[HN Gopher] Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
Author : scubakid
Score : 396 points
Date : 2021-04-28 13:35 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (projectifi.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (projectifi.io)
| [deleted]
| skronch wrote:
| Is there a way to specify the % of income that is allocated to
| cash holdings vs. investments? The modeller seems to assume that
| I will keep all future income as cash, which seems unrealistic.
| scubakid wrote:
| The way it currently works, the simulation uses income in a
| given year to cash-flow expenses for that year, and the rest is
| allocated according to the items you configure in the Financial
| Goals section. As a simple example, you could define a desired
| emergency fund of $20k as priority #1, then maximized taxable
| investments as priority #2... which would mean in any given
| year, money left over after expenses goes to (A) topping off
| the emergency fund if needed, then (B) to taxable investments.
| Does that help add some clarity?
| knoebst wrote:
| I wanted to like it but I live in the EU and it's too focused on
| dollars.
| scubakid wrote:
| Good point. Currently it's tailored more towards the US, but
| I'm hoping to find time to add features for other locations.
| That said, the idea of supporting every tax system out there is
| probably a bridge too far, but simple things like being able to
| switch currencies seems quite doable.
| mmastrac wrote:
| I'd pay for a self-hosted version of this, although I'm in Canada
| and it would require a bunch of different integrations and tax
| calculations. I imagine there are plenty of folks like me in the
| states.
|
| Heck, I'd pay for a secure little RPi in a box running this
| software.
|
| I can't give my financial passwords to anyone else at all - most
| of my accounts specifically disclaim any responsibility for
| losses if I give my passwords out.
| evnc wrote:
| This is really nice to use and well-designed!
|
| One feature request: spouses / joint incomes. Obviously my
| financial picture looks very different if I include my partner's
| income and assets than if I just include my own, but my partner
| is a different age than me, so if I just add it up and act like
| I'm one person who makes our combined household income, it's not
| going to be quite accurate.
| joshgel wrote:
| Similarly, the ability to share with another account, so that
| my spouse can also poke around and create models based on our
| base case.
| thatmikefellow wrote:
| Kicking the tires, here's a quick piece of product feedback:
|
| It seems like the "Stacked Financial Breakdown" chart actually
| _adds_ your level of debt on as just another stacked layer, as if
| it were an asset.
|
| I don't think that makes much sense - with this representation,
| if next year I take on $1M of debt to buy $1M in assets, then my
| financial breakdown curve jumps by $2M.
|
| Ideally you'd subtract off debt so that you could easily read off
| net worth from the chart, but that's not easily compatible with a
| stacked-chart representation (I don't know how you'd visually
| represent "negative stacks").
|
| I'd suggest instead you just take debt off that chart, which
| would make you at least able to read off "total assets under
| management" from it.
| scubakid wrote:
| That's a good point. My initial thought process with it was to
| stack the datasets so that everything underneath debt
| contributes to your net worth, with debt at the top "weighing
| it down" so to speak. You can also click the debt checkbox in
| the legend to hide that dataset from the plot. Still, your
| point stands that the stacked chart doesn't quite visualize the
| negative effect that debt has on net worth. Do you prefer the
| "Net Worth Over Time" plot?
| rafael09ed wrote:
| I had to create a small simulator[0] a few months ago to figure
| out my personal finances for my first job and to figure out how
| early I could move out without acquiring debt. I wanted to
| compare different options so I could weigh the impact of my
| decisions on how much money I could save.
|
| I like the idea of plans but they feel a bit bulky to use and you
| can't compare them. If you could directly compare plans against
| each other I think I would find it more useful. Also making them
| faster to create could be nice. I can change all the defaults in
| the actual view so why force me to go through the pages?
|
| I do like the stacked breakdown of each plan and the behind the
| scenes calculation of taxes, investing and inflation.
|
| [0]:
| https://gist.github.com/Rafael09ED/61568afa8a2308b53917915ee...
| udev wrote:
| What is a good offline alternative?
|
| I hear Excel, but one needs also to know how an what to compute.
| Any books/guides in that sense?
| vallas wrote:
| Who in the hell use options Just buy Bitcoin Or stay poor
| holoduke wrote:
| Just out of curiousity, Would you become really a happy person
| when you become so much focused on financials, investments,
| growth, independence etc I wonder. I personally have a good
| income. But I do not invest at all. I hate it. I just spend
| whatever I think is possible and needed for a happy today. And so
| far money is something I barely have to think about. I see so
| much people around me busy with cryptos. Busy with stock markets.
| And they always talk and dream about the future. Live a life
| today I always tell them.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| You have the right attitude. No, I don't believe anyone gets
| really into growing their money because they're satisfied with
| their life. It's a coping mechanism.
|
| However we live in a world where you need to invest at least a
| little bit. If you can spend 15 minutes at the start of each
| new job setting up your 401k to 15-20% of your salary, in a
| target-date fund, you will never have to think about investing
| ever again.
| ksubedi wrote:
| Well that strategy works, till it doesn't. There is a
| difference between being rich and being wealthy, and that is
| sustainability of wealth. You can live your life and still
| contribute to long term wealth growth. What if you need to pay
| for some big unexpected expense, like your pet getting sick or
| you getting in an accident? Without proper financial backbone,
| even one of those type of incidents can throw you off and take
| you down the rabbit hole of catching up with debt.
|
| "It's Not What You Make that Matters; It's What You Save." -
| Somebody
| neogodless wrote:
| There are lots of ways to live your live, and achieve some
| happiness, either now, ongoing, or merely in the future.
|
| It sounds like you found one method that creates some measure
| of happiness for you, right now. Will anything in your future
| change the variables so that you have to adapt? What will your
| options be then?
|
| Now, your premise here is "so much focused" or to reword,
| "intently focused" on growing wealth for the purposes of
| financial independence. If you start with that premise, there
| might a a corresponding decrease or minimization of competing
| focuses, including "what makes you happy in the present."
|
| If you shift the premise a bit to more of a Pareto Principle
| approach of "do at least the 20% you need to plan for your
| future, and get 80% of the benefit", you might see things a
| little differently. Extremes don't make for good arguments, but
| they can be illustrative. If you feel like you have to spend
| "everything" you have, and invest "nothing" then any break in
| your income stream will instantly crush everything that you
| currently use to make you happy. If, on the other hand, you
| find that you can be really quite happy while spending 75% and
| investing the other 25%, you might find that over time, you've
| been happy all along, and you've gained a resilience to
| changing life circumstances as well, and increased your options
| for what you are required to do, and what you can choose to do.
|
| As for just "investing" or "not investing", the common wisdom
| is that simple savings will tend to lose value when adjusted
| for inflation. You do not need to become "busy with cryptos" to
| invest, though. You can simply think long-term, buy broad total
| market index funds, and stop thinking about those investments
| almost instantly. It does not take focus. You don't have to go
| all the way down the rabbit hole to intently focus on what you
| might consider absolutely optimizing your investments. It's
| quite unlikely to pay off, so take a simpler path.
| ketralnis wrote:
| Just a point of feedback on the UI. When I switch between the
| "official" and the alternative plans, you reset all of the UI
| elements like which graph is active and the time period and what
| UI elements have been collapsed or hidden and which year's
| breakdown is currently visible. That makes it very difficult to
| quickly switch between them to visually see what the actual
| changes are which is the only reason I'd set up multiple plans.
| I'm sure you put a lot of work into the animations but those also
| detract from this. For the same reason I'd also like to be able
| to pin the left sidebar (whether collapsed or uncollapsed doesn't
| matter, but in any case not jumping around every time I click
| something)
| scubakid wrote:
| Those are good insights, thanks! I'll work on that.
| finniananderson wrote:
| Love it, subscribed with the 60% off. Fantastic & beautiful tool,
| can't wait to see how much it grows.
|
| I second multiple currencies, I'm in NZ and would love the tax
| and stuff to work itself automatically but appreciate the
| enourmous overheads for doing that.
|
| Found a bug: changing the "Maximum Value" field for a house
| affects all other houses.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks so much! I'll look into that.
| disambiguation wrote:
| very cool app, appreciate that i could click through without
| making an account!
|
| two features i'd like to see off the top of my head
|
| * i know privacy is important for a lot of folks -- but it would
| be cool if graphs / plans were shareable. I'm interested what the
| rest of you are up to :)
|
| * action items for how to steer your current plan to a "better"
| plan. The app is currently like a hand-held map that shows me the
| lay of the land, but I want google maps which recommends ideal
| routes.
| Dave_Rosenthal wrote:
| Nice start, onboarding needs lots of work.
|
| My suggestion: have the users start with the big hitters (house,
| income, savings) and then add more and more. Users could see the
| model change as they go and the onboarding process itself would
| become informative as they see the effect of their various
| assets, 401Ks, asset sales plans, etc.
