Pigly: A Financial Calculator Review

During this pandemic, we have been forced to look more closely at our finances. Seeing that we’re not traveling as much, we realized that we are saving much more. We’re not paying as much for gas to get to work, spontaneous travels, nor on weekly restaurant treats. In fact, we are actually optimizing our finances more.

Given these new financial data from the pandemic, we decided to look for an online financial calculator and stumbled upon this website called Pigly. After all, one has to constantly review their finances if one wants to achieve financial independence.

A Review of Pigly’s Financial Calculators

Being the lover of all things cute and cuddly, one thing that made the most impression on me is the cute mascot – it is a pink piggy-bank. Sometimes the piggy is reading a paper, sometimes it’s just standing there, and there’s other hand-drawn piggies doing human stuff it’s actually quite cute. I’ve included a few here, taken from Pigly’s website. Anyway, this review is not about the mascot but on to the financial calculators.

The first thing I tried is the retirement calculator. One thing that comes to mind is that there are no commas in between the thousand mark, so it’s hard to know if one actually mistypes something. That’s a small pet peeve, as typing all the 0s can be annoying. Then again other people calculate per thousands so to each their own.

Another annoying thing about the calculator is that there are no formal definitions or information on a specific text field. What if you don’t know what it means (i.e. what is the expected rate of inflation – it would be helpful if there was a link to define what inflation was, to those who are not aware of it).

The Good Side of the Calculator

One thing we love about the calculator is that it’s 100% free – there’s no ads, no emails required, nothing. All you have to do is plot the numbers and it will generate the end product for you on the website itself.

Back to the retirement calculator: we used it to check if we’re on track to FIRE at 45 years with 2 children and with the amount of savings invested right now. With their calculator, without inflation, yes, we are on track. However, with inflation, we would need much more than the 4% rule.

For reference, we put in an average of a 7% return (conservative as not all our investments are on stocks) and we put in a yearly inflation rate of 3% – net of 4%, if you think loosely on the percentages.

While the retirement calculator can’t exactly be used for FIRE purposes, it at least gives a rough idea on how much one would need to retire based on their annual yearly expenses. I would take the numbers provided like any other financial calculators out there: ultimately how much money one needs to retire is based on the annual yearly expenses spent.

I would not put in the leanest number – like just to pay for the basics, but pad it up. Like everything else, crap happens and one doesn’t want to run out of money for that. If you’re part of a partnership or a marriage, consider if one partner also wants to FIRE early. One may want to keep working until the actual retirement age, and so healthcare insurance may not be an issue if one opts to stay within the US with this arrangement.

One can also look for alternate options (hello going abroad) to cover healthcare an have a more sound retirement number. Seriously, I’m always paranoid with our retirement number because of medical expenses seeing how expensive it is in certain countries – case and point, if you’re not employed in the US or the Philippines, you’ll have to pay for your medical bills out of pocket, and that’s a super scary thought.

But anyway, can one really still FIRE early during this pandemic? (Spoiler alert: we still think so)!

There are still so many calculators in the website – we got a bit confused with the refinancing calculator so gave it up right now until we get an actual rate from a lender, but we will go back and see if it is useful for us before we acquire another REI or refinance our mortgage.

Other Random Stuff

Since i like looking through a website to see what else they have, I also saw that Pigly has games (GAMES!!) – they run even on my work computer and some of them are very easy. Of course they’re just games and eat up your time, but it is a good sanity break after pouring through numbers and staring intently at your screen for hours at a time (i.e. while working).

Overall Thoughts

Overall, I would think Pigly is a cute and functional website. If they would fix some of the pet peeves I mentioned above, it would be great. While their site is calculator-oriented, it would help if there were more detailed instructions on how to use the calculator and where to source information (like annual inflation rates), or even a simple definition of what inflation is as an add-on.