[HN Gopher] Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial
independence
Author : scubakid
Score : 242 points
Date : 2021-07-15 13:05 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (projectifi.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (projectifi.io)
| monkeydust wrote:
| Congrats. Remember trying this out on your previous post and it
| wasn't that UK friendly, sounds like that should be better minus
| the Tax features so will try again.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks, I'll be interested to hear what you think of the new
| version. And if you have further ideas/suggestions to continue
| improving/generalizing things for international use cases, just
| let me know!
| nunez wrote:
| This is really, really neat. Thank you for making this.
| scubakid wrote:
| You're very welcome! Throughout the course of the pandemic, I
| went from knowing only a little about personal finance and
| financial independence, to researching everything I could get
| my hands on and eventually building this tool. Working on it as
| my main side project is one of the things that's kept me going
| through the pandemic months, and it's awesome to see others now
| enjoying it too.
| rebelos wrote:
| Spreadsheet model for inputting this data is far far superior. I
| don't think this flow is conducive to a web UI.
| esseti wrote:
| would be good to have a plan comparison (e.g. rent vs buying
| house). PS: how should I setup a morgage in the system
| scubakid wrote:
| You should be able to set up one plan where you rent, then
| clone that plan and make some changes to add a house, and flip
| back and forth between the two plans to see the differences.
| Or, another way to do it is to make a single plan for renting
| but then add a house asset to it configured to cancel rent
| expenses when in effect, which you can toggle on and off by
| clicking the icon. When you add a house to a plan, it should
| ask you whether you'll be paying in full or financing it. If
| the latter, then it should provide options for interest rate,
| down payment, monthly payment, and such.
| esseti wrote:
| ok, if you add a house it adds the morgage. However, it seems
| that i get bankrupted very quickly if i do so. And I should
| live withouth cash. not sure
| grompotr0n wrote:
| If you don't mind asking, how did you come up with the design?
| It's really slick!
|
| I ask because it's always the part I struggle the most in
| projects.
| Mavvie wrote:
| Wow, amazing how well you integrated the feedback from the last
| time this was posted, especially architecture level stuff like
| storing everything client-side by default. The stock/bond
| allocation curve is really well done too.
|
| Awesome stuff, I just signed up for premium. I assume for people
| that are not single you're meant to add their expected income and
| expenses as well? That could maybe more clear
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks so much! And yeah I took a lot of that feedback to
| heart, and have been working hard to make improvements in many
| aspects and communicate more clearly about things like data
| storage and where calculations happen (i.e. client side). For
| couples, things like age values are from the perspective of the
| person creating the plan, and yeah the idea is to just add in
| their income, expenses, goals, etc. Switching status to Married
| in the tax section should auto-adjust contribution limits for
| US investment types, but custom limits can be set on most
| things as well. Couples planning is still not perfect overall,
| but is at least better than how it was before. And if you have
| more ideas on how it could be improved on from here, just let
| me know!
| smaug7 wrote:
| I am planning on getting married later next year - would we
| be able to add that in for the future?
| scubakid wrote:
| If you create a Wedding expense event, there's a checkbox
| which should update your status to Married when that event
| occurs. Does that help?
| smaug7 wrote:
| Yup let me try that out!
| waffenklang wrote:
| Make a german version (with germany related tax, stock and
| inflation data) and I "shut up and take my money."
| scubakid wrote:
| I'll definitely look around and see if I can integrate
| additional historical datasets. That should be a pretty smooth
| integration if I can find good sources. For taxes, do you think
| there are some specific ways the tool could maybe be
| generalized more so that users can adapt it to their country's
| rules (or at least approximate them) without having to hard-
| code all the details of every country's tax system?
| qqqwerty wrote:
| For the married scenario, would you suggest just combining
| income, cash, investments, etc. under one person?
|
| Also, is there a way to model purchasing a house in the future?
| Probably the biggest decision I am struggling with right now.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| Ahh, never mind. I see you can add multiple incomes.
|
| And the "Other Assests" form has a "Purchase Year" input.