|
| You also really need monte carlo simulation to elevate this far
| above 'pretty version of my excel spreadsheet' into 'powerful
| financial planning tool' category.
|
| Lastly, there is one always overlooked part of retirement
| planning which is that spending plans should not be set-in-stone.
| For example, if you plug "spend X per year" into a monte-cargo
| retirement calculator to get a 95% chance of not running out of
| money you will need to have a lot. But, if you are willing to
| adopt a spending policy of 'spend X per year unless there is a
| stock market crash, in which case spend .75X for three years' you
| will need a lot less. If you are willing to modulate your
| spending in response to events you can be comfortable with a lot
| less.
| scubakid wrote:
| These are excellent suggestions, thanks for the thoughtful
| feedback. For onboarding, I initially tried a version of what
| you suggested, but in usability tests many felt there was too
| much on the screen. Perhaps now it is too minimal though --
| I'll think about how to find a better middle ground.
|
| You're spot-on about the need for Monte Carlo simulations. A
| robust Monte Carlo mode with a variety of variables you can
| control is the next development priority.
|
| And great point on flexible expense plans. I'll consider how to
| build some (hopefully) intuitive UI widgets to allow for that
| in the Monte Carlo mode.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| I remember seeing something similar geared towards financial
| independence here: https://www.fireleap.com
| torstenvl wrote:
| This looks interesting but I think it is still a little bespoke.
| A feature request would be to add an anticipated pension, since
| that has a major effect on how much you need to put into a
| retirement savings account.
| vcavallo wrote:
| is "bespoke" the term you mean to use here?
| quercusa wrote:
| It's a British-ism, and not that uncommon.
| vcavallo wrote:
| Yep, I know the word, and agree it's not uncommon.
|
| My point was that user to whom I replied seems to be using
| it in a generally negative way.
|
| > looks interesting but I think it is still a little
| bespoke
|
| As if "bespoke" is the opposite of "interesting" or
| othwerwise a counterpoint to a good review. As I understand
| the word "bespoke", it carries no negative nor positive
| charge - just means "made individually to order", which
| seems irrelevant to this app.
| Ruthalas wrote:
| I think the parent was trying to express that the app
| seemed designed for a specific demographic, and didn't
| generalize as well as it could. (And they therefore
| suggested a feature that would help it function well for
| a broader audience.)
| vcavallo wrote:
| fair enough
| torstenvl wrote:
| Yes, that is how it was intended.
| nwsm wrote:
| Two digits of precision on interest rates would be nice!
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| This is really well done. First, I've been using the same Excel
| spreadsheet since 1992 to create a one-panel view of financial
| modeling and you've captured everything I've put into it over the
| years. Second, there is a lot of state information in this
| website, I'm impressed: its nontrivial to get right. That said, I
| didn't fuzz it, but I'm sure you've got it down.
|
| Lastly I like how it eases the user in: it asks basics, then
| funnels to specifics. That makes it less intimidating.
|
| Sorry to be "that guy" but I've been using my Excel for ~30 years
| and it has been solid so I doubt I would use this, but I think it
| might be a great starting point for youngin's who haven't thought
| about this yet.
| ixacto wrote:
| This app wants you to sign in and change the color scheme before
| using. This is not good UX, it should be more like
| https://www.firecalc.com/ where you just type some numbers and
| hit "go". Not everything needs a google/fb/clever login.
| jakubp wrote:
| That's not accurate. You actually type numbers in right after
| the color choice and it shows you chart of the projection etc.
| No login necessary.
| dkobia wrote:
| I ran through it and it is pretty impressive. Good work!
| ed312 wrote:
| Looks fantastic. I entered some close to real numbers and found
| the flow fairly easy. I specifically like the edge-case prompts
| ("you didn't enter mortgage/rent, are you sure?"). In that case I
| just entered an average monthly total expenses, but I like the
| checks. The graphs at the end are nice. Something like a toast
| for "congrats your goals are probably going to happen" might be
| good.
| cddotdotslash wrote:
| This is really excellent work! I love the UI and the data points
| feel very complete but not overly detailed (it took me only about
| 15 minutes to enter everything and get to the projection charts).
|
| Contrary to many other commenters here, I don't mind that this is
| a hosted service. In fact, I _don't_ want to download an
| application for this. If users are concerned they can just use a
| burner email address.
| chank wrote:
| I do this already in excel.
| dangoor wrote:
| Looks nice on the surface. One request for the promo site part of
| things:
|
| One thing I _always_ look for in a SAAS is a "pricing" page,
| because prices are all over the map on these sorts of things and
| I want to know if I think the price is reasonable before I jump
| in.
| davidu wrote:
| Really great v1 -- nice job. Ignore the haters.
| JeanSebTr wrote:
| There's something weird going on with the mortgage calculation
| when configuring the house's value.
|
| When I set it to 0, I'm paying the mortgage way faster than
| should be possible, when I set it to anything meaningful, I'm
| bankrupt in one year!
| scubakid wrote:
| Very interesting. Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out!
| Graffur wrote:
| Damn bankrupt by 38
| lowercased wrote:
| it wasn't clear to me that 'debt' was not the same as 'mortgage'.
| I entered 'debt', then a couple steps later, the 'asset' of house
| had a 'mortage' box below. this also doesn't account for second
| mortgages, but you're likely aware of this.
|
| nice job overall...
| 12ian34 wrote:
| Love the idea, enjoyed the interface, but I feel my time was
| wasted when I only found out the US focus several clicks into the
| flow. Speaking as someone not from the US, I do wish more
| websites didn't just assume that all their traffic was coming
| from the US. You could alleviate this by having a flag on the
| home page saying "This is really more for Americans only".
| scosman wrote:
| You can also just check browser locale, show a warning if != US
| as early setup step. Offer to take their email and tell them
| when more countries are added (and capture all the traffic to
| reactivate later).
| mudita wrote:
| Maybe I am mistaken about this, but I think the "browser
| locale" shows the preferred languages, not where the user
| lives. As such it would be the wrong information to use for
| this. For example, I am German and live in Germany, but my
| browser locale is en-US.
| monkeydust wrote:
| Also this, from UK.
| yardie wrote:
| As a former American expat, I felt this deeply. A lot of the
| online financial analysis tools, like Mint, looked cool. But
| since they had a US focus and I was not in the US I couldn't
| take advantage of any of them. And once GDPR came into effect I
| was effectively locked out of any of them.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. I would love to add better
| generalization for international use; so far it's just been out
| of scope for a solo dev to account for all the intricate tax
| rules that differ from country to country. If you have further
| suggestions though on additional features that might help to
| start bridging that gap, feel free to shoot an email to
| projectifi.io@gmail.com!
| freddymilkovich wrote:
| Im less concerned about data provacy for this one for whatever
| reason, but im having issues with it saving really off numbers.
| like ive input a 400$/ month payment in and its showing in a plan
| as like $4800 / month and this is with nearly all the data. its
| got me paying out like 380,000$ this year alone...? i dont even
| have a fraction of that debt anywhere.... what even.... is going
| on here... it says im underwater by like 200k+ . my net worth is
| -40k for sure, but def not -200k.
| scubakid wrote:
| I had trouble finding a good FI planning and simulation tool that
| could model things in enough detail to finally ditch my
| spreadsheets... so I built one.
|
| Would love it if any of you want to try it out. It does not
| involve linking any accounts and almost all the functionality is
| free. And if anyone wants to become a beta tester for the few
| premium features, you can use coupon code BETA-6001 for 60% off
| :)
|
| https://projectifi.io/
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| I love the website, (it actually helps a lot). I think there
| should be some way to print out the plans, to be used in real-
| life planning. Also, it would be nice if there was some sort of
| disclaimer on how the financial data we input is used, because
| that stuff can be sensitive, and could peer people off.
| CannisterFlux wrote:
| Having "choose your theme" as almost the first question felt
| very out of place. Like, someone is really proud of those
| themes, more than any other part of the site :) I'd just leave
| that out completely, the default theme is fine and you can
| change it from the menu anyway. Everything else was really
| slick, but I didn't understand any of the goals (not in the
| US).
| Faaak wrote:
| Same here. I though: "WTF is this ? Am I on a design your
| webpage site ?"
| zwass wrote:
| This will be an incredibly useful tool for me. I subscribed
| with the coupon code, and hope to see you continuing to develop
| the functionality.
| Eridrus wrote:
| I had the same experience and even tinkered around with
| building this myself!
|
| IMO the biggest problem with existing calculators, and yours,
| is that you have to make some pretty strong assumptions about
| the future. How will rental & housing prices grow? What returns
| will I get on my investments? Depending on the numbers you put
| in you will get very different results, and most people are not
| good at predicting these!
