UK Showcases
Ready-made financial plans you can open and make your own, no signup. Each is a real situation, some a side by side money lesson, some a full life story.
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Single
Pension or ISA?
You have money left at the end of the month and two wrappers to put it in, and everyone has an opinion. The same pound, saved both ways for thirty years and then actually spent, settles it.
Single
Start investing early
A 30-year-old on £45,000 puts every spare pound into a stocks and shares ISA. How far does three decades of compounding actually get them?
Single
Overpay the mortgage, or invest?
A homeowner has spare cash every month and one classic question: throw it at the mortgage, or invest it? The same person, planned two ways, side by side.
Single
How long should you fix for?
Your fix is ending and the lender offers two years or five. One is a bet that rates will be kind when you refix; the other buys certainty you may not need. Here is the same mortgage, both ways, through a rate shock.
Single
Where the pay rises went
Nobody decides to spend their pay rise. The money simply arrives, and six months later the flat is nicer and the balance is the same. Here is what half of it, kept, is worth by the time you stop working.
Single
How much cash is too much cash?
Everyone tells you to build an emergency fund and nobody tells you when to stop. The same saver, the same redundancy, three months of cash on one side and twelve on the other.
Couple
How much does a household need?
Every rule of thumb tells you to keep six or twelve months of your spending in cash, and none of them asks how many of you are earning.
When one salary stops and the other does not, what the household is short of is the gap, so what does sizing the buffer on the bigger number cost?
Single
Is your Cash ISA costing you a fortune?
Over 13 million UK adults keep their ISA in cash, because a cash balance cannot go down. The same money, saved the same way for thirty-five years, ends up somewhere very different depending only on what it was held in.
Single
One percent, forty years
A marketing manager of 28 pays a little over one percent a year for her investments, which on today's balance is a couple of hundred pounds. What does the same percentage cost over the forty years she means to keep saving?
Single
The quiet NI win
Everyone knows a pension saves you Income Tax. Almost nobody prices the National Insurance, and from 2029 the part of it worth having is capped at a figure that never rises.
What is a pound given up at source actually worth against the same pound taken home?
Single
Rent and invest, or buy?
You have the deposit and cannot decide. Renting is not dead money if the deposit is invested instead, so the honest version of this argument runs both lives all the way to the end.
Single
Point your spare money at the debt
You pay the card what it asks each month and the balance barely moves, because the minimum is designed to do exactly that. What is the money you are putting somewhere safer actually earning, against what the card is charging you?
Single
The 0% window
You moved £6,000 onto a 0% card and the pressure came off. The same debt, planned two ways, shows what those two years are worth if you use them, and what they cost if you do not.
Single
Pay down the loan, or fund the pension?
A loan at nearly 9 per cent is a guaranteed return you can bank, and every article says clear the expensive debt first. Here is the same salary planned both ways, so you can see what the delay to your debt free date actually buys you.
Single
When does a side hustle need declaring?
A teacher of 31 turns tutoring work away, because he is sure that once he crosses the £1,000 line the tax and the paperwork will eat most of it. What is the extra weekend work actually worth once every penny of tax has been paid?
Single
Is the pay rise real?
A data analyst of 27 in Leeds is offered the same job in London for a third more money. Once the rent and the travelcard are paid, is it more money?
Both lives run to ninety, and she stays where she moved, so the London rent goes on being paid after the job ends.
Single
A second job
You want to earn another thousand a month. You can do more hours where you are, or take a second job. Those two routes are not taxed the same way, and only one of them is asked about at interview.
Single
The nation's favourite lottery
Millions of people hold Premium Bonds and the advertised rate is not what most of them get. Here is what a full holding is typically worth against an ordinary savings account, once the taxman has had his share of one of them and none of the other.
Single
All at once, or monthly?
A plan manager of 38 inherits £100,000 and cannot decide whether to invest it on Monday or a twelfth of it a month for a year. What does the cautious answer cost, and what does it buy?
Single
All at once, or monthly, when nothing goes wrong?
The same hundred thousand and the same choice, in a market that simply gets on with it. No crash, no rescue, no clever timing. This is what the decision is worth in the ordinary case, which is the case you are most likely to get.
Single
The first year on your own
Ash is twenty nine, a product designer in Leeds who hands in his notice at the end of September and starts billing for himself on the first of October.
The tax on those first six months of trading is not due until January 2028, and when it arrives he is asked for half as much again on account of a year that is already ten months old.
His fees arrive here as a smooth monthly amount, so this is the gentle version of freelancing: nothing models a late invoice or an empty month.
Single
Sole trader or limited company?