|
| Thanks, very cool tool.
| mwerd wrote:
| It would be easier for me if I could start with a template.
| Having a few buttons for representative simulations like "married
| high income" and "single FIRE" that you could then adjust to your
| scenario instead of starting from scratch would be nice.
| scubakid wrote:
| Agreed. I've been thinking about making a "sandbox" mode like
| this where you can jump right in based on a template. Since
| there have been multiple others asking for something like this,
| I'll boost the priority.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Does it store any of the user's financial data that they input?
| scubakid wrote:
| The way it currently works is: when a new user onboards and
| creates a plan, enters some data, and experiments with the app,
| plan data and results are kept on the client side and not
| transmitted. Calculations are performed in the browser, and
| data disappears on refresh. If the user upgrades to Premium,
| they are then presented with a choice of several data
| persistence options, including Cloud Storage, LocalStorage
| Only, and Manual Import/Export. Plan data is only stored
| server-side if the user enables that option.
| colinplamondon wrote:
| This is so awesome - thank you for building this! Just
| subscribed.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks Colin! Really appreciate the subscription :)
| kolanos wrote:
| There are a lot of buttons without labels, please consider adding
| alt/title/aria attributes at the minimum. The simulation page is
| a sea of unlabeled buttons.
| ctmcbr wrote:
| This is really good & helpful! Wish I had this thing years ago
| when I was doing pro-bono financial planning for family members.
| Would have been much easier than building spreadsheets for
| them...
|
| Couple of points of feedback:
|
| 1. The UI flow for adding financial goals (like putting excess
| earnings into taxable investments, rain day funds, etc.) didn't
| make it immediately clear what that section was for. Some clearer
| explanations in that section might improve your funnel.
|
| 2. The way that debt is displayed by default on the stacked chart
| sort of makes it look like an asset, which is confusing. My
| reaction was just not to trust the chart for the whole duration
| of having a mortgage. Changing the house asset value in the
| stacked chart to home equity instead could maybe be a fix?
|
| 3. I really liked the little red exclamation indicator when a
| plan involved you running out of money b/c you retired too early.
| It felt very well calibrated to clearly indicate the
| inadvisability of that particular plan w/o being overwrought.
|
| You might want to add less alarming yellow indicators to pick up
| not great, but not terrible situations like you retired too early
| & all your assets are tied up in retirement accounts and illiquid
| assists (e.g., home equity), so now you are eating early
| withdrawal penalties unnecessarily.
|
| Great work!
| scubakid wrote:
| Really good points!
|
| For #1, I agree that section can be a bit difficult for new
| users to grasp. It's laid out the way it is so that later you
| can simply click and drag to re-prioritize goals and see the
| effects, but I'll think about how to communicate the purpose of
| that section better from the beginning.
|
| For #2, yeah the concept of showing debt on top of everything
| else may be a bit... unconventional haha. That's where
| switching the plot to the net worth one can help somewhat if
| you want the chart to clearly show total net worth. In the
| stacked view, changing house value to equity is an interesting
| thought, though I think that still leaves it an open question
| how the chart should account for the other kinds of debt one
| might have.
|
| For #3, yes definitely. Identifying warning scenarios and
| clearly marking those is a good feature idea.
| yboris wrote:
| Looks great! I like that there is a _FREE_ tier - thank you!
|
| I recently wanted to run some simple simulations (mortgage &
| investments) so I wrote a simple JS script that outputs the
| amortization table and a graph in the terminal of multiple
| scenarios you want to compare. Very limited in scope, but might
| be useful to others:
|
| https://github.com/whyboris/mortgage-and-investments
| dalyons wrote:
| I actually have a draft open in gmail that i was meaning to send
| to you, so ill post it here instead :)
|
| I saw your initial release of this many months ago, tried it out,
| was like, ok thats kinda cool, put it down.
