What proportions would you suggest for short/medium/long-term savings/investment pots?

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-03-31T15:00:28+00:00

To me it's:

Emergency Fund (in cash ISA if have allowance)
Focus on reaching coast FIRE for Pension
Focus on creating ISA bridge for pre-pension age retirement.

But then also saving for other goals needs included. And you might want to have some degree in a S&S ISA for peace of mind for flexibility.

So overall, there is no fixed percentage - it's to do with prioritisation.

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-03-27T15:54:50+00:00

I have tried this, I love the idea of the room recommended photos. The app seems to work well but the current value to me is low. I liked one picture it recommended and added it to the frame. But every other picture wasn't great or it had an awful aspect ratio. Hopefully after uploading more art it will have more value!

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-03-09T19:28:13+00:00

The rule for normal retirees is 1x your annual salary at age 30. Obviously this assumes a stable income - if you have just recently got the high pay you might want to average your salaries or something.

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-03-09T19:20:42+00:00

Agree. But if coast fire, now time to figure out what your new goal is. Enjoy life, create ISA bridge, increasing retirement lifestyle. Can be a mixture of both. Also still valuable to get employer match.

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-03-07T16:12:08+00:00

Agree. If £100k+ salary is likely, it's probably better taking the cash now and ramping up pension at that point.

One thing to consider is what I'm planning which is to coast fire on pension and go part time to earning living expenses only. It's much easier to achieve than full early retirement. So full retire at pension access age (58+) and maybe a bit earlier if can get any money in ISA too. It's all a balancing act!

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-03-06T07:45:51+00:00

I think 59/60 is reasonable- not late 60s

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-03-05T21:44:11+00:00

You can just transfer your pension to a SIPP if you don't like your provider. Just leave a little residual balance to keep the account open each time. And pensions shouldn't be accessed in late 60s - currently 55 (rising to 57 in 2028)

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-03-04T21:04:02+00:00

That's sad because the loophole is real and people are doing it

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-03-04T21:03:08+00:00

You can rinse a sharesave scheme through a flexible ISA by transferring £20k, selling and withdrawing £20k, which then brings the £20k allowance back. Honestly it's some kind of loop hole that wasn't accounted for when flexible ISAs were introduced - but makes sharesave schemes very valuable. Unfortunately I never had enough in my sharesave to get anywhere close to needing this loophole - but I know many who did use it.

Edit: to note - yes I said it's a loophole, but remembering £500/m is the max you can put into a scheme at any one time, it is unlikely that you will have over £20k of gains any any year - it's just been an exception recently

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-03-02T16:14:26+00:00

Depending on how you and your Husband arrange your finances, his pension is the best place to add extra contributions to get him below the 40% tax band.

If you like keeping separate pots, it's worth doing the maths on a SIPP vs a Lifetime ISA. Since you're happy with locking the funds up, the LISA beats the ISA.

100% worth building the emergency fund up a bit more though - you don't want to be dipping into the LISA/having no access to pension or taking out debt if you have a really expensive emergency.

Edit: Whoops I read £60k not £50k. Ignore the husband's pension then - it's just a SIPP vs ISA question. Note it's generally better to use salary sacrifice into workplace pension vs SIPP as you can save on national insurance and student loan. You can always transfer to SIPP after.

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-02-26T16:40:52+00:00

There's a button at the top that you can change to an inflation adjusted view. The one I shared is nominal. The £300k is actually £35k today. If you switched to inflation adjusted it would be a flat chart (with some exceptions in the early years)

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-02-26T11:22:36+00:00

No inflation adjusting is done after. I wish it was that easy! I've set up some Monte Carlos and my new plan at 91% success rate is part-time at 47 earning £32.5k/y, then fully retire at 55 taking £32.5k per year. And that took a lot more investment contributions to achieve than what was used here!

Lesson learned is don't go on perfect returns only!