A freelancer earning a steady profit, planned two ways: stay a sole trader, or run the same trade through a limited company. Which structure keeps more after tax over a working life?
Couple
One steady income, one risky one
He can earn the same freelancing as he does on the payroll, and the second salary at home makes the leap survivable. Here is what the same earnings are worth once there is no employer behind them.
Single
The £100k tax trap
Earn just over £100,000 and a hidden 60% tax rate kicks in as your tax-free allowance is withdrawn. The same earner, planned two ways: hand the 60% slice to the taxman, or sacrifice it into a pension.
Single
Staying under the line
You did not choose to be a higher rate taxpayer, your pay rise did. In the last few working years the slice above the line is the cheapest money you will ever put into a pension, and the most expensive money you will ever spend.
Couple
The allowance one of you is not using
One of you earns too little to use your whole tax-free allowance. The other pays basic rate tax on money that allowance could have covered. Moving the unused slice across is one form, and about a million eligible couples have never filled it in.
Couple
The gap nobody sees
One of you earns too much for Child Benefit to be worth taking, so you never claimed it.
The claim was never really about the money: it is the only thing crediting the parent at home with a State Pension. What does the form nobody filled in actually cost?
Couple
Same money, different answer
Child Benefit is means tested on one person's income, never on what a couple earn between them.
Two families on exactly the same money, split two ways, find out what that quirk is worth: one is charged the whole benefit back from the first year, and the other is charged nothing at all until rising pay catches up with the thresholds.
Couple
Does going back to work pay
Take-home pay, minus nursery, is the sum every parent does on the back of an envelope.
Since the funded hours were extended it no longer comes out near nothing, and it was never the whole answer anyway: the pension and the salary you never fall behind on are not on the envelope.
Couple
All the eggs, one basket
One of you works and one of you is at home with the children. On the family's own account that is one household getting by on one salary.
Followed to the end it is two very different individual futures, and the one nobody is watching stops growing on a date neither of you has in the diary.
Couple
Yours, mine and ours
Two people, four children, two former partners and one mortgage. This is what a blended family's money looks like from the inside, and what the years of paying for everybody else cost the people doing it.
Single
The graduate decade
Rosa is twenty two and in the last term of her degree, owing about £40,000 on a student loan written off after forty years rather than thirty, and holding nothing beyond the last instalment of her maintenance loan.
Ten years later she owns a flat, owes a mortgage, has a pension she has never looked at, and still owes more on the loan than the day she left.
Everything after thirty two here is an ordinary working life carried forward so the chart is honest about how it ends, not a decade anybody authored.
Single
Don't rush to clear the student loan
You hate owing tens of thousands of pounds and you want it gone. But this debt comes out of your pay only above a threshold, is cancelled after thirty years whatever is left, and clearing it early is a purchase you cannot undo.
Couple
Two rents, one mortgage
Two people paying two rents are running two households on two incomes, and a payslip never says so.
Watch the same couple over six years, first the month the second rent stops and then the month the rent becomes a mortgage. Neither change is a pay rise.
Single
LISA or pension for your first home?
You are saving for a first flat and the advice splits two ways: a Lifetime ISA for the government bonus, or the pension for the relief. The same money saved each way hands you the keys years apart and leaves you somewhere very different at ninety.
Single
The car question
The quote is a few hundred a month and the car is new, so it feels like a solved problem. Here is the same person driving the same miles for the same years in a three-year-old car instead, and what the difference is worth by the time she retires.
Single
Five more years
You are about to hit the age the pension unlocks, the job has stopped being interesting, and stopping is suddenly a real choice. The same woman, planned two ways, shows what those last five years of work are actually worth.
Couple
Both at once, or one at a time?
You have always assumed you would finish together, and the date is nearly fixed. Before it is, look at what the last three years of one salary are actually worth to the household, because it is a great deal more than three years of pay.
Single
The inheritance
Two hundred thousand pounds lands in Ruth's account at sixty-two and everybody has an opinion: clear the mortgage, top up the pension, fill the ISA. The same woman and the same money, planned three ways, to see which advice was worth taking.
Single
Trade up, or stay put and invest?
The bigger house is affordable, so the only question left is what it costs. Here is the same person planned both ways, with every fee, tax and higher bill the move actually carries, so you can decide what the extra space is worth to you.
Single
The spare room beats the extra shift
A radiographer of 33 wants another £7,500 a year, and can have it either from the extra shifts her hospital keeps offering or from the spare room she uses for storage. Are the two really the same £7,500?
Single
Downsize at 55, or at 75?
Almost everyone intends to downsize eventually, and eventually is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The same woman making the same move twenty years apart shows what the waiting is worth, and who it is worth it to.