|
| I think the real value here will be to find a way to reduce the
| number of knobs that users have to specify in some way, with
| either expert estimates for these variables, or joint
| distributions of these variables so that users can explore
| scenarios like "stock market crash" without having to figure
| out how that could impact every variable.
| scubakid wrote:
| You're right about those user estimates and various knobs
| having a potentially huge effect on results. When I introduce
| a Monte Carlo simulation mode, I hope to be able to offer
| better insights into how distributions around some of these
| variables will impact likelihood of success. I'll also
| continue to look for opportunities to create smart defaults
| and/or links to resources that can be used to help calibrate
| estimates based on historical data, locality, etc. Thanks for
| the comment!
| tjbiddle wrote:
| I've been stuck on "Confirming Subscription" for the last 5
| minutes
|
| Edit: Tried again, but with PayPal, and it worked.
| samtimalsina wrote:
| I've always wanted to build a tool like this, but never went
| around to it. I am a FIRE nerd, and have used and tried many FI
| tools. I am an active YNABer and I was looking for a tool for
| longterm planning. This looked interesting enough that I
| actually went ahead and got the premium plan for a year. Thanks
| for the coupon code. It came out at roughly $12/year, which I
| think is a great value to the kind of insights you can get. To
| create something like this on my own would take months, if not
| years. I also like the fact that I am not linking this to any
| of my real accounts.
| drewg123 wrote:
| Would be nice if there were alimony and child support expense
| categories.
| elil17 wrote:
| Nothing makes me more annoyed than when simulations like this
| make assumptions which don't make any sense. For example.
|
| >"Note: currently, ProjectiFi taxes inheritance as ordinary
| income for simplicity and to maintain a conservative estimation
| strategy. More nuanced options that more closely mirror current
| inheritance tax liability scenarios are coming soon."
|
| This is an absolutely ridiculous assumption. Federal
| inheritance/estate taxes in the US don't start until $11 million.
| If you can't figure that out your app is not ready to publish.
| kenned3 wrote:
| Thankfully most people have over $11 million and therefor your
| proposal really does impact the majority of the users?
|
| Most developers want to build features that service the
| majority, then add more functionality later.
| elil17 wrote:
| The app taxes inheritance as income. No one gets inheritance
| taxed as income. Most people get inheritance totally tax
| free.
| vallas wrote:
| Most devs probably want that but what they really want is
| developping for a minority that represents a majority
| samtimalsina wrote:
| I guess that's why they are in BETA? Nobody makes perfect
| product in their first attempt.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| I like the icon for debt. Just from that you can tell this
| software wasn't made by a business.
|
| Edit: Hm, seems like sometimes it's a pair of handcuffs, and
| other times it's a more innocuous iron weight.
| bouchardm wrote:
| Wow, that is pretty impressive ! I've tried it and its pretty
| complete :)
| vallas wrote:
| Should be renamed "personal finance for the poor class"
| bsanr2 wrote:
| Does this model consider the disparities in costs, rates, and
| growth potential as dictated by race? I say this not to be
| divisive but because revelations about such disparities over the
| past few years are a real and substantial concern, such that
| spending, borrowing, employment, and other such decisions might
| be altered to account for these realities.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/25/realestate/blacks-minorit...
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/19/lenders-deny-mortgages-for-b...
|
| https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/compensatio...
| vallas wrote:
| Misleading, should be renamed "personal finance for the middle-
| class"
| lesinski wrote:
| I will try this out!
|
| Currently the gold standard for this kind of FI simulation is
| OnTrajectory. There's a learning curve but it's so much more
| comprehensive than any spreadsheet you could build. I consult it
| every time I make a big decision.
|
| Get in touch with your email and I can provide a referral link.
| foo92691 wrote:
| The name (ProjectiFi) and the logo (which looks like LTE signal
| strength) are probably much too close to Google's Project Fi (now
| Google Fi).
| manuelisimo wrote:
| I had the same thought, the service is quite different but the
| name is too similar
| pupdogg wrote:
| This feels like Mint.com all over again. I do not feel
| comfortable sharing personal banking data with a hosted platform.
| We all know what happened when Mint sold out to Intuit!
| 09bjb wrote:
| What are you referring to? That Intuit killed the product? I
| use Mint and don't particularly like it but am not yet aware of
| data abuses or breaches.
| pupdogg wrote:
| Not sure about your personal experience but it was only a
| matter of time until I started receiving promotional offers
| from various credit card companies based on my spending
| habits via snail mail. I could directly tie them to Mint.com
| becuase I was shown the exact same offers on their portal.
| What other proof do you need?
| sct202 wrote:
| I think you should make it a little more obvious that you start
| off without creating an account, because I was a little off put
| at first that it looks like Personal Capital, Mint, etc where you
| have to provide a bunch of personal info before even seeing
| anything.
|
| Anyways very interesting graphs and stuff, I'd be interested if
| once you have the monte carlo simulations up if there was like a
| demo mode to just show what it did for a test person to show the
| value of what it could do for me.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks! Do you mean like a feature tour video on the home page,
| or something more like quick "templates" you could choose from
| that would pre-populate everything with sample data?
| sct202 wrote:
| I personally would like the second (like the data doesn't
| need to be realistic or anything but I would want to see what
| the scenarios are like that are being run), but a walk thru
| would work too.
| anentropic wrote:
| I would also like to see more of a demo of the product before
| having to go step by step into filling out my data
| jetpackjoe wrote:
| love love love that I can get started without putting in ANY
| personal information. I agree that making this more obvious is
| a good thing.
| stevofolife wrote:
| I like the UI. I like the process. I'm just a basic guy who likes
| to put in basic numbers. What's next?
| adjkant wrote:
| So I have a Google Sheet that basically does this and I tested
| this out and got some similar numbers as my sheet, so some things
| seem to be working well! This is also a great UI!
|
| I was pretty impressed with the depth of detail as well, and one
| thing this seems to have better tooling for than my manual sheet
| is for tax treatment and long term tracking there
|
| Two bugs/issues I found:
|
| 1. I couldn't tell if inflation was applied in future years at
| all. Despite selecting an increase in income and inflation
| matched expenses, neither seemed to be reflected when I selected
| the future year.
|
| 2. Setting 401K by percentage caused lots of issues as it allowed
| me to go over the IRS limit. I just wanted to set it by amount
| and be done with it! Would be good to have options to allocate
| savings like that as well as by percentage.
|
| Honestly, this is really intriguing for me as I've covered a lot
| of these cases and as a developer I've thought about the UI/UX
| for this but basically have always thought that the edge cases
| were so vast that it would be hard to get users while also making
| sa reasonable UX. Truly, using this changed my mind and this
| seems like something that could be possible. I'm not sure what
| your team size is and I have limited time, but I'd be interested
| in talking and seeing if there's any way to contribute / help
| here! Feel free to contact me @gmail or via my bio's website
| contact form if you're at all interested in that!
| joshgel wrote:
| Agree the tax calculations are a little bit off. Also, only
| lets you take the individual standard deduction (12k vs 24k for
| married filing jointly)
| jameskraus wrote:
| Nifty calculator! I wish it was a bit easier to max out two 401ks
| (e.g. for a married couple). Otherwise, it's very slick and gives
| a similar result to my personal projections.
| Aachen wrote:
| Just as a heads-up, this privacy policy is not legal in the EU
| because it doesn't fulfill even the primary requirements (say
| what you process, for what purpose, stored for how long), but
| also this huge template (28 minutes estimated reading time) is
| not helpful to anyone -- it's just an enumeration of every
| possible method of data tracking -- so I'm not sure why you would
| even use this when it's not legal anyway. It's more helpful for
| users to just write a short, custom notice with a bit of required
| boilerplate at the bottom (e.g. 'you have the right to complain
| go your local authority' needs to be in each of them), then it's
| both informative and legal.
|
| Edit: somehow ctrl+f privacy gave me 0 hits (maybe I started
| typing before the page loaded fully? Not sure, but I did look),
| just noticed when actually starting to read the comments that
| something similar is also the top comment, sorry for being (at
| least partially) redundant.
| jameskraus wrote:
| Lol, my impression is that OP did exactly that - copied a
| template privacy policy. They probably don't have a budget for
| a lawyer to write them a privacy policy, much less a EU-
| compliant one. If this was a big player in the space, sure,
| maybe they should have a better policy. But for a homegrown
| tool like this that's just launching? It makes sense they're
| using off-the-shelf stuff.
| Aachen wrote:
| Obviously there isn't an original word in this (see the word
| 'template' in my comment), and indeed it makes sense to not
| spend a lot of time on this when you're just starting out.
| That's exactly why I'd recommend to just write what you
| actually do instead of finding huge text that isn't actually
| fulfilling the law. Writing up what data you process takes
| the time of writing a blog post where you barely have to
| research anything because the subject you're reporting on is
| yourself. Or just don't have a privacy policy (effectively
| the same as having one that isn't legal and doesn't say
| anything): saves you even more time as well as the reader.