|
| But then recently i needed to do some serious life financial
| planning, remembered your tool, searched for the HN post and gave
| it a real go.... and WOW. Im so impressed. It does exactly what i
| need; give me a semi-realistic long term plan of finances,
| retirement, how much house i can afford, effect of jobs, stocks,
| etc. Being able to play around with scenarios like "what if one
| of us didnt work for a few years?" really easily. I probably
| _could_ do all this stuff on a spreadsheet, but the fiddly
| details of things like inflation, raises, tax, etc are incredibly
| tedious to model. theres a lot of near term budgeting type apps
| etc out there, but there was no other product i found that works
| so well for long term macro stuff. So its well worth the premium
| subscription fee to me, on a time saved basis alone.
|
| The UI/X is mostly great(ill email you some minor suggestions :)
| ), and your development velocity is really impressive.
|
| Perhaps the total market for a tool like this is niche, but
| hopefully it turns into a profitable enough endeavor for you so
| you can keep working on it forever :)
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks! It started out as something I knew I wanted for my own
| planning purposes, as well as friends and family, and it's
| awesome to hear that it's a tool you too can imagine coming
| back to when you consider new life plans and decisions. I aim
| to keep evolving it over time, and I'll be happy to take a look
| at those UI/UX suggestions you have.
| sthatipamala wrote:
| This is super useful but the results were screwed up for me
| because of the default house maintenance estimate. For HCOL
| areas, 2.5% in yearly maintenance is HUGE.
|
| I'm planning on buying a $2M house in the SF Bay Area and didn't
| realize this tool was allocating $50K a year just for upkeep.
| Just a point of feedback :)
| gaspard234 wrote:
| In Texas we need $50k a year for the property taxes on that $2M
| home.
| sthatipamala wrote:
| Yes but looking at Zillow that $2M Bay Area home would go for
| $250K in Houston TX. In fact, I can't even find homes small
| enough in Texas to compare some of the houses I see for sale
| in the Bay...
| scubakid wrote:
| Ouch, that's a lot of yearly maintenance. Would you recommend
| changing the default value or trying to make it
| dynamic/contextual in some way? Or perhaps just trying to draw
| the user's attention to it better?
| sthatipamala wrote:
| Just draw the user's attention to this and any
| derived/estimated values. It's impossible to model this
| correctly without very specific regional data.
| hnrodey wrote:
| Just guessing here, would it make more sense to base yearly
| maintenance on $/sq ft instead of overall property value?
| Would better take in to account expensive but modest (lower
| maintenance cost) versus huge home (higher maintenance cost).
| garborg wrote:
| $/sqft glosses over local labor costs, level of finish,
| landscaping, etc., which is why you see people suggesting
| 1-2% of value per year, though you're right that it would
| be an improvement to separate out the value of
| labor/materials from the value of a the bare lot.
| garborg wrote:
| My first inclination would be to base maintenance cost off
| cost of rebuilding (optionally overridable) -- in effect, you
| end up with a much lower percent of total value where you're
| basically paying for an expensive lot, and a much higher
| percent of total value in depressed markets (e.g. where you
| can get 100-year-old 7-bedroom for ~= national median home
| value).
| sct202 wrote:
| I remember your site from the earlier thread, and the experience
| is so much smoother now. I'm definitely going to start sharing it
| out since it seems like a very usable tool. I like how you broke
| out the different types of investments because a lot of other
| tools tend to have awkward configurations.
|
| The only other feedback I have is for the pricing screens to
| upgrade if you could list the payment options paypal, etc to
| manage subscriptions. I've been burned a couple times when
| smaller creators self manage subscriptions, and I had to email
| and wait for them to manually adjust the subscription.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks! Really glad to hear you enjoy the improvements. I spent
| a lot of time thinking about the data modeling and
| visualization aspects, so I'm happy you find the configuration
| here less awkward.
| pilom wrote:
| This is really pretty but I personally appreciate the onboarding
| speed of cfiresim.com much more. Way easier to save multiple
| models and I can actually understand what the graph is telling me
| a little easier. I'll be honest, if I'd never seen one of these
| graphs before I doubt I'd understand the mobile version of yours.
| No idea what the different colors mean or what all the icons
| refer to.
| scubakid wrote:
| I'd be interested to hear what you think of the experience on
| desktop -- it's definitely better there than on mobile. But
| point taken; I'd like to keep making improvements for mobile as
| well.
| jrdngonen wrote:
| This is really neat! We've been hacking on a version of this at
| Compound http://withcompound.com/ , built specifically for folks
| who have illiquid assets like startup equity. Similar tools that
| help you model out your finances/taxes.
|
| May find useful!
