Pictures of Pensions 
Authors: Declan Naughton
Read the closeread article: Pictures of Pensions 🖼️ – Calc with Dec 🧮 🤓
Reproducible repo: posts/pictures-pensions/index.qmd · main · Declan Naughton / calcwithdec.dev · GitLab
Abstract
In this blog post I aimed to illustrate the value of compound interest, tax relief, and employer matching - really valuable features of pension saving (whenever they're applicable).
It starts with a simple visualization of a saving projection, and progressively introduces new features. I try to strictly change one thing at a time and guide the users attention with short narrative blocks.
Full Description
I aimed to illustrate the value of compound interest, tax relief, and employer matching: features of pension saving that are really valuable (whenever applicable).
A more complete interactive and visual pension calculator on calculang.dev includes all the features I want to show, but is complex to interpret. I used a closeread in my blog to guide the reader, and I start with a simple projection that I progressively update, with explanations in short narrative blocks.
The page brings together a few tools:
- calculang: used to describe/calculate saving projection values
- Vega to make the visualization, where a reactive runtime allows me to progressively update
- OJS and of course closeread - notably working together so that calculang input parameters and Vega signals can be conditioned on scroll progress
It's a highly declarative set of tools that I was very happy to bring together. I think closeread and narrative visualization generally points to very powerful ways to communicate about numbers and models - which is another thing I hope to be able to demonstrate with this post.