A clearer view of what your money could do
Financial planning can feel complicated. Your Future Money starts with one simple question: after your monthly spending, how much is left?
Try the free calculatorHow it works
Enter your monthly income
Use the take-home pay that reaches your bank account after tax.
Adjust your spending
Add housing and bills, then move the food, going out and other spending sliders. The calculator shows how much could be left to save each month, or how far short you are.
Explore long-term possibilities
See what consistently investing your monthly surplus might look like after 5, 10, 20 and 30 years using illustrative 3%, 5% or 7% annual growth assumptions.
Check the starting example
The six starting figures give £2,636 take-home pay and £2,150 total spending. The difference is £486 a month, or £5,832 over a year if every month stays the same.
At the illustrative 5% effective annual rate, adding £486 at each month-end for 20 years gives approximately £197,221. Of that, £116,640 is money you contributed and approximately £80,581 is hypothetical growth. This is before fees, tax and inflation, with no starting balance.
The £486 is a budget estimate: include irregular costs such as annual bills, repairs and holidays when deciding what you can actually set aside. For an annual cost, divide it by 12 and include that monthly amount in the most suitable spending category.
If you change only take-home pay to £1,000, the same spending produces a £1,150 monthly shortfall. The calculator then sets investable savings and projections to zero. It does not treat a shortfall as money available to invest.
Where the example take-home pay comes from
The calculator starts at £2,636 per month purely as an example. This is an approximate take-home amount based on the ONS median gross yearly pay for full-time UK employees who had been in their jobs for at least a year, in April 2025 (£39,039).
We estimated take-home pay using the 2026/27 standard Income Tax allowance and basic rate and employee National Insurance, as applicable to England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In this simplified estimate, £39,039 gross pay less about £5,294 Income Tax and £2,118 employee National Insurance gives about £31,628 per year, or £2,636 per month. It does not deduct workplace pensions, student loans or other personal deductions. Scottish Income Tax can differ.
The median is the middle full-time employee figure, not a mathematical average of all UK workers. It does not describe part-time workers, people who are self-employed or everyone in the country. Please replace this starting figure with your actual monthly take-home pay for a meaningful personal calculation.
What the investment example assumes
We start with zero invested. Every month, you invest the same amount at the end of that month. We convert the chosen effective annual growth rate into an equivalent monthly rate, then apply monthly compounding.
Choose your country or region beside the chart to display the calculator in a local currency. The numbers stay the same when you switch currencies: enter your own income and spending in the selected currency. No exchange rates are used. The starting figures are UK examples, not local income estimates.
The graph distinguishes the money you contributed from the extra money the calculation attributes to growth. This is a smooth mathematical illustration, not a simulation of how markets actually move.
No rate is guaranteed. Global stock markets can be volatile and may fall considerably. You could get back less than you invest. Annual investment fees and inflation are editable assumptions. Future Value shows nominal pounds; Today's Money divides each year's balance by its inflation factor. Taxes are excluded. Real markets and your actual outcome can be very different.
We do not suggest that any particular fund will produce the rates shown. This free tool is educational and does not provide personal financial advice. Think about building an emergency cash buffer before investing.
Different tools, different questions
Your Future Money helps you explore a monthly budget and a mathematical growth illustration. CandleQuiz is a separate practice tool for recognising simplified candlestick and chart shapes. A quiz score says how well you recognised those examples; it does not measure trading skill or predict returns.
The expanded collection adds pension planning, money simulations, emergency savings, missions and quizzes. Each tool explains its own assumptions and sources. Explore the full collection through Money Tools. The offline upgrade was checked on . The calculation assumptions, source links and limitations are set out on this page; the quiz explains its own practice rules and references.
Free, simple and private
There are no accounts, paid plans or bank connections. The calculator uses plain JavaScript running in your browser, so your income and spending figures are not uploaded to a server. For more detail, read our privacy information.