| Xcelerate wrote:
| Tough crowd. I think this looks great. I've been managing these
| sorts of calculations manually, and I think there's definitely a
| market for better tools in the financial planning space. (I agree
| with removing the theme selector though.)
| g_sch wrote:
| One thing I've always struggled with in these "financial
| planning" products is how to make the numbers make sense on a gut
| level. My problem is that, after doing some level of "taking
| charge of my finances" to make a savings/investment plan, it
| still feels like I'm treading water and barely making any
| progress toward my goals. Yet when I plug my numbers into any
| financial planning app (including this one), they inevitably not
| only tell me that I'm going to be a millionaire when I retire,
| but also that I'll have tons of money within just a couple years.
| This usually makes me reflexively dismiss their conclusions.
|
| I realize that part of the problem is that it's hard for my brain
| to extrapolate a few months of observations into a decades-long
| trendline, but I really would love to see a product that helps my
| brain bridge the gap between my own perception and the big money
| chart.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| My entirely speculative guess is that the discrepancy is in
| human behavior that's not modeled. The tools assume the money
| is invested in a timely manner, but in reality folk
| procrastinate and their saving spend arbitrary months / years
| sitting around in low interest rate accounts.
|
| My first 5 years of full time employment with a salary, I was
| making enough to live comfortably and contribute to a 401K, and
| finances and investing aren't inherently interesting to me, so
| I didn't really think too much about the money accumulating in
| my savings account. The money definitely lost value over those
| 5 years because of inflation. I finally figured out how to put
| money into ETFs, and 5 years later that same amount of money
| has at least doubled in value. A lot of that probably has to do
| with the economy being crazy, but I suspect I missed out on a
| lot of compound growth not investing those savings initially.
| That is to say, my savings over time didn't look like a "PERT"
| plot until I took concrete steps (and the associated risks) to
| invest in the market.
|
| Not to say that sitting on money or being slow to invest in
| higher growth accounts is good or bad. There's risk and
| everyone has their own personal risk tolerance, and
| diversification is important. If all you have is $5000, dumping
| it all into the stock market would seem pretty risky and
| perhaps foolish. That $5000 sitting in a checking or savings
| account is losing value over time rather than growing, though.
|
| I suppose that could be another example of it being easier to
| live frugally when you have money, i.e. buying a $100 pair vs.
| $20 pair of work boots. On the other hand, many folk with very
| little savings still seem to find a way to buy luxuries like
| iphones and vacations. In addition to luck, personal discipline
| and sacrifice must factor in to some degree when it comes to
| achieving a financial goal.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Yes. And these tools will always provide significantly
| inacurate forecasts, I think, because 1/ it is hard for humans
| to predict their spending habits, since spending often increase
| proportionally to income, and not just inflation. 2/ most
| people have a very different path ahead of them, along with so
| many unknowns in the equation.
|
| That's probably why people serious about their money consult a
| professional, who has hopefully historical data at hand and in
| his head, who produces a forecast, each year, that is very
| tailored to the person, the person's personality, habits, job
| industry and many other important factors that a financial
| planer coded with if and else, avg and linear projection etc
| can't match. Maybe machine learning can get decent results of
| training properly on very good data sets.
|
| And about most planners showing we will be millionaire in a few
| years, I'm tempted to say it's for the exact same reason demo
| data and screenshots for a CRM or analytics system always tend
| to display over optimist income/sales.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| The thing I find most difficult about retirement planning is that
| assumptions about market returns and inflation always seems to
| overwhelm all other factors by a large margin. I typically assume
| a 4% inflation-adjusted return for planning purposes (7% average
| return minus 3% inflation), but half a percentage point in either
| direction could leave me broke shortly after retirement or
| wealthy beyond all need.
|
| I guess partly this is just because I'm still 30+ years from
| retirement, but does anyone have any advice on how to account for
| the incredibly wide range of possible outcomes based entirely on
| factors that are impossible to accurately predict?
| [deleted]
| singingboyo wrote:
| Similar situation, but the way I figure it, it's best to err
| somewhat on the side of caution. Aim to save more than you
| expect to need, so that a bad return is still enough.
|
| The thing to remember is that if you are somehow wealthy beyond
| need, you can just retire. You don't have to keep working if
| you're financially stable earlier than expected.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Awesome work, can't wait to give it a try.
| Frost1x wrote:
| Looks interesting, but based on the privacy policy terms of data
| usage, transferability, and so forth, I can't in good faith test
| with real financial data: https://projectifi.io/privacy-
| policy.html
|
| Everytime I see a tool that shouldn't need to be hosted remotely
| as a service and could reasonably be deployed to the client where
| they have more control over their data (not as a service), it's a
| non-starter for me. I get it, that's the industry model now and
| it's how you can get comped for your time investment, gain
| passive income, control IP, etc.
|
| Unfortunately, those cost models will get no comp from me in any
| way. Having more data rights and ownership for a week or so free
| trial version where you can later shift to a pay model in which
| your data is still owned entirely by you during the entire course
| of the application usage would make more sense for people like me
| who still want privacy. I'm probably not the target market for
| something like this though and the number of people like me seem
| to be on the decline, so there's that.
| dheera wrote:
| > ProjectiFi
|
| You might want to reconsider the name -- it looks way too
| similar to Google's Project Fi. Or at least the logo, which
| looks like cell phone reception bars, which even further
| reminds me of Project Fi.
| xcambar wrote:
| HN tropism at its fullest.
|
| IMO, 99% of the real people know or care about Google's
| Project Fi.
| dheera wrote:
| Could you perhaps just divide all of your financial numbers by
| some linear factor N that you keep secret?
|
| But yes, this should really be an client-side / offline app.
| devinsit wrote:
| I agree. The trend of handing over all your data ( _especially_
| your financial data) to some nebulous service isn 't exactly my
| favourite. Which is why I built https://ufincs.com, a nebulous
| service where you hand over all your financial data!
|
| Yes, that was a joke.
|
| In reality, uFincs is more of a stop-gap between what you seek
| (native app where you own the data) and what the status quo is
| (web-based app where your data ownage is dubious). Yes, uFincs
| is a web app, but we take the extra step to do client-side
| encryption so that the only financial data being stored in our
| database is a jumble of base64; I don't want to touch your
| actual financial data with a 10-foot pole.
|
| Of course, like some other people in this thread have
| mentioned, having a completely client-side app is also pretty
| important. Well, we have exactly that:
| https://ufincs.com/noaccount. You can use uFincs right away,
| without any account, and the app works completely client-side,
| completely offline. You can even export your data and then re-
| import it later if you so prefer!
|
| Of course, the tech that enables this 'no account' option is
| also what makes the logged-in app work offline-first, so I
| think it's pretty cool :)
|
| And if anyone asks "Well, why a web app at all then?", it's
| because _I_ wanted a web app. Yes, I do enjoy accessing my
| finances on all my devices, thank you very much. But we do have
| plans to build out standalone desktop /mobile apps in the
| future.
| gowld wrote:
| You could store the data in the user's cloud (or local)
| storage, so you don't have a copy of the data.
|
| Having an "encrypted" copy of the data, with a key controlled
| by you (unless there's some browser API for encrypting using
| the user's key?) is a lot shorter than a "ten foot pole"
| devinsit wrote:
| That's the thing, the key _isn 't_ controlled by me. The
| key is derived from your account password. If you want some
| more technical details, feel free to check out
| https://ufincs.com/policies/security. tl;dr Yes, that
| browser API is called WebCrypto.
|
| As for storage, all data is kept in-browser in local
| storage (specifically, IndexedDB), until it gets saved to
| our database. And before it leaves the browser to be saved
| in our database, it gets encrypted using the user's key.
|
| Finally, if you only ever use the 'no account' option
| (https://ufincs.com/noaccount), then all your data is only
| ever stored in-browser; it never gets saved to our database
| because you don't even have an account to save it to! Feel
| free to monitor the network requests to prove it for
| yourself (or even turn off your network connection).
|
| Hopefully that makes things more clear.
| Someone wrote:
| So, when you change your password, all data flows back to
| your browser to be decrypted, then gets re-encrypted, and
| sent back?
| devinsit wrote:
| Hmm, that's a good question to add to the Security doc!
|
| Not quite. See, we make use of a scheme called envelope
| encryption. That means we have two separate keys: one to
| encrypt your data (the 'data encryption key' or DEK) and
| one to encrypt the DEK (the 'key encryption key' or KEK).
| We use the KEK to encrypt your DEK to get something
| called the 'EDEK' (or 'encrypted data encryption key').
| The EDEK is what we store in our database.
|
| Something that never changes after you sign up is your
| DEK. This is completely random and not dependent on your
| password.
