick though and very clear, thanks for putting it together! Would you mind sharing a bit about what you're using underneath, as this doesn't look like the usual Shiny-type interface.
- dom96 3y agoThanks for the kind words! I'm using Tailwind + React + recharts. The design itself is pretty custom and doesn't use anything off-the-shelf. I basically use Tailwind like a different syntax for CSS.
- baz00 3y agoOh good. I'm not going to die in poverty. Going to celebrate a little now :) Seriously though, excellent tool. This is the sort of thing that big fintechs are selling clients for silly money. And this is 1000x better than anything they have already.
- dom96 3y agoThank you, glad you like it :)
- davkap92 3y agoNice interface, a few tweak suggestions, its not clear when things are auto updating maybe some more indicators some tooltips, such as retirement spending, is that annual? nice job though!
- dom96 3y agoThanks! Retirement spending is annual. Tooltips are on my todo list.
- stuaxo 3y agoThis is a depressing website, and I'm on an alright contract (well, now in my 40s). Anyone want to work out what % of people this applies to ? I can think of very few people who had 100k savings by the age of 30, this seems insane Vs normality.
- throwaway22032 3y agoEarly retirement is not normal.
- geraldwhen 3y agoI’m in the US, but most have way more than that by 30, in software.
- CalRobert 3y agoPeople in the UK in software generally make a fraction (under half) of what those in the US do, and will have much, much, much lower savings, on average.
- dukeyukey 3y agoThat is not normal in the UK, even for software developers.
- jermaustin1 3y agoBy "in software" you are meaning startup/FAANG, not software development in general where the average salary is still sub $100k, and depending on where you live as little as $50k for a starting salary. As a 22 or 23 year old getting your first job at $50k, your living expenses will take most of your salary. After a few years you might be able to jump to a better paying mid-level developer. So at 28, you could be making $75k throughout most of the central US. Your life style will likely have changed, and you now have a wife, potentially a kid, so living expenses still take up 70-80% of your take home. Hopefully you are able to put away $10k/yr into your personal retirement, and you've been getting your full company match that maxes at 2% (this is standard at most corporate developer jobs). So your 401k might have around $40k in it now, which is great. Your ROTH has another $15-20k probably. At 30, you finally hit your big 3-0. Your 401k has been growing nicely, and you now have $75k in it, and your ROTH is sitting pretty at $25k, only 15 years left until retirement! You have hit $100k by 30! Wait, you were talking about £... Well, you still have a ways to go, you only have £80k.
- rheide 3y agoNice. I made something similar a couple of years ago: https://www.colorfulwolf.com/retirement/ https://www.colorfulwolf.com/retirement/
- dom96 3y agoCool! I might add links to these in my tool so folks can find alternatives. For me at least, I've been loving the ability to try many different tools and compare how my visualisation differs between them. So I hope others would like that too.
- drexlspivey 3y agoWhat is “Safe withdrawal rate”? Also does it take into account capital gains on GIA?
- dom96 3y agoFor the purposes of this calculator it is only used to calculate your "FIRE number" (represented as a dashed blue line on the chart). For more info see https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/safe-withdrawal-rate-swr-method.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/safe-withdrawal-rate-sw...