Financial planning for families, years ahead of the bills

Most money apps plan for one person. A family is not one person. CrestCast adds up every income, bill, saving and debt across the household into one cashflow, one profit and loss and one net worth, then lets you add each child on top: an account with a monthly amount, a target age, and the value projected forward in today's money as well as future pounds.

Each child then has their own view, and the ten-year forecast holds the whole household in one picture beside it. It is the difference between hoping the numbers work and watching them.

For most working families the largest cost of a young child is childcare, and it can rival or beat the mortgage. It is also front-loaded into the years your income is often most stretched. CrestCast lets you set nursery fees as a temporary bill that starts and ends on real dates, so the childcare cliff shows up as a shape on the chart rather than a shock on the statement.

You can layer the rest of it in too: the cost of a new baby, a stretch of maternity or paternity leave, and a parent dropping to four days. Related reading: how much a child actually costs and what parental leave does to your finances.

Putting something aside for the children is easy to intend and hard to size. Because each account carries a monthly amount and a target age, “we should save for them” comes back as a figure you can plan around rather than an intention. Noah is younger, so his pot has longer to run and ends higher.

If you are weighing where that money should live, our guide on whether to open a Junior ISA walks through the trade-offs, and the savings goal calculator works out the monthly amount to hit a target by a date.

In a lot of families the money knowledge sits with one person: they know the mortgage rate, the pension, what the joint account really covers. CrestCast does not ask the other parent to take all of that on. Each of you keeps your own login, linked into one household, so the whole picture is there for both of you to read, and nothing about what is coming rests on one person remembering to pass it on. And reading is exactly what a new invite covers: a partner starts with viewing access, free to explore every shared number and chart with nothing they tap able to change the shared plan, and their own details still theirs to edit. If you would both rather keep the plan up to date, viewing and editing is one setting away, yours to change at any time.

That changes what the money conversations cost. School fees, the second car, the house move: instead of one of you rebuilding it all from memory at the kitchen table, you open the forecast, show the path and decide. Busy families get from question to answer in minutes. Here is why both partners need the same picture, and if it is just the two of you for now, the page for couples covers the same ground without the children.

One subscription covers the whole family, however many children you add. Your partner is covered by yours, so planning together never costs twice.

CrestCast also never connects to your bank. You decide what it knows, and nothing goes in unless you put it there, which matters more, not less, when a single plan holds your whole family's finances. Here is why I built it that way.