Single
The accidental landlord
Nadia is moving, and the flat she already owns could be let out instead of sold.
Here is the same move planned both ways, with the purchase surcharge, the interest relief rules and a landlord's running costs all priced in.
The let flat borrows at a homeowner's rate here, which a real consent to let deal is not, so the case for keeping it is shown about a fifth stronger than it should be.
Couple
Rental income, whose tax?
You are buying a flat to let, and the mortgage offer, the rent and the price are the same whichever of you signs for it. The tax is not, and for a couple with different salaries the gap is bigger than anything a better rate would win you.
Couple
Whose name is on the deeds
One of you already owns a flat and you are buying a house together.
The extra Stamp Duty is the bill you will see; the one you will not see is twenty years of rent taxed at the wrong person's rate, and a sale at the end that hands the money to one of you rather than to both.
Couple
Use both, or lose one
One of you does the investing and shelters everything you save. The other has an account they opened years ago and never went back to.
A tax-free allowance belongs to a person, resets every April and cannot be handed over, so what does the second one being left alone cost?
Single
The exit got four times slower
You have money invested outside an ISA and you have been meaning to deal with it. The cost of not dealing with it is one number, and the reason it keeps growing is that the door out gets narrower the longer you wait.
Single
Take the tax-free cash, or leave it?
At fifty-five your provider will hand you a quarter of your pension, tax free, no questions asked. The same saver, planned two ways, shows what taking it thirteen years early actually costs.
Single
Annuity or drawdown?
At retirement you can hand your pension pot to an insurer for an income that never stops, or keep it invested and take what you need.
One of those plans is still paying you at ninety after a bad decade in the markets, and the other is the one that keeps the balance.
Single
Stop contributing at 40
A software engineer of 40 with £200,000 already in her pension wonders whether she can stop feeding it. How far does compounding carry the pot on its own, and what does stopping actually cost?
Single
The which-pot-first puzzle
You retire with money in three places and every article names a different one to spend first. The honest answer is that each order wins something and loses something, so the only way to see the trade is to run it three ways.
Single
Does 4% survive?
The four per cent rule says take a twenty-fifth of your pot in year one, then give yourself a pay rise with inflation for life.
Take a twenty-fifth of whatever the pot is worth instead and you are paid less every year, and a lost decade at the start shows which promise actually holds.
Single
The worst possible start
Colin is sixty five and retired last month with £520,000 in a pension, £130,000 in an ISA, £60,000 in an investment account and a house he owns outright. He takes £20,000 a year out of the pot, raised with inflation.
In the very month he stops working a systemic crisis takes hold and runs for three years: shares fall hard, the base rate is cut so his savings earn almost nothing, and house prices go backwards too.
Nothing here reacts to any of it, no spending cut and no pause in the withdrawal.
Couple
Draw from both, always
You both stopped work last year with a pension pot each, and it feels simplest to take the money out of the bigger one and leave the smaller alone. Two people have two tax-free allowances between them, so what does using only one of them cost?
Single
Defer, or take it now?
You reach State Pension age and the money is there for the asking, whether or not you need it yet.
Take it while you are still earning and the taxman keeps a slice of it; leave it and every year of waiting adds permanently to what you eventually draw.
Single
The best return in the system
Most people never look at their National Insurance record, and a gap in it quietly costs a slice of State Pension for ever. The same person, planned two ways, shows what filling the gaps is worth.
Single
Unlock the house
Brian is seventy-two, owns his house outright and cannot run his life on the State Pension alone.
He can borrow against the house and stay in it, or sell it and move somewhere smaller, and the two roads leave very different amounts of the house behind.
Neither side is charged Inheritance Tax, which no simulation computes, so the real gap between them is smaller than the one shown.
Single
Paying for your own care
Margaret is seventy, owns a terraced house and has watched her own mother's care consume a family home.
She wants to know what happens if she ends up where her mother ended up: what the house actually buys, and the age at which the council finally starts paying.
Couple
When one of us dies first
You have worked out your retirement together, and on paper it works.
This is the same money seen from the morning after one of you is gone: one State Pension stops for good, the company pension drops to a survivor's share, and almost every bill arrives unchanged.
Couple
Fifteen years apart
You married someone fifteen years older. Everything about the money happens twice, a long way apart, and one of you is very likely to spend a quarter of a century on the far side of it.
This is that plan, from the year they retire to the year she stops needing it.
Single
Made redundant
Mark is forty, an operations manager in Sheffield with fifteen years at the same firm, a mortgage and savings he has always thought of as enough.
