From sign-up to your first projection
When you create your account and sign in for the first time, FutureClear opens the onboarding wizard. It collects everything needed for a first projection — your details, your pensions, your savings and home, and your spending — and builds your first scenario at the end. You can change any of it later; nothing here is fixed.
The wizard has six steps, shown as a progress bar across the top. You can move Back and Next freely, and your entries are kept as you go.
Step 1 — About You
Enter your date of birth and tell us whether you're still working or already retired. If you're still working, you'll set the age you plan to retire. You can also add a partner here to model the two of you together, each with your own ages and pensions.
Step 2 — Spending
Enter the annual spending you want the projection to cover, and the age you'd like the projection to run to. This is the figure the model draws from your assets to meet each year.
Step 3 — Pensions
Add your pensions — defined contribution pots such as a SIPP or workplace pension, any defined benefit (final salary) pensions, and your State Pension. You can add as many as you have; FutureClear keeps them separate and applies the right tax treatment to each.
Step 4 — Savings & Home
Add your other assets — ISAs, a general investment account, cash, and property such as your home or a buy-to-let. These sit alongside your pensions in the projection.
Step 5 — Employment
If you're still working, enter your current employment income. This step is skipped automatically if you told us in Step 1 that you're already retired.
Step 6 — Review
A summary of everything you've entered, with an Edit link beside each section if you want to change something. When you're happy, create your first scenario.
What happens next
FutureClear builds your scenario and takes you straight to the results — a year-by-year projection showing how your money is modelled to evolve, with charts and a full tax breakdown for every year.
Making your scenario more accurate
The onboarding wizard gets you a quick first view of your scenario from a handful of figures. To make that projection more accurate, it's worth refining three things:
- Check your profiles — confirm your retirement age, State Pension age, and life expectancy (and your partner's, if you're modelling a couple). See Scenario Profiles.
- Update your asset register — add any pensions, ISAs, or property you skipped in the wizard, and refine the values and growth assumptions. See Adding Your Assets.
- Update your scenario — add the life events that shape your scenario: milestones, spending phases, one-off costs, and changes in income. See Adding and Editing Life Events.
Each refinement makes the year-by-year projection reflect your situation more closely.