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Looks like a direct alternative to Personal Capital, which I
| appreciate. Beyond a certain net worth, they continually reach
| out to you, which is annoying.
|
| Love the net worth back testing screenshot on the front page, but
| wonder how reasonable it is.
|
| Index funds weren't available to the general public before the
| 70s IIRC, and investing fees were very different then.
| scubakid wrote:
| That's a good point regarding historical data, index fund
| availability, and investing fees. I suppose the current Monte
| Carlo mode is closer to saying "what might happen in the future
| assuming index funds remain accessible and given similar
| overall returns, dividends, inflation, etc., to what was seen
| historically (but perhaps without some of the other context
| like you mention)". When you think about what you would want
| from a probabilistic planning tool, which are the insights you
| care most about, and are there changes you would recommend to
| the current methodology? Or perhaps additional variables?
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| No, I'm sure the historical-theoretical view is good enough.
| Unfortunately it will always suffer from that lack of context
| wherever it's implemented, and so I'm not sure you can do
| anything besides point out to people what the conditions were
| at that time.
|
| That would be my recommendation. Too much financial software
| out there doesn't provide historical context and simply
| parrots useless quips like "Past performance is no guarantee
| of future results" (which in finance, it actually is a decent
| indicator!).
|
| Because whole periods of financial history occurred in blocks
| of time, I'd like to see some financial software that
| actually acknowledges that.
|
| I'm less interested in novice implementations which simply
| provide a graph over time of the Dow/S&P 500 performance
| benchmark, when realistically people didn't use the S&P until
| recent history, and VTSAX's first generation, precursor to
| the Vanguard 500 Fund, the First Index Investment Trust
| wasn't available to the public until after '75.
|
| Today, it's the largest mutual fund in the world, according
| to Investopedia.
| scubakid wrote:
| I wonder what major changes and developments we might be
| likely to see within our lifetimes... do you have any
| intuitions there? If so, I wonder if there might be
| additional variables or situation types/probabilities that
| could be interesting to throw into a monte carlo
| simulation.
| 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 decided to build one: ProjectiFi
|
| https://projectifi.io/
|
| A while back I posted a very early version here
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26969173), and just
| released a major overhaul with loads of new features and
| enhancements, many inspired by the initial HN commentary:
|
| - Monte Carlo mode with customizable simulations, variables,
| probability distributions
|
| - Backtesting on historical data
|
| - Multiple data persistence options for subscribers: cloud
| synchronization, localStorage only, or manual import/export
|
| - Stock/bond allocation curve over time
|
| - Improved support for international use cases (currency + locale
| selector, custom options and contribution limits for financial
| goals)
|
| - Ability to quickly switch between deterministic and
| probabilistic modes
|
| - Many new event types to model a broader range of scenarios
|
| - Better support for married filing jointly / couples planning
| (perhaps still not perfect, but definitely better)
|
| - Redesigned landing page, additional UI improvements
|
| - And more!
|
| If you feel like checking it out, I would love to hear what you
| think. Most of the functionality is free, but for anyone
| interested in upgrading to Premium, you can use coupon code
| "HN-15" for 15% off all plans :)
| thih9 wrote:
| The cookies popup seems opt out rather than opt in, unless I
| missed something. I felt annoyed when I visited all the tabs and
| withdrew permissions that I never gave.
