POC
🎯 TOOL · What could this become?

Goal planner

"When will I have £X?" isn't one date — it's a spread of maybes. This runs 600 possible futures and tells you the honest version: how likely you are to get there, how soon if you're lucky, and how long if you're not.

How it works
1 You describe the plan and the goalWhat you start with, what you add each month, the number you are aiming at, and the return you are assuming.
2 We run it 600 timesEach future gets its own random luck month by month. We note the first month each one touches your goal — and plenty never do.
3 We report the odds first, then the timingHow often you get there at all, and among the futures that did, how long they took.

Read the big percentage first — the three times below it mean nothing without it. Those times describe only the futures that actually reached the goal. If the chance is 30%, then “typically” is the middle of that 30%; the other 70% never arrive at all and are not counted anywhere in those figures. So a distant goal can show a comfortable-looking “typical” time because almost nothing reached it.

Nothing here is a prediction. The return and bumpiness are numbers you type in, and the tool has no idea whether they are achievable — it works out what would follow if they were.

“Reaching” means touching the number once. A future counts the first moment it hits your goal, even if it falls back below afterwards and ends the period short. Getting there is not the same as staying there.

What this can’t tell you

A goal date is the wrong shape of answer. These are the reasons the spread matters more.

  • The three times ignore every future that failed. This is the easiest number here to misread: when the chance is low, the times describe a lucky minority and quietly leave out everyone else. Always read them together with the percentage.
  • It cannot tell you your assumed return is realistic. That one number drives everything on the screen and it is pure input. Whether a real edge behind it is skill or luck is what Real or Noise? tests.
  • Touching the goal is not holding it. A future that hits your number once and then falls back still counts as reached. If what you need is to have the money on a particular date, this is more optimistic than that.
  • Luck is drawn from a bell curve. Real markets have fatter tails and crashes that arrive in clusters, so genuinely bad outcomes are more likely than shown — and it is the bad ones that push goals out of reach.
  • No costs, no tax, no inflation. Trading costs come off along the way (Cost of trading covers those), and the goal itself will buy less by the time you reach it — a £250,000 target in twenty years is not £250,000 of today’s money.
  • It assumes the monthly top-up never stops. Through every bad year, without fail. That is the assumption people break first, and the one that moves the answer most.
The thinking behind it
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A goal is a probability, not a date
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Reaching the number is one problem. Making it last once you start drawing an income from it is a different one, and the order of your luck matters far more.

Living off it →