You save £1,800 a month, you have £95,000 in ISAs, and you want to know whether you can stop work at 50. PocketGuard will not answer this. Delphina will. Here is why.
PocketGuard is a budgeting app. It does not have a retirement calculator, a FIRE number, or a projection of any kind. You can track your monthly savings and your spending, and you can set a savings goal with a target date, but the goal is treated as a generic number rather than a retirement target with withdrawal modelling.
If FIRE is your goal, PocketGuard can tell you what you spent last month and how much you saved. It cannot tell you whether the savings rate gets you to the goal. You would need a separate retirement calculator to fill the gap.
Delphina calculates your FIRE number as 25 times your real annual spending. It then projects forward using your actual savings rate and expected returns on a UK asset mix, and gives you the date you reach the number. State Pension income from age 67 is built in as a deduction from the required portfolio, which lowers the target by around £314,000 for a single person reaching State Pension age.
For a UK saver with £95,000 in ISAs and £1,800 a month going in, Delphina gives a specific projection: at your current pace and a 5% real return, you reach your number in 14 years and 7 months, age 51. If you want age 50, you need £2,400 a month or a 6.5% real return. You can adjust the levers and watch the date shift.
FIRE is a multi-decade compounding question. It depends on your savings rate over 15-25 years, your expected return, the order in which you draw from ISAs and pensions, and your State Pension timing. None of these inputs are visible in a budgeting app, even a good one.
You can use PocketGuard to optimise your monthly spending and improve your savings rate. That is genuinely useful. But the FIRE question itself, "when can I stop work?", needs a tool that models compounding withdrawal over decades. PocketGuard is the wrong shape for that job.
Add up your real annual spending for the last 12 months from your bank statements and multiply by 25. That is your FIRE number today, before any tool. Connect Delphina this week to get the date and to see exactly which lever moves it fastest.