Why I built Your Future Compass

I'm Gavin, and I built Your Future Compass out of my own frustration.

About ten years ago I started to take a bit more of a serious interest in planning my financial future.

Like many people, I'd been paying into a workplace pension for years. My employer had a generous match, which was great, but I'd never looked at what it was actually invested in. How much was in shares versus safer things like bonds. What it might grow to. I didn't have anything like the knowledge I have now.

So I went away and got stuck into learning as much as I could off my own back. Ten years ago there wasn't the wealth of information there is today, so it was a case of reading my own pension documents, researching the providers, and digging into asset classes, UK pension rules, tax wrappers like ISAs, and what the stock market has typically done. These days it's far easier: there are people making absolutely excellent, free and detailed content, like the YouTube channels from James Shack, Meaningful Money, Pension Craft and Damian Talks Money. I'd point anyone starting out towards channels like those before they pay for anything, including my software.

After I'd understood more about the basics, I wanted to get more actively involved in using this information to help plan our own future, but I couldn't find any tool I could actually use to do it. The good ones were professional software packages built for advisers, and to get near them you had to go through a financial planner, which meant paying for advice I didn't feel I needed yet. There's absolutely a place for high quality paid financial advice, but I didn't believe I needed that, and I was frustrated with the tools available at the time. I hand-built my own spreadsheets to try and answer the questions I thought I should be able to answer myself. I got so far, and then stopped. For some people, a solid spreadsheet is all they'll ever want or need, and that's great, but personally I found myself wanting to explore things in more detail than I was able to do with my sheets.

Some of the questions were fairly basic, and some more complex. If I want to spend a certain amount in retirement, how much do I need to save? Where am I now against that? What would I need to do to get there? What would happen if the stock market performed badly just after I retired? Could I retire earlier, or work part time? What would happen if we downsized, what about modelling care costs, inheritance tax, ranges of different investment returns, one-off spends, and so on…

What struck me, then and since, is how many people are in exactly that position. Some of the most intelligent people I know are still paying into a fund without really knowing where the money is, or what it might become and the level of income it might be able to give them. We teach our kids maths, science and English, and nothing about mortgages, pensions or investing, the things that would probably make the biggest difference to their lives.

I started building a tool to answer my own questions, and it grew into something I thought could be genuinely useful. So I kept working on it until I had a product I'm genuinely proud of, and one I think can help other people plan for their future the way I've done for myself.

There's no advice in here. If you need advice on specific products or what you should do, that's what a financial adviser is for. This is your data, your assumptions and your questions, answered by you.

So take a look around and see how you find the tool. There are free guides on the site you can read without signing in, and if you'd like to explore more, you can sign up for a free plan and model your own situation to see what your future could look like. Hopefully, by exploring what it can do, you'll decide the full paid version is worth what I consider a relatively small investment.

Gavin
Founder, Your Future Compass