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, with their pot carried forward to the target age you pick, 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. Give each child's account a monthly amount and a target age and CrestCast projects what it grows into, so “we should save for them” becomes a figure you can actually plan around. 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. That is a quiet risk, not a convenience, and it leaves the other making decisions from half a picture at exactly the wrong moment.

CrestCast is built for both parents to see the same forecast. You each keep your own login and link into one household, so the school-fees conversation, the second-car conversation and the house-move conversation all happen over the same numbers. 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 we built it that way.