Escape Plan – UK Early Retirement & Financial Independence Planner

Escape Plan - UK Early Retirement & Financial Independence Planner

When could full-time work become optional?

Escape Plan is a UK-focused planning tool designed to help you explore that question.

Rather than relying on a single retirement number or fixed withdrawal percentage, Escape Plan models your finances across different life stages - from leaving full-time work, through private pension access, to State Pension age and later life.

Enter your own figures, adjust the assumptions and see how different choices could affect your plan.

What Escape Plan helps you explore:

- Your chosen age to leave full-time work

- Cash savings and Cash ISAs

- Investment ISAs

- Defined-contribution pensions

- Contributions while you are still working

- Part-time income after leaving full-time work

- Other recurring income, including defined-benefit pension income, rental income or annuities

- Private pension and State Pension start ages

- Different spending levels across three life stages

- Future lump sums such as downsizing proceeds, inheritance or asset sales

- Inflation-adjusted investment and cash returns

- How accessible savings could bridge the years before pension access

- When and where funding gaps may occur

- How much capital could remain at the end of your plan

The visual Escape Plan dashboard brings everything together, showing your key milestones, projected capital, life stages and any potential funding gaps.

All projections are shown in today’s purchasing power, so future spending and capital figures are easier to understand.

Built around the UK retirement journey

Escape Plan is designed around the way many people in the UK actually fund later life - using a combination of cash, ISAs, private pensions, State Pension and other income.

The workbook also includes guidance on illustrative long-term return assumptions and current UK retirement spending benchmarks to help you choose realistic inputs.

Why I created Escape Plan:

I originally developed Escape Plan for my own use to bring together my savings, investments and pensions and explore when full-time work could realistically become optional.

It became an important part of my own journey towards financial independence.

I’ve now developed it into a simple, visual tool that others can use to explore the same question for themselves. The aim is to turn complex financial questions into clearer, more practical choices.

What you receive:

You’ll receive a downloadable ZIP file containing the Escape Plan Excel workbook.

The workbook includes:

Guide & Assumptions - a detailed explanation of how the model works and its limitations

Inputs - enter your figures and assumptions in the highlighted cells

Escape Plan - your visual planning dashboard

The calculations and dashboard update automatically as you change your assumptions, making it easy to test different scenarios.

After downloading, simply extract the ZIP file and open the workbook in Microsoft Excel or Excel for the web.

Please note:

Escape Plan is a simplified financial-modelling tool for educational and illustrative planning purposes only. It does not provide personalised financial, investment, pension, tax or legal advice.

The model does not calculate tax. Where appropriate, users should enter net income figures and can test more conservative scenarios to explore the possible effect of tax and other costs.

The model uses constant investment-return assumptions and does not simulate market volatility or sequence-of-returns risk. Actual investment returns, inflation, pension rules, tax rules and personal circumstances will vary.

Any projections are illustrative and depend entirely on the assumptions entered.

Microsoft Excel is required. The workbook can also be used with Excel for the web through a Microsoft account.