|
| What _is_ dependent on your password is your KEK. So when
| you change your password, all that actually changes is
| your KEK. With your new KEK, we just re-encrypt your DEK
| to get a new EDEK, and we store that new EDEK in our
| database. Again, the Security doc
| (https://ufincs.com/policies/security) outlines the basic
| process.
|
| So no, all your data isn't passed back to the browser to
| be decrypted and re-encrypted when you change your
| password, but thanks for the question!
| Someone wrote:
| _"With your new KEK, we just re-encrypt your DEK"_
|
| = when users change their password, you have access to
| the DEK (you decrypt it and then encrypt it with the new
| KEK)
|
| _"one to encrypt your data (the 'data encryption key' or
| DEK)"_
|
| = when users change their password, you could decrypt
| their data.
|
| I think this boils down to "you don't store user
| passwords, but when users change their password, they
| must trust you to not look at your data or store the
| KEK".
|
| Where's my error?
| caycep wrote:
| I wonder if the "most private" way to do this would be to
| distribute as a jupyter notebook or some sort of local
| bundle/distro to run as a local webapp?
| devinsit wrote:
| Well, uFincs _is_ a PWA, so you could 'install' it that
| way. We send a little in-app notification whenever a new
| update is pushed, so you could theoretically just ignore
| those and never update to keep using that one version of
| uFincs forever (assuming your browser never decides to
| update it otherwise).
|
| But yeah, in terms of more standalone distribution and
| sandboxing, that's where the future desktop/mobile apps
| would be more appropriate. Of course, they'd be Electron-
| esque, but that would at least fulfill my end-goals of
| being privacy-first, offline-first, and providing 'long-
| term' software.
| TheGeminon wrote:
| I feel like this is a great use-case for WASM, being able
| to push down fully features apps that can run locally.
| false-mirror wrote:
| That is a _huge_ "living paycheck to paycheck" upcharge!
|
| I get the incentive, but considering how financial planning
| can be most vital to folks with spotty income, I'd strongly
| encourage you to bring the price of the monthly plan down. Or
| perhaps a bare-bones "free" tier folks can use between paid
| months?
| devinsit wrote:
| Yep, I agree, it's a pretty big upcharge. That's precisely
| why our 'free tier' is the 'no account' option
| (https://ufincs.com/noaccount). I'm not kidding when I say
| it's the full version of uFincs; the only (real) difference
| is that you don't have an account to sync to. And if you
| make sure to never log out (or take the time to
| export/import your data every time), then you can basically
| simulate having an account. It's just a free tier of
| 'inconvenience' rather than 'features' or some such.
|
| But yeah, there's definitely some pricing psychology at
| play there. Thanks for taking the time to leave some
| feedback!
| calderarrow wrote:
| ufincs looks very cool! During my December holiday, I was
| thinking of making a web-based platform that had a more
| modern UI than GNUcash, and it looks like you built it
| already!
|
| Just curious, what's your tech stack, how long have you been
| working on it, and how many users do you have?
| devinsit wrote:
| That's exactly what uFincs is, a modern version of GnuCash!
| I had the exact same thoughts as you did :)
|
| The simple tech stack breakdown is that the client-side is
| React + Redux + TypeScript + Sass. Of note, I use redux-
| saga, which has been an absolute boon for some of the more
| complex flows.
|
| Design system is completely custom.
|
| Backend API is Node + Feathers. Database is Postgres.
|
| Marketing site is served separately from the app and is
| React + NextJS + Tailwind CSS.
|
| I intend to write up a more complete breakdown of the tech
| stack sometime in the future.
|
| In terms of how long it's taken to get this far, longer
| than I'd like to admit... there was a version '0.1' that
| was built as a capstone project over the course of 2019,
| then the redesigned version (uFincs as it exists now)
| that's been ongoing since the start of 2020.
|
| And the user situation can look... misleading. I only
| 'officially' launched last week, so for the longest time
| the only user has been le-moi (and some friends that did
| testing), but I actually did just acquire my first paying
| customer yesterday!
| gowld wrote:
| Is it open source? That's a critical aspect of the "Gnu"
| part of GnuCash.
| devinsit wrote:
| It definitely isn't. At least, not yet. I've been
| thinking through different ways we could handle that
| aspect, but I don't have any concrete plans to open-
| source uFincs at the moment.
| dazuaz wrote:
| "but I actually did just acquire my first paying customer
| yesterday!"
|
| Congratz!
| devinsit wrote:
| Thank you!
| Svenstaro wrote:
| That looks very cool and I like the security concept. Any
| chance you're going to open-source it?
| devinsit wrote:
| As I replied down below
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26972907), I don't
| have any concrete plans to open-source it _at the moment_.
| However, I know this is a pretty big sticking point for
| some people, so I have been working through some plans on
| how we could do it.
|
| In particular (but again, no promises), I want to start by
| open-sourcing the custom Redux middleware that we use to
| handle data encryption. I feel like that's one of the most
| important parts to open-source (ya know, since it's the
| foundation of uFincs' security), but it's a matter of
| getting everything in order.
| Dennip wrote:
| This looks like exactly something i've been after! I used to
| use an iOS app but really missed becuase able to access it on
| windows....but the pricing just seems way too high. Its more
| expensive than a photoshop sub...
| gofreddygo wrote:
| I agree with owning your personal financial data.
|
| Very few people I know understand and appreciate double entry
| bookkeeping for finances. I learned about it recently from
| beancount [1] and it was a revelation. I don't go overboard
| with detailed transactions and keep it high level with around 5
| accounts salary/mortgage/cc/investments etc.
|
| I now personally keep my raw data (monthly
| income/expense/balances) in a spreadsheet. I have 1 html file
| with js embedded that does my homegrown calculations (works
| great on a phone). Spreadsheet is updated monthly. I add data
| from my monthly bank statements (same day I pay my credit card
| bills so I don't forget). Run the calculations whenever I need
| to (so far has been very rare).
|
| My takeaway: discipline around personal finances is more
| important than what tool, services or process I use.
|
| Looking at my income/expense/balances and mapping to what
| happened last month, looking at trends is valuable. For me that
| comes from piggybacking on the critical routine/ritual of
| paying my bills.
|
| 1:
| https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_m...
| endominus wrote:
| The importance of this cannot be overstated. I used to use
| Mint when I was in college, but got sick of them pushing
| credit cards on me, and the uncomfortable feeling of giving a
| service full access to my bank account. I tried tracking all
| my expenses in a spreadsheet for a year, which worked fine,
| but wasn't the most flexible system (or rather, it very
| quickly became a UX monstrosity).
|
| Now I use hledger, which has been fantastic. I back up the
| file to a shared drive that's sync'ed to my phone, so every
| time I get a message from the bank or pay with cash, I can
| immediately note it down (this would have been much less
| workable before I found the "cone" app) and track my spending
| across dozens of accounts.
|
| There are some improvements that could be made as to the
| visualization of data, which I might write a quick webapp
| for, but in terms of simplicity, robustness, and ease of use,
| plaintext is definitely the way to go.
| system2 wrote:
| Agreed. Giving up my financials to a site is unacceptable. I
| rather use Excel sheet with fancy graphs myself.
| okr wrote:
| So a site like youneedabudget would not be useful either to
| you?
| system2 wrote:
| No. After long years of trying to fix my financial life, I
| am sure of one thing that apps do not help. Simplifying it
| with a simple excel sheet is way more efficient because it
| is much more simple, realistic and more flexible too.
| Simple math, you make X, spend Y. If there is a new
| expense, add a new line in excel and finished. I tried many
| of these apps in the past. Excel wins every time. (For me.)
| wait_a_minute wrote:
| Do you pay for desktop software though? Such tools could be
| built for desktops-first with no data ever leaving the machine,
| but people will scoff at paying for them...
| [deleted]
| qwertox wrote:
| The terms are warning sign. Specially the section "Transfer of
| Your Personal Data" as well as "Disclosure of Your Personal
| Data", which states that
|
| > If the Company is involved in an asset sale, Your Personal
| Data may be transferred.
|
| The Personal Data _is_ the asset. This is like saying: If we
| want to sell your financial data, we will do so.
| cube00 wrote:
| Blanket permission to share your information with third
| parties for advertising too
|
| > We may share Your personal information in the following
| situations:
|
| > With business partners: We may share Your information with
| Our business partners to offer You certain products, services
| or promotions.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! I've thought about maybe creating a
| version which is wrapped up as an Electron app and runs
| natively and with no google analytics, etc. Does it sound like
| that might alleviate some of your concerns?
| subpixel wrote:
| I just created an account but did not feel comfortable
| uploading data, having already associated my account with my
| identity via Gmail. Would love to run something locally.
| scubakid wrote:
| You should be able to use the app without making an
| account. And plan data is not synced to the cloud unless
| you upgrade to premium and also explicitly enable that
| feature.
