You can find a very wide range of financial calculators on the Internet. Many are designed for the North American market; with pricing in US dollars and the associated American tax rules applied. For the British user they are better than nothing, but they are far from perfect.

Here is a selection of our favourite online financial calculators and tools for your personal financial planning pleasure.

Pension Calculator

This tool, provided by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and Association of British Insurers (ABI) is a really neat way of working out how much income you might receive in retirement when you save in a pension plan.

After providing basic details (such as your date of birth and sex) you simply input a series of facts about your current earnings and the type of pension income you would like to get in the future. You can also enter details of any existing pension funds, to take these into account in the overall calculation.

Once you hit the calculate button, the system tells you what total monthly income you might expect to receive at your selected retirement age. It also provides projections showing the breakdown between the income your existing and future pension contributions might produce, what might happen if you saved a bit more and what might happen if you retired a bit later.

It also produces your results in graph format, which is more user friendly than a table of numbers. All in all, a great online calculator that should help you make some important decisions about pension funding for retirement income.

Mortgage Cost Calculator

This is another online calculator from the Financial Services Authority (FSA). It allows you to work out how much your monthly mortgage repayments are likely to be. You can use this calculator to work out what size mortgage you can afford, based on different interest rates.

To use this calculator you need to enter three bits of information – the mortgage amount, the number of years left on your mortgage and the mortgage interest rate. When you press the calculate button it will show you the monthly cost on an interest-only and capital repayment basis, enabling you to compare the two options.

You can then see what would happen if interest rates changed – if rates increased by anywhere from 1% to 5%. This is a great feature for understanding the risk of future interest rate increases. With the Bank Rate at a historic low of 0.5%, interest rates will go back up at some point in the future. Thinking ahead to these future rate increases should help you to prepare for the event rather than allowing it to come as a complete surprise.

Target Savings Calculator

If you have a particular savings goal, this online calculator from the Halifax can help you work out how much you will need to save each month.

You need to enter your savings target, length of time for which you want to save and the gross interest rate you will get on your savings. There is also an option to input a lump sum to get you started towards your savings target.

Once you press calculate, it tells you how much you need to save each month to reach your savings target. It breaks down the total amount saved between your actual savings and the interest earned on these savings.

This calculator asks you to use a gross interest rate, so you might want to adjust this to take off income tax at 20% or 40% depending on your level of earnings.

Financial Protection Tool

This online tool from unbiased.co.uk asks you seven simple questions before presenting some information about the different types of protection policies you might need to consider. This information is tailored to your personal needs, based on the answers you provide, which can help you to narrow down the areas in which you need to find out more.

The information provided about the different protection options is extremely well written, comprehensive and easy to understand. This tool would be a good starting point for anyone thinking about your financial protection options.

Income Tax Calculator

This is a nice, easy to use tool from Money Saving Expert that you can use to calculate your income tax, National Insurance contributions and resulting net pay. All you need to enter is your gross income and age. When you press calculate you are shown the total income tax you will pay in the tax year, how much you will take home each year or month.

There is a neat feature to compare this to previous tax years, going back as far as 1999/2000. This is really helpful to see how your income tax costs have changed over the years. There is a full breakdown (by week, month and year) showing your gross wage, taxable wage, tax paid, tax free, National Insurance and net wage.

Tax Waste Calculator

Another tool from unbiased.co.uk, the tax waste calculator asks you up to 16 simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions before giving you a very general figure of how much tax you could be wasting. Whilst this is a very basic tool, it should prompt you to take some action, particularly if the tax waste figure is high. By looking at the different questions being asked you should get some ideas for areas you could explore to save on tax.

Martin Bamford is site editor of BrilliantWithMoney and a Chartered Financial Planner at Informed Choice.

The small but important print: The calculators and tools mentioned, and links provided, in this post are for information only and do not constitute an endorsement of the providers or services mentioned. We can not take responsibility for any links to third-party websites.

DIY financial planning can replace the need for the services of a professional financial adviser. It can also reduce the costs involved, but never confuse cost and value. Doing your own financial planning using the various resources you can find online should come with a serious ‘wealth warning’.

Here are some of the things you can easily do yourself online, and some of the things you should definitely avoid.

1 – Keeping up to date with personal finance news

Frequently updated news is a 24/7 occurrence online. By the time traditional newspapers and magazines are available to buy in the shops, a financial news story is likely to have been reported and debated online for hours if not days.