In July his division closes, it takes nine months to find work, and the job he takes pays less for the rest of his career.
Only the means-tested benefit is modelled here, and his savings disqualify him from it; the contributory one his National Insurance record bought is not modelled at all.
Single
The safety net
Ellie is thirty two, renting in Nottingham, with savings she is quietly proud of.
Her contract is not renewed, she is out of work for eleven months, and she claims everything she is entitled to.
Only the means-tested benefit is modelled here, and her savings disqualify her from it until they are nearly gone; the contributory one her National Insurance record bought, and the council tax help she would also get, are not modelled at all.
Couple
If one of us stopped
The argument every couple with a joint mortgage has and nobody ever settles: six months of costs sitting in an account you can reach on a Tuesday afternoon, against the same money invested.
Then one of the two salaries stops for a year, and both sides find out what the habit was worth.
Single
Insurance you hope to waste
You pay a small amount every month for something you hope never to use. Here is the same person, the same illness and the same spending, planned with the cover and without it.
Single
Ten hard years
Ayesha is forty five, a quality manager on £52,000 near Manchester, with a two bed flat and £118,000 left on the mortgage.
From spring 2027 prices climb three points a year faster than she assumed, the Bank of England answers with two points on the base rate, and her pay rises every year by a point a year less than prices do. She changes nothing at all, and her fixed deal ends in the middle of it.
Her net worth still goes up throughout, because a mortgage is a debt in cash terms secured on something real, and the decade takes about a fifth of what she has by 2037 all the same. Everything here inflates at one rate, so no part of the shopping is modelled as rising faster than the rest.
Single
Five percent in crypto
A data engineer of thirty-five is talked at from both sides about whether to own any crypto, and nobody argues about how much.
What does one three year crypto winter cost at a twentieth of her portfolio, at none of it, and at a quarter of it? This is what one bad run costs at each size, not how likely that run is.
Couple
Pay the fees, or let the loan run?
Three years of tuition is a number you can see. What it costs you at ninety, and what it actually saves your daughter, are two numbers nobody puts on the table.
Here is the first one, and an honest account of why the second one is not ours to compute.
Single
School fees, or the same money invested
Priya is forty, her daughter starts school this September, and the independent school four miles away invoices about three hundred thousand pounds over thirteen years with VAT already inside the figure.
What is the identical money worth at sixty-eight if it goes into an ISA instead?
Couple
Two children, thirteen years each
One child at a fee-paying school is a stretch. Two is a different animal, because for five years you pay both senior fees at once. Here is what those years cost, and what the same money is worth if it never leaves your own accounts.
Single
Company car or the cash?
Your employer offers an electric company car or the money instead. The two are taxed in completely different ways, and everyone will tell you to take the cash. Which of them actually leaves you better off?
Single
Diversify or hold?
Your shares vest, the tax is already paid, and now you choose: keep the company stock or sell it and buy everything else. The same grants, the same growth, two bad years at the company.
Single
FIRE by 45
Nadia is twenty eight, a software engineer in Manchester on £72,000, renting a one bed and intending to keep renting.
She saves about half of what she is paid and wants to stop working at forty five, which leaves a twelve year gap: she turns fifty five in 2053, the wrong side of the 2028 change, so her pension is locked until fifty seven and the State Pension does not arrive until sixty eight.
Stopping then also closes her National Insurance record at twenty three years out of thirty five, which costs about £6,300 a year of State Pension in today's money for the rest of her life.
Couple
Two incomes, one set of bills
Moving in together roughly doubles a household's income and adds about a third to its bills. That gap is the whole engine of this plan, and it is why a couple can stop at 45 on two salaries neither of them could have done it on alone.
Single
Catching up late
Nadia is fifty two, divorced and mortgage free, on £150,000 after twenty years of earning far less, with £120,000 in her pension and fifteen working years left.
She sacrifices forty five per cent of her pay into it, and what finally stops her is the yearly allowance rather than the money.
The allowance charge is settled from her own cash here, because paying it out of the pot is not modelled.
Couple
Move it to the lower-rate spouse
You are about to sell an investment you have held for years, and the tax on it is not fixed. Between a married couple the same sale can be taxed three different ways, and the difference is decided before the sale, not after.
Single
When the allowance shrinks
A reinsurance broker of 52 has put 12% of a £360,000 salary into his pension for twenty years without thinking about it.
His yearly allowance is now tapered to £10,000, so most of what he pays in is charged straight back: is the pension still the right home for that money?
Single
Selling up
An owner-director of 58 has four years of trading left and about £227,000 of post-tax profit a year to decide about. Take it as dividends as he goes, or leave it in and take it once when the company closes?