| scubakid wrote:
| I guess I should also add that with the current web version,
| you can opt out of sending telemetry data via cookie
| preferences, and with the Premium version you choose whether
| or not you want your data persisted or not. (there is also a
| button to remove all your data at a later date if desired).
| Perhaps something else that might be helpful to add is an
| import/export button so you can save and load data locally(?)
| melody_calling wrote:
| I think part of the disconnect is communicating what the
| app actually does vs. what the terms permit it to do in the
| future.
|
| It sounds like you've put genuine thought into this, and
| your privacy policy is very readable, but it suffers from
| the generic "WTFPL" clauses.
|
| For example, you clearly specify who the third-parties are
| and what data is shared, which again is commendable. But
| it's combined with "we may use your data for [any] other
| purposes", "we may sell and may have sold [extremely
| personal PII]", and so on.
|
| _Are_ you doing this? Doesn 't seem like it. _Could you?_
| Apparently, and that 's part of the concern.
| GordonS wrote:
| Can I ask how you are using the telemetry that you collect?
| scubakid wrote:
| Currently just google analytics dashboards showing things
| like navigation within the app and where users are
| dropping off during the onboarding process.
| seieste wrote:
| > (there is also a button to remove all your data at a
| later date if desired)
|
| Do you keep database backups?
| scubakid wrote:
| Currently, no. I suppose one could criticize that from an
| operations perspective, but at least data requested for
| deletion does really go away.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Not having a recovery plan is bad. You should have
| backups but with lifecycle rules that remove them after x
| days.
| Kalium wrote:
| > I guess I should also add that with the current web
| version, you can opt out of sending telemetry data via
| cookie preferences, and with the Premium version you choose
| whether or not you want your data persisted or not.
|
| Rather than ameliorate concerns about privacy, this
| intensifies them. This is the approach I would expect from
| a megacorporation hellbent on mining my private data to
| death while pointing to the by-sheer-coincidence-hidden
| option to opt out of telemetry. And the choice to _pay_ for
| the ability to _not_ be data-mined to death.
|
| These are the design choices I expect from a product team
| that regards privacy as something to be defeated and
| evaded. It's the sort of thing I would expect from
| Facebook.
|
| Perhaps a privacy-centered approach might be worth
| considering? What might the user experience look like if
| behavior was not tracked until the user explicitly
| consented to just specifically that? What if the ability to
| _upload_ your data was a premium option, with the local-
| only privacy-preserving experience the default? What data
| do you _need_ to let people do incredibly personal
| calculations, as opposed to what data do you _want_?
| scubakid wrote:
| Oops, it seems my attempt to add clarity on the current
| implementation only added more confusion. Sorry about
| that. Let me try to break down the status quo in more
| detail.
|
| 1. User arrives on the site, no google analytics
| activated unless user accepts cookie settings (which
| includes option to accept some types and not others).
|
| 2. User onboards and creates a plan for free, experiments
| with app -- no plan data or results are transmitted.
| Everything done client-side in JavaScript and goes away
| on page refresh.
|
| 3. User decides to upgrade to premium. If they do, the
| app asks if they would like to enable persistent data. If
| they enable this feature, only then is plan data saved.
| Kalium wrote:
| Thank you! That clears things up considerably.
| samtimalsina wrote:
| I would really be interested in that approach as well. I
| don't necessarily need my data synced to the cloud. A way to
| import and export data for backups would be nice.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| For every person that cares about privacy, there are 10,000
| that don't. That's why it's so profitable to be an evil data
| hoarder.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| How is data hoarding evil? Data lets us improve things, know
| what services need to be made, connect everything better.
| There's potential for abuse as in anything but we don't call
| cough syrup evil.
| royaltjames wrote:
| Hoarding of any type is a disorder, just like how addiction
| used to (still is) be considered a moral defect.
|
| Cough syrup not being evil -used as intended to alleviate
| symptoms but not cure OR chugged like a panacea ambrosia
| delivered by the gods- is such a weird analogy to write as
| the burden of use falls on the individual rather than the
| collector.
|
| How dare people prescribed highly addictive advertised as
| nonaddictive cocaine start taking it spoonful up the
| butthole~
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| How to be evil:
|
| - Offer a service.
|
| - Claim that your service exists to make the world better
| in some vague way.
|
| - Train yourself to sound like a compassionate, altruistic
| person that cares about others.
|
| - Sell user data. Hide the information about what data is
| being sold and who is buying it and why as much as
| possible.
|
| - Become wealthy selling data from users who trusted you.
|
| - Buy bona-fide companies and put them to the service of
| your evil cause.
|
| - Normalize evil behavior. Force other companies to become
| evil in order to compete.
|
| - Turn the Internet into a privacy nightmare.
|
| - Turn the field of computer science into satanism.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I think I need context on that last one.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| People thought that data is the new oil, but it turns out
| it's not. Data is the new uranium. Powerful, yet toxic and
| irradiates everything in proximity. You most emphatically
| do not keep large piles of it if you can help it, and if
| you do, you silo and audit the sh*t out of that to control
| access and prevent theft because the potential for abuse is
| very high.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I love the oil vs. uranium analogy. Uranium can be
| powerful and useful, but risky to hold, difficult to
| protect, and probably more of a liability than an asset.
| efnx wrote:
| I like the analogy and agree with you but the potential for
| abuse of cough syrup is for the user, not the manufacturer.
|
| Maybe another analogy would be like if you had to give your
| full banking information to every restaurant your family
| dines at?
| [deleted]
| z0r wrote:
| I remember seeing Bruce Schneier talk about this - https://
| www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_tox...
|
| imo this is the single correct perspective to have about
| data
| creativeembassy wrote:
| Signed up!
|
| I'd love to see a little more flexibility in putting some kinds
| of numbers in, especially as someone not great with understanding
| financial data. For instance, I'm currently plugging numbers in
| about my mortgage. I know how much I currently pay per year in
| homeowner's insurance, but ProjectFi is asking me for the annual
| rate. I divided what I'm paying per year by the current estimated
| market value and got 0.3%... but I'm sure that's not accurate.
| samtimalsina wrote:
| I had a similar problem with the mortgage insurance. I had to
| bring out my calculator to calculate the % it was asking for.
| Who pays mortgage insurance as a percentage of their mortgage?
| I think this should be a dollar amount, with inflation added.
| scubakid wrote:
| You're right, more flexibility on those inputs would definitely
| be a good thing. That's already on the road-map, so stay tuned!
| jetpackjoe wrote:
| Love it. I do have some notes:
|
| For "Financial Goals", allow me to opt set a fixed number, not
| just a percentage of income (i.e, if I want to max out my 401k).
|
| When inputting investments, instead of having a field for the sum
| of the different categories, have line items, so I can add my
| copy/paste my 401k, IRA, etc into the website without having to
| add them up myself.
|
| Great work!
| hexo wrote:
| All I can see is a blank page :(
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I wish this was offline, this stuff is a little too personal to
| have hooked to identifying information. This looks great for
| those who don't have issues with that though.
| gregwebs wrote:
| I briefly tried this out. I prefer Personal Capital because it
| gives you a probability of meeting a retirement goal. I can see
| though how this would be a little nicer to use if you don't want
| to link your accounts as encouraged by Personal Capital.
| simlan wrote:
| Wow impressive. I clicked through some and it does look really
| polished !
| irinai13 wrote:
| I just played around with a little and I really like it! The
| onboarding flow and entire look and feel of the app is really
| smooth and modern, while also remaining simple. It makes me want
| to use it more! I recently signed up for a free trial of a
| similar online financial planning service at Charles Schwab and
| it was awful and clunky. Maybe you can sell this to them? ;-) I
| will keep using. I'm not as concerned about handing over my data
| since it's not linked anywhere so even if breached or sold, no
| one would really know that it's accurate. I guess the worst that
| can happen is that I will get slightly more targeted financial
| deals.
| luminousbit wrote:
| Great job, I wish you the best! I'm sure you'll get lots of
| feedback about issues and will work to fix them. But overall the
| polish, simplicity, power, and uniqueness are an amazing start!
| dmcbrayer wrote:
| I'd love to see some kind of pre-populated sample account to play
| around in. My willingness to test out an app has an inverse
| relationship to the number of forms that app asks me to complete
| to view its functionality. In this case, i felt like there were
| quite a few forms that I needed to fill out to get to the charts.
|
| Beyond that feedback, I think this looks really interesting and
| would love to see where it goes.
| TheHideout wrote:
| The good: the interface is very slick, nice work, you obviously
| put a lot of work into this tool.
|
| The bad: I was immediately turned off that I was presented with
| an up-sell to premium on the very first on-boarding step and it
| was for a color theme... Not only that, but I couldn't find any
| information on what the pricing was until significantly further
| into using the tool, another major turn off.
|
| The ugly: Not being transparent about premium up front feels
| deceptive and makes me very weary of giving you any of my data.
| scubakid wrote:
| Good points. A lot of people have been really tearing into the
| color theme selector on here, so it looks like that will be
| getting demoted out of the onboarding experience haha. As for
| premium, I'll make the feature breakdown of Free vs Premium
| available from the home page so that communication is clearer
| from the start. Thanks for your thoughts!
| frabjoused wrote:
| I would suggest the first step of onboarding should not be the
| selection of your theme. This is already a long onboarding
| process and every additional step will lose you users. When you
| build something you're technically proud of, it makes sense you'd
| like to show it off, but you have to evaluate its relative
| importance to your public.
| alfonsodev wrote:
| I didn't mind the number of steps, at least is not asking for
| creating a user before trying. But I'd replace the theme
| selection with currency selection, much more relevant.
| scubakid wrote:
| Great point! Currency selector coming soon. Would you
| recommend demoting the theme selection to like a last step in
| the onboarding process? Or not showing it at all during
| onboarding and leaving it for users to find on their own?
| cpitman wrote:
| Introduce features to users as they continue to use the
| tool. They don't need to know everything as soon as they
| start using it, and you want to have the ability to
| introduce new features later on anyways!