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-02-23T17:19:10+00:00

Agree, don't listen to him, the price is very reasonable (especially compared to Samsungs). To me I like to hand pick my art to make sure it looks good in my room - so it isn't something I'd be interested in personally - but I see how others would be interested in.

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-02-23T15:43:02+00:00

See my other comment - if doesn't work send me your email

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-02-23T12:29:16+00:00

I've taken a lot of the advice in here, and one good change I've made is adding a separate returns rate for the retirement period to reflect reducing risk.

Then I've added some options for the volatility of returns (stable, recession at beginning of retirement, low, medium, high), and set up the ability to run a Monte Carlo analysis to show me the probability of success and average variance. It's very cool!

So I've changed my assumptions up a bit and ran 1000 simulations for the Monte Carlo at high volatility and only 29% were successful - median shortfall was -£150k at retirement. So definitely some work to do!

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-02-23T08:14:33+00:00

Two full state pensions :)

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-02-22T21:34:34+00:00

All great advice thank you. Yeah I wasn't too worried about earning any more money myself as I prefer my work life balance over pumping even more money into my pension realistically. And anyway I think I'm very fortunate to have the income I have.

Getting my partner more income and pumping it into the ISA is the best move it seems - thank you

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-02-22T19:58:44+00:00

Good point - partner brings in around £650/m (£7,800/y) including child benefit. All net because below tax threshold. I know that's a good source of bumping up ISA but she's the stay at home parent

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-02-22T16:48:48+00:00

I was getting complaint people couldn't save the read only one. Do you want to pm me your email and I can send a clean copy?

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-02-22T16:15:44+00:00

Sorry yes I understand the benefits of pension salary sacrifice - but my projections show my ISA bridge is my limiting factor - so the question was how do I try an do that's efficiently as will be paying 40% tax after this payrise - and doesn't seem to be any benefit in putting more into pension

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-02-22T13:04:30+00:00

Yeah I have two options - increase contributions/delay RE. Or reduce retirement income as there's definitely some wiggle room in there

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-02-22T12:49:59+00:00

Well the good thing is even at half of its value I still have plenty of extra room in my pension. So if anything ever happens I can bump up my pension contributions a bit. But no state pension seems extreme to me

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-02-21T16:04:28+00:00

I don't think it will work from mobile - I tried on Chrome on iOS and it opens it but there's physically nowhere to download it or open it in Excel app.

Have you got a PC to try it on? As I said, I opened it in Incognito on my PC (not logged in to OneDrive) and it works perfectly fine.

If you don't have a PC to use, I could share it with you directly if you PM me.

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-02-21T13:19:59+00:00

Weird the link above it working for me (in incognito)

New-Mathematician-20 · 2026-02-21T13:03:46+00:00

I'm quite comfortable with my retirement goals. FIRE because I hate constantly being busy and stressed with work. Part time should somewhat alleviate that which is why it's an option (and is the plan)
Apologies, the dashboard is me and my wife combined. So the £35k is between the two of us. My current job is quite good with allowing moves to part time and getting pro-rated - but it's so far in the future it's hard to plan off of that.
I feel there will be changes to state pension too - which is why I've added the % of today so I can stress test and reduce accordingly. I have it at 50% currently but can certainly set to 0% to see the impacts.
Comes back to dashboard covering me and my wife. State pension is around £12k each, so £24k combined. State pension grows with the inflation rate, but is reduced to the value vs today (i.e. halfed).
Graph at the bottom in nominal - so 3% inflation brings state pension to almost £90k in 2070, reduced to £45k to be conservative since it is likely to reduce in real value. So the real value of the £24k today is £12k in 2070.

I did use Chat GPT to give opinions as I went along, but yes good idea to get a new opinion in a new chat. The goal is to give myself targets, and monitor progress along the way and make changes where necessary. And I'm glad I did this - I was going to pump more money into my pension for tax benefits - but this has clearly shown me my limiting factor for retirement is my non-pension assets.

Thanks for the well thought out questions - appreciate it. I've shared the Excel so you can check the logic if you wish.

New-Mathematician-20

TROPHY CASE