When can I actually afford to stop working?

Almost everyone has asked it, and almost no one has a number they trust. "When can I retire?" usually gets answered with a shrug or a rule of thumb. Doughsense turns it into a specific, defensible date built from your own finances, and shows you what would move it.

The shape of the answer

Open the retirement journey and it walks you there one question at a time, starting from the numbers you already track:

• How much do you spend in a year? Your spending is the anchor, and it is prefilled from your plan rather than guessed.
• What will you spend in retirement? Keep your current spending, name a different amount, or pick a living standard.
• When were you born, and will you get the state pension? Age and state pension timing shape the whole path.
• When does your current path get you there? Before you change anything, you see the date your plan already lands on.
• When would you like to stop working? Pick the age you actually want, and the journey shows what stopping then takes: the monthly contribution that closes the gap becomes a lever you can drag until the date and the cost feel right.
• Which tax wrappers hold your pots, and which accounts fund it? Pensions, ISAs, and access ages are part of the answer, not an afterthought.

What you end up with

A projected date with the pot behind it, readable above inflation or including it, and the handful of levers that change it. The changes you stage in the journey are yours to keep: keep them and they become part of your real plan, not a throwaway scenario.

The maths behind it is the same engine we document openly, and you can stress-test the resulting plan with a Monte Carlo simulation to see how often it holds up across market history. You can read exactly how that works.