With a greater frequency of reporting on financial stories, it becomes important to only use news sources you know and trust. The well established news agencies generally carry a very high standard of reporting. It makes real sense to read stories from the online journalists you would usually read in print.

The Internet enables everyone to become a journalist, and the rise of ‘citizen journalism’ can lead to potentially misleading stories being published online. No where is this more risky than in the world of financial journalism, where (rightly or wrongly) readers often rely on what is written to make decisions about their own finances.

2 – Comparing products and finding the best rates

One thing the Internet is great for is online price comparisons. Whether it is finding the most competitive interest rates for your savings or reducing the cost of your utility bills, there is a range of websites enabling you to do this research online. In many cases you can even implement the product directly from the price comparison website.

When using online price comparison sites, there are a number of important points to consider. Firstly, they can only ever display the cost of a product. Just because something is the cheapest does not necessarily make it the ‘best’ or actually suitable for your personal circumstances. Being able to identify the lowest cost financial product is one thing. Understanding how it might fit with your own financial plans is another thing entirely.

There have been questions raised in the past about the independence and coverage of some price comparison sites. When using them always keep in mind that they are typically paid a commission when you click through to buy a product.

Some product providers do not submit their details to price comparison sites, preferring instead to deal directly with consumers, so the results you get by using these online services is not always representative of the entire market.

3 – Checking valuations

The rise in popularity of online banking has reduced the burden on local bank branches. It is the ability to check your bank statement or make money transfers at 3am on a Saturday morning which has transformed the way we interact with our home finances using the Internet.

The technology behind online banking has long since been extended to cover a whole range of other financial products. It is now increasingly common to be able to check up on your investment and pension portfolio values at the click of a button.

Some financial product providers have taken things a step further by creating what we call ‘wrap’ platforms which enable you to hold a whole range of tax wrappers within a single administration platform. Doing this allows you to check one website to get instantly updated valuations on all of your financial holdings.

This ‘wrap’ technology is still in its infancy here in the UK , but well established and commonly used in the US and Australia . It is likely to become more popular here as more of us demand this sort of functionality for managing our financial plans.

4 – Arranging financial products or investments

The actual implementation of a financial product or investment has theoretically become easier due to the Internet. Because retail financial services in the UK operates within a heavily regulated framework, there are still some restrictions on the types of product you can implement yourself without the assistance of an approved financial adviser.

If you do not need financial advice to make investment decisions, it is possible to save money by doing your own implementation online. Various discount brokers offer preferential terms for investments transacted directly without the aid of an adviser.

Remember that if you implement investments or arrange financial products yourself, without advice, you receive less protection in the event of things going wrong. If the investment or product you select turns out to be unsuitable, there is little or no recourse for putting things right. Using a financial adviser to arrange things at least gives you that additional layer of protection.

It is also worth noting that it is not always cheaper to implement every financial product online. Some product providers are still very much geared up to transact business using the more traditional paper-based application method. Never assume that it is better value just because it is done online.

5 – Finding investment opportunities

This is one area of the Internet where things risk becoming quite dark and murky.

Because the Internet is a global entity and largely unregulated, more or less anyone can set up shop and attempt to entice novice investors into parting with their hard-earned cash. The Internet is awash with ‘get rich quick’ schemes and scams.

As a UK resident, the golden rule is to only ever invest money through someone who is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA). Always check the FSA Register at www.fsa.gov.uk to confirm they are a legitimate authorised adviser.

Another unfortunate use of the Internet is by so-called ‘boiler room’ scams who attempt to lend more credibility to their claims by setting up fake websites. It can be very difficult to tell the difference between a credible and fake financial website. The best approach here is to use your common sense and always follow the rule that if something appears too good to be true, it usually always is!

6 – Getting a second opinion on advice

In addition to news and information, there is a growing number of places on the Internet where you can ask questions and get answers about your financial planning. Again, this will never replace the services of a qualified financial adviser but it can be a good place to go for a second opinion if you are unsure of the advice you have received elsewhere.

Because these websites often take the form of a community environment, you might expect to receive a response from more than one source. This can serve as a useful backstop to ensure the accuracy of information provided or simply a way to get a more diverse set of opinions.

At all times keep in mind that these services provide information only and not advice. Financial advice in the UK can only ever be delivered in a regulated environment where the adviser first takes the time to properly understand your personal circumstances and objectives.

Martin Bamford is site editor at BrilliantWithMoney and a Chartered Financial Planner with Informed Choice.