| scubakid wrote:
| Ah, I see what you mean. The way it works now, if you ignore
| the banner, things are disabled by default (e.g. Google
| Analytics). If you click settings from the banner, the switches
| default to on at that point (and you can toggle them off), but
| GA doesn't activate unless you confirm that dialog with them
| on. Does that make sense? Or do you feel it should be
| implemented differently? I'm definitely open to changing it.
| mawise wrote:
| I'd love to see more sites skip out of GA entirely. If you
| use server logs for analytics you get better fidelity[1]. You
| can probably eliminate the cookie consent banner if you're
| only storing login or session-continuity (required for
| functionality) cookies.
|
| [1]: Based on this analysis: https://brandur.org/minimal-
| analytics
| _boffin_ wrote:
| On https://projectifi.io/get_started, I'd personally change the
| age input into type=number.
|
| Overall, great work.
| michaelml wrote:
| This is something that I would be interested in, but you are
| asking for too much without giving anything back. You are
| essentially asking me to put my entire budget as well as future
| plans into your site before giving me anything interesting.
|
| I am estimating it would take > 15 minutes to fill out everything
| you want, and there is no way I am making that investment into a
| random website without some token of return.
|
| Please consider giving general projections after only a few
| questions and then allowing the user to refine it by adding more
| details if they are interested.
| scubakid wrote:
| One idea that might help with onboarding for users who want to
| jump right in is a sandbox mode where you can skip onboarding
| and plan creation and go directly into a scenario pre-
| configured to model one of several selectable templates or
| personas. How would you feel about that?
| mwerd wrote:
| I logged in to post this exact suggestion. A couple of
| templates like [married home owners] and [single renter] that
| would jumpstart the process would be nice.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Have you ever worked with a financial planner before? I ask,
| because you're complaining about the process that every
| financial planner uses.
|
| They're all very heavy weight, especially when it comes to
| expenses and tax rates.
| jazzkingrt wrote:
| Superb tool!
|
| In 15 mins, I was able to get rough answers to questions like:
|
| * When am I financially independent if I keep living the way I do
| now?
|
| * What if I lowered my expenses right now seeking earlier FI?
|
| * When could I hypothetically stop working by lowering my
| expenses at the point of retirement?
|
| * How much would be left in my estate?
|
| I bought the lifetime subscription, which seems like quite a good
| deal!
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks! Appreciate the subscription, and I'm stoked you're
| enjoying the app. I imagine there are others in the FI
| community that might also get a lot out of it, but I'm not
| quite sure what the best way is to spread the word. Most
| subreddits don't allow self-promotion, and same with the
| Bogleheads forums and wiki. If you or others have any ideas,
| definitely let me know. Pretty much all my time has gone into
| trying to make the actual tool, so I haven't done much at all
| in terms of marketing.
| gjulianm wrote:
| I gave a quick try and just from the first look this looks
| amazing. It's precisely what I'm missing in my spreadsheets for
| my personal finance: probabilistic planning. I'd consider paying
| the premium tier but I miss a few things:
|
| - Support for tax brackets in other countries (maybe let users
| introduce them manually)
|
| - Support for "disasters" in the probabilistic case. I'd be
| interested in knowing how robust is my strategy to being fired,
| or having a reduced salary. For example, letting me input a
| "probability of losing employment" per year and possible ranges
| for time being unemployed would be interesting.
|
| - Also, support for variable-rate mortgages would be interesting.
| Here in Spain there are quite a lot of offers on mortgages at X%
| + euribor, and it'd be interesting to put together the behaviour
| of the mortgage index and the investments. Related with the
| previous points, simulation of economic crisis could be
| interesting: investments go down, increased probability of losing
| my job, increased mortgage payments maybe... Do I survive those
| crisis? What's my margin?
|
| All in all, pretty interesting, congratulations on the job.
| gota wrote:
| Localization could be important too, for broader adoption - not
| just for currency display but (most importantly) the kinds of
| investments available and tax rates vary a lot. A minor thing
| is that the 'default' values for % return and inflation are
| also different in different places
| scubakid wrote:
| Good point. In addition to customizable income tax brackets,
| another idea I've been mulling over is a custom investment
| type with more controls to model a wider variety of
| investment vehicles. Perhaps I could add more templates as
| well, and show/hide some based on the localization settings.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| Along the vein of supporting "disasters" one of the most
| interesting useful features when seeing a financial planner for
| our family was looking at possible effects of death and
| disability.
