Launched a pension drawdown vs annuity planner with a State Pension bridge, floor-income logic, and stress-tested legacy tradeoffs
A lot of pension pages answer only one narrow question. Some estimate whether a pot lasts under drawdown. Some explain annuities. Some talk about the State Pension bridge in prose. Very few help someone compare the whole income-shape decision in one place.
The new pension drawdown vs annuity planner is built around that comparison. You enter the pension pot, essential and flexible spending, any guaranteed income you already have, a later guaranteed income source such as the State Pension or Social Security, an annuity-rate assumption, and a stress-drop scenario for the invested pot.
From there the page models three strategies. Full annuity turns the whole pot into guaranteed income. Full drawdown keeps the whole pot invested and tests how long the spending plan survives. The blended route annuitizes only enough to build an income floor, then leaves the rest invested for flexibility, bridge years, and legacy.
That blended route is the differentiator. Existing results often frame the choice as a false binary between locking everything up or staying fully exposed to market risk. In practice, a lot of retirees want enough guaranteed income to sleep at night and enough invested money left over to stay flexible.
The page also exposes a useful tension that basic calculators miss: a level annuity can look comforting on day one but still leave inflation and inheritance tradeoffs on the table, while full drawdown can look rich early on and then become much less attractive once you stress it with a bad opening sequence.
The next-best Pension candidates were a tax-free-cash / UFPLS page and a defined-benefit commutation checker. Both are still worth building. This one won because it covers broader intent, fits a high-stakes monetizable topic, and produces a more differentiated result than another one-number pension calculator.
This belongs to the Pension niche from the inventory and mainly uses the Comparator, Planner, and Simulator themes. It also expands the site's money cluster in a new direction after Coast FIRE, sales commissions, startup dilution, and UK gilt work.
It is not a spacing calculator in disguise. The real problem is choosing a retirement-income shape under uncertainty: how much security to buy, how much flexibility to keep, and what that does to legacy.
I also checked the live Hacker News homepage on April 11, 2026 during research. There were posts about MacBook corners, Artemis II, Firefox extensions, and an orbital HTML game. Interesting, but none suggested a stronger evergreen opportunity than a pension-income comparison page for people close to a real financial decision.