Worked answers to the decisions UK couples and families actually weigh up, and how CrestCast models them.
Three roll-ups that frame a topic, group the articles that answer it, and point at the calculators for the parts that are arithmetic.
Upsize, downsize, buy or rent, overpay, buy-to-let and solar. Eight guides and five calculators.
How much stays in cash, pension against ISA, and what a pot is worth by the date you need it.
A pay rise, four days a week, parental leave, a new baby and redundancy, worked through properly.
A debt-free date is the month the last balance reaches zero. How it is worked out, the five things that move it, and why a payment that looks big can still never get there.
Read more →What the FCA and the Treasury are proposing for open finance, what is law and what is not, and why a household forecast has good reason to want it to happen.
Read more →An AI can explain your numbers and help you enter them. It should not calculate them, invent them or tell you what to do with your money. Where the line sits, and a five-question test.
Read more →The Premium Bonds prize rate is an average, not a promise. What is tax-free, what is protected and what is guaranteed for Premium Bonds, a savings account and a credit union.
Read more →Plan 1 and Plan 4 interest is the lower of RPI and Bank Rate plus 1%. Plan 2, Plan 5 and Postgraduate follow RPI. What that means today, and when a rate cut would change the balance.
Read more →In most households one person keeps the money picture. How CrestCast lets the other see it without having to run it: one subscription, three settings, and what each one hands over.
Read more →A first meeting with a financial adviser is mostly questions. What they will ask, what to bring, and why a forecast of your own numbers makes the hour count.
Read more →The median British household holds about £293,700. It is meant to tell you where you stand. It cannot, and the only comparison with anything in it is against yourself.
Read more →Finfluencers and money speakers can genuinely get you moving, and motivation is real fuel. What no video can tell you is whether your household can afford the thing it is now motivated to do. On the difference between a story and a model.
Read more →The regulator's own research puts average adviser charges at 2.4% of the amount invested up front and 0.8% a year ongoing. What those percentages mean in pounds, who can actually get advice, and when it is genuinely worth paying for.
Read more →No published tax band says 60%, and yet between £100,000 and £125,140 each extra pound is taxed at an effective 62% once National Insurance is counted. Where the trap starts, what it does to a pay rise, and the one clean way out.
Read more →From 6 April 2027 the amount you can put into a cash ISA falls from £20,000 to £12,000 if you are under 65, and from around April 2028 the Lifetime ISA is proposed to be replaced by a First Time Buyer ISA. What is settled, what is still consultation, and what it changes if you hold either.
Read more →A mortgage is a bet that one employer keeps paying you. Modelled here: what a second salary is really worth, why two are often one, and what to do with only one.
Read more →Dropping to four days cuts your pay by a fifth, but your take-home by less, and for some households it unlocks childcare support worth more than the difference. The arithmetic, then the ten-year question.
Read more →CrestCast stops at ten years. The engine would run thirty, and the app used to offer it. Here is why we removed that option, and when you do need a longer view.
Read more →A forecast that lets your current account sink £28,000 into the red is not modelling your life. It is modelling someone who watches it happen and does nothing. Here is the rule that fixes it, what it actually costs, and the month it stops working.
Read more →Snoop, Emma, Plum, Monzo, YNAB, PocketSmith and the two that closed, on one question: do they tell you what you spent, or what you can afford next? Including what each of them does that CrestCast does not.
Read more →Emma is a strong tracker with bank feeds and subscription spotting. If what you actually need is an answer to "can I afford this", here is what changes and what you would give up.
Read more →Moneyhub switched its consumer app off on 31 July 2026. What happened to your data, what WPS LifeStage carries over, and how to replace the half you used.
Read more →Buy-to-let is sold as passive income. In reality it's a part-time business with thin, sometimes negative, rental yields. Most of the return is a leveraged bet on house prices. Here's the full picture, personal versus company.
Read more →Spending £7,000 on solar rarely adds £7,000 to your home's value. But that misses the point. The real return is a rising, tax-free cashflow, and cashflow is exactly what matters most in retirement.