|
| I haven't gotten very far in to it so I haven't been able to
| explore the life events very much. But looking at the long term
| impact of "what if I died/what if I had life insurance (and
| what term)" is very helpful to explore.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. It's great to see that you
| tested out the probabilistic planning mode enough to identify
| ideas like this that would further enhance it. In fact, some of
| these things like being able to inject "simulated recessions"
| are already in my feature backlog, kind of waiting to see how
| much demand there might be. I'm definitely looking to keep
| evolving the tool over time, and I'll put some thought into how
| to accommodate custom tax brackets (seems pretty doable), as
| well as the other probabilistic features you mention.
| smaug7 wrote:
| This is super cool. I just got a lifetime membership. Please keep
| this going!
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks! Really appreciate the support :)
| chewymouse wrote:
| Is there consideration for automatically estimating taxes per
| year based on input assets/income? Great GUI.
| scubakid wrote:
| The premium version has an automatic tax estimation feature
| which shows a breakdown of estimates for each year in the sim,
| but it is US-specific at the moment.
| trailrunner46 wrote:
| This is very slick and well executed. I especially appreciate the
| thought that went into data transfer (making it opt in, otherwise
| stays client side). I have a CFA and have been in finance for a
| while and have maintained a spreadsheet but honestly this does it
| better so I will use and support you. I wish more people would
| take a long view with their financial wellness, maybe I can
| convince a few friends to see the impact of their debt binges :)
|
| On the UI side there are a few odd things like trying to paste a
| number that has decimal points makes it so nothing gets pasted
| in, the colors on some of the graphs are hard to read (especially
| for people with color vision deficiencies), etc. As I use it I
| will try to give more specific feedback. Can't wait to dig in
| further.
| scubakid wrote:
| Much appreciated! And yeah before building this, I was
| surprised there weren't already more tools that can show you a
| nuanced view of what the future may hold and the ways various
| decisions affect that picture... and the complexity of the
| spreadsheet I had been playing around with eventually became
| untenable haha. Thanks for the UI feedback so far, and since
| you've been in finance for a while I'll be very curious to hear
| more of your thoughts as you dig further into the app.
| sjg007 wrote:
| It seems great but also too sophisticated.. Is there a simple
| mode or a persona I can clone and update? Wife, 2 kids, etc...
| scubakid wrote:
| Not yet, but based on all the commentary here I'll definitely
| be adding a sandbox mode where you can jump into a pre-
| configured scenario based on templates like that.
| ahmadss wrote:
| This is fantastic, and the pricing for "lifetime" is nearly a no
| brainer.
|
| Here are some additional ideas for ways to generate revenue:
|
| * $100-$200 one time guided setup consulting, where someone
| spends 30-minutes with me on zoom to get data setup the right
| way, talk through data analysis process, talk through simulation
| and projections, etc. * Marketplace to connect me with financial
| advisors who know your software, align with your approach to
| financial planning, and can help me with next level optimization.
|
| Nice work!
| rezistik wrote:
| I completely agree, I'd easily pay $200 for help with this
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| I feel like that might be a hard sell among the FIRE crowd.
| FIRE is almost synonymous with ultra-frugal.
| neogodless wrote:
| Confused by the assets. It's starting with my current home's
| value, and decreasing it over time, maybe at the rate that it
| decreases the debt associated with the asset? But that payment
| should only be applied to the debt, not the value of the asset.
| scubakid wrote:
| If you're puzzled by asset value appearing to decrease over
| time, it's possible this is because values are shown in Today's
| Dollars, i.e. values are adjusted to account for inflation. If
| you set the asset to appreciate in value at a higher rate than
| inflation, you should see the value go up over time.
