Personal systems · Financial modelling
Household Ledger & Retirement Runway
A household ledger for the past and a retirement planner for the future, kept deliberately separate.
Problem
Statements, spending categories and retirement assumptions were spread across spreadsheets that were difficult to check.Solution
One local tool reconciles past spending; a separate one tests future retirement assumptions and shows every year of the result.Impact
Reliable household analysis and retirement scenarios without uploading private financial data or mixing facts with forecasts.Illustrative planning data
- Statement lines1,248
- Reconciled spending£92,640
- Needs review0
- Scenario
- Plan A
- Annual spending
- £60,000
- Runway
- To age 95
The problem
Household spending asks what happened. Retirement planning asks what might happen. Our spreadsheets had started to mix statements, categories, pensions, tax, school fees, returns and inflation until facts and assumptions were difficult to separate.
The solution
I built two local tools. Household Ledger analyses completed financial years. Retirement Runway tests future income, tax, pensions, investments and spending. The ledger does not forecast, and the planner never presents an assumption as a fact.
New statements are checked before they join the ledger
Original statements stay unchanged. A PDF, image, spreadsheet, OFX or QIF file becomes a preview that is checked for dates, amounts, duplicates, missing sources and reconciliation. I review it before acceptance, and the existing ledger is backed up first.
The evidence
The ledger supports fiscal years, custom periods, category and merchant drill-downs, search, export, repeat spending and inflation-adjusted comparisons. Each account shows its date coverage, included spend and anything needing review.
Retirement scenarios show their working
Retirement Runway models income, tax, pensions, ISAs, school fees, investment returns and inflation. Results show how long a plan lasts and the figures behind every year. Real and nominal values are kept consistent so inflation cannot quietly flatter the result.
Private by default
Household records and scenarios remain local. Public repositories contain code and synthetic examples, not private statements or family totals.
The impact
I can see what happened, change an assumption and trace the result. The same approach makes business forecasts easier to challenge.
The result