If you've ever tried to answer "am I actually going to be okay financially," you've probably hit the same wall: every tool only sees part of the picture. A pension calculator doesn't know about your mortgage. A budgeting app doesn't know about your ISA. A mortgage-overpayment calculator doesn't know what your investments are doing. You're left mentally stitching together four browser tabs and hoping the seams line up.
Aldra's starting premise is simple: your retirement, your net worth, your property, and your debt are not separate problems. They're one balance sheet. Treat them as one, and the answer gets both more accurate and far less effort to maintain.
01Everything goes into one simulation
Rather than running separate tools for separate accounts, Aldra builds a single model of your finances and simulates it forward — thousands of times, accounting for market uncertainty, not just a single best-guess number.
What goes in:
- Investments — ISA, LISA, SIPP, GIA, cash, each modelled with the UK tax rules that actually apply to it, not a relabelled US account
- Workplace pension — including your employer's contribution, shown as its own clear line rather than buried in a single combined balance
- Property — your home, and any other property, as a real asset with its own growth assumption
- Debt — your mortgage, modelled with real amortisation, plus any other loans or balances
- The State Pension and the bridge to it — what you can draw before pension access age, and what changes once it unlocks
Because all of it sits in one model, Aldra can answer questions none of the single-purpose tools can — like whether paying down your mortgage faster or investing the difference actually leaves you better off at retirement, given your specific tax position and timeline. Not a generic rule of thumb. Your numbers.
02Built to be easy to keep current
The honest failure mode of most "comprehensive" finance tools is that they ask too much of you. Categorise every transaction. Link every account. Spend twenty minutes a week maintaining a spreadsheet that quietly rots the moment life gets busy.
Aldra deliberately doesn't do that. You're not logging every coffee. You're updating a handful of account balances — investments, property value, debt balances — whenever it's convenient. A few minutes, every few months, is enough to keep the picture meaningfully accurate. The simulation does the heavy lifting; you just feed it current numbers.
03Your estate, tracked over time — not just a snapshot
A single projection, run once, tells you something. A net worth that you can watch evolve over months and years tells you a lot more — whether you're actually on the trajectory the simulation predicted, or whether something's drifted and the plan needs revisiting.
Every time you update your numbers, Aldra keeps the snapshot, building a real history: your net worth over time, broken into what it's made of — investments, property, debt — so you can see not just the total but *why* it moved. Markets had a bad quarter? You'll see exactly how much that cost you, and how much the simulation still thinks the plan holds despite it.
This is the difference between "checking your number once a year in a panic before Self Assessment" and actually understanding the shape of your own financial life as it happens.
04Why this is hard to get right — and why most tools don't bother
It would be easier to build four separate, shallow tools than one that's genuinely correct end to end. That's most of why the market looks the way it does:
- US retirement planners are deep on simulation but don't understand ISAs, SIPPs, or LISAs — they're built around 401(k)s and Roth IRAs, and the UK tax treatment gets approximated, badly.
- Free UK calculators get the accounts right but stop at a single, shallow projection — no real stress-testing, no property or debt in the picture, nothing you can keep or export.
- Budgeting apps are excellent at day-to-day spending and useless at the question "will this actually work out" — and they need your bank linked in to function at all.
Aldra exists because none of those three were willing to do the harder, less glamorous work of modelling the whole picture correctly — UK tax rules, property, debt, and a real simulation — in one place, without asking for your bank login to do it.
05Nothing hidden in the maths
Every number Aldra shows you can be opened up and read — the exact formula, the exact figures it used, the exact UK tax rule applied at each step. When the rules change (and they do, most tax years), the rates live in a plain config file you can edit yourself. No black box, no "trust us."
Want to know when this is ready to try?
Aldra is in active development. Leave your email and you'll hear from us once — when there's something to actually run on your own numbers.
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