| neogodless wrote:
| Thanks - had to dig in a bit to find that, and it's a strange
| default, but it does have the options you need.
| scubakid wrote:
| Yeah I go back and forth on what the default should be with
| regard to adjusting values for inflation. I have seen other
| planners do it this way, and perhaps one of the reasons why
| is so that you don't look at a high projected portfolio
| value 40 or 60 years down the road and think you're doing
| amazing, when in reality those values have much less
| purchasing power than they would today.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| I agree with the choice of presenting in today's dollars
| by default is more helpful when actually planning. In the
| deterministic planning it has the note at the top for
| "All Values in Today's Currency" but I don't see that in
| the Advanced Simulation and I think it would be helpful
| to have that reminder on all of the projection graphs so
| you don't forget what money you are looking at.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| One thought and one bug
|
| Thought: While I appreciate the stuff around child dependents, it
| feels very weird and tacked on.
|
| Sure sticking an expense called "child" works if you don't
| already have kids, but if you do, those costs are inextricably
| integrated with your existing lifestyle costs. I can't easily
| estimate how much my grocery budget will go down if I remove the
| food my kids eat. Even if I could, I'm certainly didn't think
| about removing my kids from the expense calculations at step 1,
| when dependents get added later, because I didn't think it would
| ask me that.
|
| A better solution would be something that discounted expenses
| after some date. Similarly, you could always bump up the expenses
| at some date if you don't already have kids.
|
| Bug: I think the net worth chart is a bit busted. Mine started at
| 0, but that wasn't obviously wasn't true. While the growth line
| looked reasonable, I think the chart needs to be pushed up by an
| offset.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks Jonathan. Appreciate the callout about the chart -- I'll
| look into that.
|
| For dependents, wouldn't "discount expenses after some date" be
| roughly the same as taking some from your current living
| expenses and putting it into a child expense which eventually
| goes away?
|
| But yeah, point taken. It's probably not the smoothest
| experience. Perhaps having additional ways to control how
| expenses change over time would help? Maybe something along the
| lines of an interactable plot where you can specify different
| values at different ages to interpolate between?
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Very well done. Clear UI. Simple to use and it delivers a good
| overview.
|
| The one thing I would suggest ( I assume this would be a part
| where you attempt to monetize it ) is a referral to financial
| advisors, who can use the information to assist.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks! Interesting thought, though I have a natural hesitance
| towards recommending advisors (who might steer towards active
| management) or investment products, since my initial vision was
| to try to make the tool as unbiased and objective as possible,
| and more in keeping with some of the principles from the
| Bogleheads community. You may have a point though; I would be
| interested to hear where others stand on this.
| trailrunner46 wrote:
| There is a lot of skepticism around financial advisors and
| rightful so given the track record of many (picking insanely
| expensive funds, charging high fees themselves, etc.)
|
| However, I do think there is a place for advisors not to pick
| investments but rather actually plan for life events
| (including tax stuff), which is right up the alley of this
| app). Having someone who could take all of your inputs, ask
| the right followup questions and appropriately model the
| likely range of outcomes on this kind of app could be quite
| attractive.
| scubakid wrote:
| True, planning for life and tax stuff does seem like a more
| distinctly helpful service. I have no connections in the
| financial advisory space, but in general I'd be open to
| discussing this kind of idea further.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I do due to the nature of my work, but I do not feel as
| comfortable recommending anyone specific.
|
| Instead, I would suggest starting by focusing on
| fiduciary financial advisors ( https://money.usnews.com/i
| nvesting/investing-101/articles/wh... ), who have a legal
| duty to not recommend things that do not benefit their
| client. That alone may help with removing some of the
| unease of the referral.
| antonpuz wrote:
| Tried it out and it's awesome! I've been working with
| spreadsheets so far and this takes it to a different level!
| knz42 wrote:
| Is there a way to simulate capital tax? Percentage of taxable
| investments/cash?
| testing_1_2_3_4 wrote:
| I'm super interested in this, but, every time I try this you end
| up losing me in the funnel. It takes too long to set everything
| up and I eventually lose interest and exit.
