Using Verdly

How milestone projections work

A plain-English guide to Verdly's milestone projections: what the projection is, how to read the chart, and the method behind the likely-range band and the projected date.

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When you set a milestone, Verdly does more than track how close you are today. Once you have enough history, it projects: it reads how your money has been moving and estimates when you’re likely to reach your target, and how confident it can be about that. It isn’t a promise, just an honest best guess that sharpens every time you record a snapshot.

What a projection is

A projection is an informed estimate of where your milestone is heading, based on your own recent history. It is not a prediction of the future and not a promise. Markets move, life changes, and Verdly can only see what you’ve recorded. What it can do is take your recent trend and show you a most likely path, along with a sense of how much that path could vary.

Every projection updates as you record more snapshots. The more history you build, the more Verdly has to work from, and the steadier the estimate becomes.

The four statuses

Each milestone carries one of four statuses, shown alongside its progress bar:

  • Achieved: you’ve reached the target.
  • On track: your recent trend is heading towards the target, so Verdly shows an estimated date, such as “around March 2029”.
  • Not on track: on your current trend, the target isn’t in reach, so there’s no date to show.
  • Insufficient data: there isn’t enough history yet to project. Record a few more snapshots and a projection will appear.

Reading the projection chart

For a milestone that’s on track, Verdly draws a chart of its journey. Every part of it means something:

A milestone projection chart. A solid line shows recorded net worth climbing from roughly £87,000 to £104,000 over a year, filling only the first sixth of the chart because the remaining width covers five more years. From that point a dashed line, the most likely path, continues upward inside a shaded band that fans out wider the further ahead it goes, until it meets a dashed £250,000 target line at a marker labelled around August 2031.
An on-track milestone with a £250,000 target. The solid line is recorded history; the dashed line is the most likely path; the shaded band is the 80% likely range; and the marker is where the most likely path meets the target.
  • The solid line is your recorded history: the actual figures from your snapshots, up to today.
  • The dashed line is the projection: the single most likely path from where you are now towards your target.
  • The shaded band is the likely range around that path. Rather than betting on one exact outcome, it shows the spread of where you could reasonably end up. Notice how it fans out the further ahead it looks: near-term estimates are tighter, distant ones less certain.
  • The dashed horizontal line is your target.
  • The marker is the point where the most likely path meets your target: the projected date.

Because a projection is an estimate, the headline date is shown as a range too, for example “around March 2029, typically between October 2028 and August 2029”. The range is the honest version of the answer: a spread, not a single promised day. It widens with distance, so a target a decade out carries a range measured in years, not weeks.

For the curious: how it’s worked out

You don’t need any of this to use projections. But if you’d like to know what’s happening behind the chart, here’s the idea in plain terms.

It learns from your own history

Verdly looks at your last twelve months of snapshots and measures how your value has changed from one period to the next: your own rhythm of saving, growth and the occasional setback. It doesn’t assume a textbook rate of return; it uses your pattern.

It imagines many possible futures

From that pattern, Verdly plays your recent history forward around a thousand times over. Each run reshuffles your own ups and downs into a different plausible sequence, and each one also sets off at its own pace: a year of snapshots tells Verdly roughly how fast you’re moving, not exactly, so some runs go a little quicker than your recent average and some a little slower. That gives a thousand possible futures rather than one tidy guess.

  • The most likely path (the dashed line) is the middle of all those futures.
  • The likely range (the shaded band) covers the middle 80% of them: eight in ten land inside it.

The band widens with distance for both reasons at once. Month-to-month ups and downs even out over time, but a small difference in pace keeps compounding: if your real rate is a little above or below what the last year suggests, a month’s head start becomes a year’s over a decade. So the further ahead the chart looks, the wider the range — and a steady record earns a tighter one than a lumpy record does, because consistency is evidence about your pace.

Very distant targets show a trajectory, not a date

Some targets are a long way off. Beyond about fifteen years, a precise date would be false precision: too much can change in between. So instead of pinning a date, Verdly shows your trajectory: where your current pace is taking you, without claiming to know exactly when a far-off number arrives.

A milestone projection chart for a very distant target. A short solid history line near the bottom left gives way to a dashed most likely path that climbs steeply inside a widening shaded band, reaching roughly £385,000 by 2041. There is no target line and no date marker, because the target is beyond a reliable projection window.
A target that's beyond the projection window. There's no dated marker. Instead, the chart shows the trajectory your current pace is on, with the same widening likely range.

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