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

You do not need a spreadsheet or a wizard to hold your hand. You build the answer from pieces Doughsense already gives you:

• Start with your position. Add your income, expenses, savings, investments, and pensions. This becomes the projection everything else builds on.
• Find your number. Your financial-independence target is your annual expenses multiplied by 25, the figure behind the 4% rule. Doughsense keeps it live as your spending changes.
• See the date. Set a retirement or financial-independence milestone and the projection shows when your plan crosses the line at your chosen growth and contribution assumptions.
• Stress-test it. A Monte Carlo simulation replays your plan against decades of market history and tells you how often it holds up, so the date is not just a best-case line. You can read exactly how that works.
• Ask what moves it. The solver works backwards from the goal, so you can see trade-offs like "an extra £140 a month brings it forward three years."

What you end up with

Not a single fragile number, but a picture: the earliest realistic date, how confident you can be in it, and the handful of levers that change it. You can keep that as a named plan, set it as a milestone, or adjust and try again.

The maths behind it is the same engine we document openly, so you can see how every figure was reached.