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I know, I thought that was weird: "Here's a personal finance
| website, first things first: what's your favorite web scheme
| out of these 16..." ?Como?
| gourneau wrote:
| Cool project. If any FIRE people are looking for a more
| minimalist simulator checkout https://ficalc.app/
| ragar90 wrote:
| Pretty cool app, but how can i use this to plan my fiances
| better? I do not have much background in finance and there was
| some things i did not understand how to fill in, would it be
| possible to include some video tutorial on how to do a good
| planning?
| grouphugs wrote:
| this figures out something, but neither my personal finances, nor
| my life. nazibuxxx are not a good thing. the nazis have to die
| Semaphor wrote:
| This was also posted 9 days ago [0], when OP created their
| account, with 3 other also freshly created accounts (with no
| other activity on them) praising it. Make of that what you wish.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26862841
| 3l3ktr4 wrote:
| I dont see how this is a problem. its a game of chance to get
| trending or not, if you have a good interesting project
| Semaphor wrote:
| The explanation [0] they gave makes it a non-issue for me,
| but it's very relevant mentioning in general, even more so
| for an app that asks for your financial data.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26970025
| throwthere wrote:
| Thank you for digging into this! Private finance data like
| this, submitted to a server, makes me uneasy. This isn't some
| calendar app or a game. The reputation of the site should be
| beyond reproach.
| scubakid wrote:
| Fair point. I've been a long-time HN reader but never made an
| account before. After working hard building the app, I was
| excited to create my first post to share it, and mentioned to
| my friends I had posted it to HN. Evidently a few of them
| decided to create accounts to show support. If this was any
| kind of breach of HN etiquette, my sincere apologies -- that
| certainly was not the intent.
| dang wrote:
| Both the site guidelines and the FAQ explain that this is not
| allowed here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
|
| The HN community considers it spamming and guards its
| integrity rather zealously.
| goatcode wrote:
| Making an account to post something and coincidentally
| having friends who on their own decided to make accounts to
| comment is against the rules?
| dang wrote:
| It's not coincidentally.
| adamdusty wrote:
| >Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to
| post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of
| the site should be for curiosity.
|
| Posting the same site twice in 2 weeks seems more than
| "occasional", and in my opinion, crosses the line from
| "look what I made" to self promotion.
| goatcode wrote:
| The comment that was being replied to didn't say that
| he'd posted more than once. The one to which OP was
| replying said that the article had been posted earlier,
| but not by whom.
| [deleted]
| ksm1717 wrote:
| I like how easily you can pick out the legit HN comment, ie
| completely off topic about naming
| monkeydust wrote:
| There is definitely a market for this.
|
| I had wealth management review recently and they used a 3rd party
| piece of software that was doing something similar, their entire
| pitch revolved around this app.
|
| What you really need to have is a demo setup so I can just play
| with the output without having to input any data.
|
| Also concerned about sharing this much personal detail with a
| start-up so I would not use it unfortunately as it is (at least
| with real data)
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! In the near future I'm hoping to add
| templates you can choose from to optionally skip the onboarding
| process and play with an example simulation pre-populated with
| some interesting data. Based on this and some other commentary
| on here, I'll boost the priority of that feature.
| foo92691 wrote:
| +1 to "demo setup so I can just play with the output without
| having to input any data"
| matmann2001 wrote:
| This is a fantastic tool but honestly my favorite part is that I
| can try what seems like most of the features without ever having
| to create an account and providing personally identifiable info
| that will inevitably lead to yet another mailing list for me to
| ignore. So thank you for having faith in your users!
| zwass wrote:
| Really useful for me! I subscribed.
|
| Few pieces of feedback:
|
| 1. It would be helpful to be able to visualize how property tax
| is effecting the reduction in other assets.
|
| 2. It would be nice to be able to use arrows to move the
| retirement age up and down and watch the scenario change.
| Currently having to click on the box, edit the age, and then
| click out is cumbersome.
|
| 3. It would be nice to be able to easily click on and off the
| income/expenses/other/goals in the bottom so that there would be
| a quick way to see how each of them (or combinations of them
| together) effects the scenario.
| Fast_Sasquatch wrote:
| It looks pretty but I can't figure out how to add my monthly
| investment "expenses"? FWIW I currently use firecalc and
| personalcapital.
|
| Also maybe add a url-save feature like firecalc to the free
| version?
|
| *edit: I found it, you have to add monthly savings or investments
| into your Financial Goals
| geuis wrote:
| This thing appears to be broken. You just get to a certain point
| after entering some basic info and it just stops. There's nothing
| to indicate what next steps should be.
| neogodless wrote:
| Maybe I missed it in the text/instructions, as I was going pretty
| fast just trying to "see what it is" and typing a bunch of things
| in, but it asked me about Debt, so I put in a mortgage. Then it
| asked me about a house, and when I said it wasn't paid off, it
| wanted mortgage details. I already added that under debt.
|
| (Also Delete is disabled on that debt, so I cannot go back and
| change that.)
|
| EDIT: OK I started over and see that it specifies that Debt is
| "not associated with a specific asset."
|
| Later Debt seems to become "Expenses" which is a little
| confusing. Not big complaints, just trying to make sense of it.
|
| Similar confusion with the plan, where it asked for a payment
| amount for the mortgage, but then wanted it again as a payoff
| plan? This was even though I unchecked Pay Off As Soon As
| Possible? What's going on here? It's confusing.
|
| Also it seems like excess salary is going into cash savings, not
| taxable investments OR tax-advantages accounts. That is severely
| limiting growth in the projections. <-- No I was partially wrong,
| it's just that it has my mortgage payment in twice as I mentioned
| previously due to the confusing wizard. So my expenses were way
| higher and the investment amount was reduced. But even removing
| that my "Cash" at the end of the period of income is massive; it
| should be putting "cash" into investments.
| theptip wrote:
| Gave it a quick spin, it looks potentially useful. The mortgage
| calculator seems way off though; I put in some toy numbers ($1m
| 30yr fixed mortgage @ 3%, copying in values from the external
| calculator that's linked) and it's computing the payoff in about
| 5-6 years instead of 30. Ideally you could enter the mortgage
| terms like period, APR, and have the calculator back in to the
| mortgage payment, since the monthly payment is more of an output
| rather than an input in mortgage planning calculations.
|
| Mortgage details are likely to be the dominant term for
| homeowners, so seems like this one would be important to fix.
| Plus mortgage interest compounding calculations are pretty opaque
| to most people, so it would help with explaining different
| structures (e.g. ARM vs. fixed vs interest-only, what portion of
| your payment is going to principal vs. interest over time, etc.).
| zwass wrote:
| It seems to automatically select "pay off ASAP" (probably a
| bug). You can turn this off by resetting the monthly payment
| and then it seems to work as expected.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| There is no reason at all for this to be server-hosted. I have of
| course done this for myself a very long time ago creating an
| effectively identical feature set using spreadsheets and even put
| them onto Microsoft's sharing pages (no idea what happened to
| them, it was such a long time ago).
|
| I'm not saying this isn't a better solution than Excel. You work
| with what's available at the time. But there is nothing at all
| about the size of the data or complexity of the calculations that
| requires it to be centrally hosted. This is financial data and
| you're not a bank with reporting and privacy requirements being
| audited by state charter associations and federal law
| enforcement. No reason for people to trust you with this data.
| Make this an executable someone can put on their own machine.
| Don't require a network connection. Don't send telemetry.
|
| Like Frost1x, though, maybe I'm just a minority and you don't
| need my business. Ultimately, do what the market will tolerate, I
| guess.
