🇳🇿 New Zealand · Illustrative scenario

A retirement number that had never actually been calculated

A couple in their mid-career years, 45 — Auckland, New Zealand

This is an illustrative scenario, not a real customer or testimonial. It's a composite built to show how the tools apply to a realistic situation in New Zealand — the persona and exact figures aren't a specific real person's data.

The situation

A rough sense of "we should be saving more for retirement" with no actual target number, current trajectory, or gap calculated — the retirement plan existed as a feeling, not a figure.

The approach

Set a concrete target retirement income and horizon, and let the projected-corpus and required-corpus figures do the comparing instead of a vague instinct. Ran a downside scenario (a lower assumed return) alongside the base case to see how much the gap widened under a more conservative assumption.

The outcome

Found the base-case trajectory was closer to on-track than expected, but the conservative scenario showed a real gap — prompting a specific, calculated increase to the monthly contribution rather than an open-ended "save more" resolution.

Tools used

Goal planning
Scenario comparison (conservative/base/optimistic)

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