Read more →There's no magic percentage. The right amount to invest is whatever's left after you've set aside an emergency fund and the money you'll actually need in the next few years. Here's how to work out that number for your own situation.
Read more →CrestCast projects your household's finances one to ten years out (the mortgage renewal, the new baby, the job change) using your real numbers, so you can see where your money is heading and test a decision before you make it.
Read more →A £3,000 raise sounds like £250 a month. A basic rate taxpayer keeps £180, a higher rate taxpayer £145, and someone in the 60% trap keeps just £95.
Read more →In real terms, £300 a month invested for five years is worth about £19,900. Over twenty years, about £110,000. The horizon does more than the vehicle.
Read more →On a 30-year mortgage with flat house prices, it takes about 18 years to own more of your home than the bank does. What moves that date, and by how much.
Read more →Open banking feeds are convenient, but they only ever show you the past. CrestCast is built entirely around numbers you enter yourself, which is what lets it answer questions your transaction history cannot.
Read more →Your income, debts, and net worth are about as sensitive as personal data gets. Here's exactly what happens to it once you enter it into CrestCast, and how it's kept private.
Read more →A forecast is arithmetic, assumptions and the figures you typed in, and each one fails differently. What each is worth over ten years, with the sums shown so you can check them.
Read more →In most couples, one person carries the financial knowledge. They know the mortgage rate, the pension contributions, what the joint account actually covers. This is why that's a risk, and what a shared model actually looks like.
Read more →Big financial decisions are usually made on gut instinct, because modelling the 'what if' by hand is tedious enough that nobody bothers. Here's how saving and comparing forecast versions changes that.
Read more →Most companies of any size run on three linked financial statements, updated together as one model. Here's what 'three-way' actually means, and why a household forecast needs the same structure to be worth anything.
Read more →The headline figures for raising a child in the UK are striking, but they offer surprisingly little help with planning. What actually matters is when the money goes out, and what it does to your monthly cashflow at each stage.
Read more →Statutory pay falls sharply after the first six weeks, and most families feel it. Here's how parental leave actually affects your income, and how to plan for the gap before it arrives.
Read more →Net worth gets treated as the score. Here is what one is actually made of, worked through, and why cashflow, profit and loss and net worth can each tell a different story about the same household.
Read more →The standard advice is three to six months of expenses in an emergency fund. For a household with a mortgage and one income doing most of the heavy lifting, that number often falls short. This is how to calculate your own.
Read more →Both are tax-efficient. Both build long-term wealth. But they work very differently, and the right priority depends on your employer, your tax rate, and how much flexibility you need.
Read more →Overpaying your mortgage reduces interest and builds equity faster. But it also locks money away in property. Whether it's the right move depends on what else that money could be doing.
Read more →Every loan repayment holds interest and capital, and only one builds your wealth. A £250,000 mortgage worked through year by year, with the total cost at different rates and terms.
Read more →A cash flow forecast and a profit and loss statement measure completely different things. Understanding the gap between profit and cash, and why a healthy P&L can still leave you short, is one of the most practically useful things you can learn about your finances.
Read more →A Junior ISA is a wonderful idea in principle: tax-free savings locked away for your child's future. But is it actually worth it? With limited money to go around, and your own ISA usually the better home for the same pound, the answer isn't as straightforward as it seems.
Read more →Downsizing is often framed as giving something up. But for many households it can release significant capital, cut monthly costs, and open up possibilities that a large house was quietly closing off.
Read more →Upsizing feels like progress. More space, a better location, room for the family to grow. But more property means more debt and a cashflow hit that can last years. Here's how to think it through properly.
Read more →Whether to buy or rent looks like a financial decision. For parents, it's really about stability and security, and sometimes the numbers alone won't give you the answer.
Read more →Most of us manage money by looking backwards. I built CrestCast to change that, bringing the same forward-looking tools that businesses rely on to your household.
Read more →