| mcshicks wrote:
| I started out using excel and quicken but at some point ended
| up using beancount, fava and python. There are so many
| variables like some investments are tax free, others are tax
| deferred, some are exempt from state but not federal taxes,
| etc. I didn't dive in too deep to the app, I agree with other
| comments here that it would be nice if he had some demo
| accounts with a few different scenarios, like single, family,
| different ages, incomes and investments to showcase how the
| modeling works.
| Bostonian wrote:
| I think many people have gotten out of the habit of installing
| software on their computers and prefer web-based solutions.
| comeonseriously wrote:
| For me I break it down as such: If it's supposed to be
| "social", I'll use the web based app (ie: twitter, etc). If
| it is personal (ie: banking), unless it is my actual bank, I
| want that on my machine.
| giantg2 wrote:
| You can still have it be client side if you're web based,
| right?
| andi999 wrote:
| How?
| gen220 wrote:
| By doing all of the computation of user data clientside,
| and making all of the persistence in localstorage.
|
| It's very doable, especially with small data.
|
| Unfortunately, you have to take projects' words that they
| do this on good faith as an end user. You'd need to GET
| the app bundle, and then firewall the tab / disable your
| network interface to be certain that no data is leaking
| out. It's not so easy to control this as an end user
| these days, and web apps can be quite sneaky.
|
| Maybe we'll see some innovation in this space from
| browsers in the future, where an app can identify itself
| as local only and then be sandboxed by the browser.
| another-dave wrote:
| > Maybe we'll see some innovation in this space from
| browsers in the future, where an app can identify itself
| as local only and then be sandboxed by the browser.
|
| That would be a really cool 'HTML5' API -- let the page
| do:
| document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', () => {
| // some bootstrap document.goOffline(); });
|
| Which could prompt the user -- "this web page wants to
| disable its own internet access. Do you want to continue?
| (Refresh the page to reload from server)[OK/Cancel]" --
| and then it can do longer use the internet & has its own
| storage which gets wiped before it's allowed back online.
|
| Would allow all the benefits to devs of doing things in
| the browser (if that's their choice), & end-users could
| trust that it was truly offline.
| andi999 wrote:
| Probably this will end up like all the apps which ask for
| all kind of permissions they really don't need
| mjochim wrote:
| I Agree very much with the general idea. One addition,
| though:
|
| > Unfortunately, you have to take projects' words that
| they do this on good faith as an end user
|
| The same is true for applications running natively. Of
| course, those can be firewalled from any outgoing and
| incoming network traffic more easily. And they don't feel
| like and don't default to using a network connection all
| the time. But still, they could.
| giantg2 wrote:
| It might just be easier to partner with a respected
| company or companies that people trust with their
| money/data already. The biggest one that comes to mind
| that also seems a bit behind on the visualizations and
| sleek UI that this has would be Vanguard.
| scubakid wrote:
| Any thoughts on the comments under the Frost1x post?
| (e.g. Electron app version, and/or import/export or local
| storage options for web premium users). Certainly local
| storage is very doable -- I didn't anticipate how hotly
| requested that might be. I'll also note that all
| calculations are actually already client-side.
| mjochim wrote:
| I like the impression of your tool, but I share Frost1x's
| reluctance. However, I was pleasantly surprised to read
| this up front:
|
| > Free planning and projection tools that will never ask
| to link your financial accounts
|
| If it were followed up by convincing me that my data is
| stored in LocalStorage and doesn't leave my browser, I'd
| be sold :). I know I'd still have to trust you that
| you're actually implementing what you claim, but I think
| I'd be willing to. After all, the same would be true for
| an application running natively: those, too, can submit
| my data "to the internet."
|
| For me personally, having an Electron app would not make
| much of a difference. Do I run your code in my Firefox or
| in a separate process? I'm still running your code on my
| machine. Maybe browser-based even has some advantage
| because it is sandboxed filesystem-wise. Not sure whether
| this holds true for Electron.
|
| Import/export as CSV or whatever format would also be a
| huge plus for me.
|
| As a last point, I'm not sure I understand the status
| quo: you are saying all caluclations are done client-side
| - but the results are stored server-side?
|
| Nice work!
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks! A LocalStorage only option seems very doable.
| With all the interest expressed here, I'll add that to
| the roadmap. As for the status quo, without Premium no
| plan data is stored server-side. With Premium, plan data
| is stored server-side only if the user chooses to enable
| that feature. Calculations/projections are always made
| client-side and the results are not stored server-side.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| PWA
| Mavvie wrote:
| JavaScript (store + compute everything client side)
| andi999 wrote:
| The big problem is: installing a dubious (not saying this is
| dubious, but lets say anything not from a MNC) program on
| your computer might lead to a hostile takeover of your
| computer. But a web-based solution means your data is in
| somebodies else hand. So one has to pick ones poison...
| jakear wrote:
| I'd like to see everything as a web app (a secure sandbox
| everyone already has installed in their computer), but
| running with service workers and using indexeddb for
| persistence. Best of both worlds: you can access everything
| offline, the data stays local, and the app can't infect
| your computer (absent a browser exploit that'd be bad news
| regardless)
| ryandrake wrote:
| Let me just say that I'm glad people like you and Frost1x are
| here, fighting the good fight. Ten years ago, I still though
| the "make an app on the web" thing was a fad that would go away
| soon, and the pendulum would swing back to native apps. That
| hasn't happened, and if anything, the practice of just putting
| it on the web has become the default, which is a little scary.
|
| The web site looks great, and I sincerely appreciate the
| courage and vulnerability it takes to throw one's project to
| the "Show HN wolves," but I have to agree that this needs to be
| a native application (that I can demonstrably run with the
| network plug disconnected) for me to touch it with real
| financial information. It also needs to be "better than old-
| school desktop Quicken" for its use case, in order to un-sticky
| me from that application and migrate my 20+ years of data from
| it.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > That hasn't happened, and if anything, the practice of just
| putting it on the web has become the default, which is a
| little scary.
|
| The problem is that everyone making something like this wants
| to have at least seven zeros in their bank account when they
| cash out after 5-10 years - selling licenses to a desktop app
| doesn't get you that.
| canadianfella wrote:
| Of course?
| cddotdotslash wrote:
| There is absolutely a reason. It's a service and many people
| (myself included) don't want to download a desktop app to use
| it.
|
| He's not asking for your SSN or your address. If you want to
| use a burner email and a VPN or enter fake data to try it out,
| you can. This hardline approach of "every service should be an
| open source desktop app that I can run with zero telemetry from
| my cabin in the woods with no internet" so often found on HN is
| clearly not the opinion of the majority of internet users.
| fragileone wrote:
| > He's not asking for your SSN or your address.
|
| They're asking for even worse - all your historical financial
| data. Why would you want to give some random guy on the
| internet that?
| liuhenry wrote:
| I'm trying to understand the concern but most of my worry
| around "historical financial data" would be actual
| transaction-level information, not rough summary figures to
| estimate a financial plan.
|
| I just played around with the site myself and I didn't see
| anywhere that it imports data, plus the tagline on the
| homepage says "never ask to link your financial accounts"?
|
| Isn't this essentially the same risk profile as like
| FIREcalc [1], or the NYT Rent or Buy calculator [2], or
| some portfolio analysis tool [3], are you saying that those
| shouldn't be online calculators either?
|
| [1] https://firecalc.com
|
| [2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-
| rent-cal...
|
| [3] https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com
| cddotdotslash wrote:
| Again, unless you provide some _other_ piece of data (full
| real name, email, etc) connecting that data back to you, I
| fail to see the harm. Regardless, no one is forcing you to
| use the site, or even provide real numbers. If anonymously
| providing your salary and savings data worries you then
| don't use it.
| bb123 wrote:
| How is installing an executable on my machine and then entering
| my financial info any less sketchy than entering my data into a
| website? The average user would still have to take it on faith
| that the data isn't going anywhere, and as an industry we have
| spent the last 20 years telling people not to download unknown
| software onto their systems. I think it would be a complete
| own-goal for the builder of this to switch to that model.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| It can run client side and store data in secure cookies.
| Maybe that's what was meant? And then export to a file for
| backup.
| sildur wrote:
| I can install it in a network isolated Qube. Data wouldn't go
| anywhere.
| bb123 wrote:
| Sure, many of us can do stuff like that, but the average
| user can't.
| z0r wrote:
| But the default expectations are very different. The
| default expectation for a web hosted application is that
| all your private stuff is stored in a database with
| dubious security, and if your data is stolen as a result
| the only consequences are a 'whoops, my bad' (at most!)
| from the company.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Love the idea, I toyed with the idea of building something like
| this.
|
| When talking to friends, I realised that even smart and
| relatively wealthy people have zero planning skills and freak out
| about the idea of "planning your life in the next decades".
|
| I suspect your market is going to be small.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-04-28 23:01 UTC)