Pensions forecast calculator

[Florabella]

I have tried a few pensions calculators, but none of them do exactly what I want to know.

I am way behind on my pension due to trusting my ex and investing in properties with him as a pension only to be shafted when we split. Anyway, I have an old pension from before I met him that has £145k in it (I am 53). I want to try and work out different scenarios for if I contribute different amounts to it each month/year based on different levels of returns.

I've left it too late to get a comfortable retirement, but thinking that it might be possible to get to £300k by £68 and trying to work out how much I need to start contributing to do that. Any calculators that would help me work this out?

Sorry - a very muddled post!

PensionBee website and app have a good calculator on their site. You do not have to be signed up with them to use it. You can play around with contribution amounts and it will tell you what is forecast. I don’t think you can adjust levels of return though, it makes a standard assumption on that. But could be a reasonable place to start.

PensionBee is a good shout. You call’s also ask Chat GPT and plug in different scenarios.

https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/pensions-and-retirement/pensions-basics/pension-calculator

I used chatgpt and it's pretty good.

You don't actually need a dedicated pension calculator. If you want to test different levels of contributions and return, a compound interest calculator will do it - and they allow any input for the growth figure.

For example this shows that at a 5% return, and contributions of £100/month¹, you'd comfortably hit the £300k goal: https://www.thecalculatorsite.com/finance/calculators/compoundinterestcalculator.php

¹Remember to factor in the tax benefit - so for £100 contributions you would only need to pay £80 if you're a basic rate taxpayer.

But at 2.5% growth, you'd need to put in £450/month.

Thanks, I am getting myself tied in knots, and ChatGPT and Pensionbee seemed to be giving me very different answers. I am self employed and can't commit to a monthly direct debit which makes it more complicated, so just going to put in what I can at the end of each year and hope for the best!

Indeed.

5% average annual total return (growth plus dividends) is fairly realistic for equities - that's about the FTSE100 average over the past 50 years, with the S&P500 closer to 7%.

But it is an average. Individual years, and short periods, can diverge enormously from that.

And that's equities alone. Most ready-made pension funds are mix of equities and lower return (but theoretically more stable) investments like bonds. Which is why official pension growth forecasts use a rather lower growth estimate.

Also check your state pension forecast to make sure you are on track to get a full state pension.

The thing here is that most financial services companies are going to account for inflation, do you want to consider this? Are you thinking in today’s terms?

In that time frame the spending value will have almost halved.