| scubakid wrote:
| Do you think it would help if I make a "sandbox mode" where you
| can skip onboarding and plan creation and jump straight into a
| scenario pre-configured to model one of several selectable
| templates / personas? That's something I've been debating about
| building for a while but haven't had a chance yet.
| newman314 wrote:
| IMO that would help with some common scenarios
|
| 1. Beginning of career 2. Mid career (20 years in) 3. Close
| to retirement
| xtracto wrote:
| I tried it, filled up all the data and the end screen with a
| "plan" stopped 1 year after my current age with chart lines
| looking kind of botched. I think some calculations may be wrong
| or something.
| scubakid wrote:
| Hmm, this sounds like the kind of thing that could happen if
| you have a huge percentage value in an expense or tax input
| by mistake, or something along those lines that could create
| an immediate bankruptcy scenario. If you double-check
| everything though and think there is a more sinister issue at
| play, I'd be happy to look into it and/or help troubleshoot.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I had roughly the same experience but it was 10 years
| instead of 1. I just took the defaults for tax rates and
| stuff because frankly it already felt enough like doing my
| taxes just to get an idea of how the thing worked.
| scubakid wrote:
| When you say it stopped, did it show a bankruptcy
| condition for you or more like a weird unexplained
| simulation stoppage? If the latter, I'll look into it
| right away, and if you can identify any simple
| reproduction steps that would be very helpful.
| jaclaz wrote:
| JFYI, maybe it is just me, but in Assets ->House you have:
|
| Effective yearly tax rate
|
| Yearly maintenance costs
|
| Yearly insurance rate
|
| I automatically visualize "rate" as a percentage but I see
| "costs" as being expressed in actual money, so I inserted (
| _believed to be inserting_ ) 2,000 Euro in maintenance
| costs which of course ended up being 2,000% of the asset
| value.
|
| Quickest bankrupt ever!
|
| Maybe Yearly Maintenance Rate would be less prone to
| possible errors?
| scubakid wrote:
| Ah good call. I see how that can be confusing. Hopefully
| I'll also be able to add in a system where you can toggle
| some of these inputs between percent and fixed value as
| well.
| jaclaz wrote:
| Another side note.
|
| Still in Assets->House.
|
| Your simulator seems to work "by category", i.e. it takes
| expenses for the house (taxes, maintenance, insurance)
| from the value of the asset?
|
| I.e. with constant income fixed 6000 (salary until
| retirement and same amount as pension, tax exempt, todays
| money, follow inflation), no living expenses, and only a
| house with value fixed to 200000 (but adjusted to
| inflation), 1% tax, 1% maintenance, 1% insurance, the
| value of the asset decreases.
|
| That should be 6000 income tax exempt, 6000 expenses,
| same house, everything fixed but adjusted to inflation.
|
| But it is not like you are going to pay taxes,
| maintenance or insurance with "slices" of your house.
|
| Anyway, with those values I start at 25 Net Worth 200,000
| (only the house) and end up at 92 with a house worth
| 26000 and a lot of cash, 121000.
| scubakid wrote:
| Hmmm, if you open up the "House" asset form and look at
| the "Value Change Over Time" field within the During
| Ownership section is it definitely set to "Match
| Inflation"? I just tried to replicate your scenario, and
| in mine the house maintains the 200k value throughout the
| simulation.
| cddotdotslash wrote:
| It seems that this is a difficult problem to solve. These kinds
| of tools don't provide a lot of value unless they have a
| significant portion of your financial picture. Providing that
| picture takes a lot of manual data entry. I suppose it could
| ask more generic questions first (e.g., "enter total cash,"
| "enter total investments," etc.) but that wouldn't be very
| accurate.
| newman314 wrote:
| +1
|
| Free tier does not appear to persist data. Please do not make
| me re-enter the data if I want to get on a plan later...
| scubakid wrote:
| I'd say the premium / monetization aspect is something I'm
| still open to suggestions on. I knew I wanted most
| functionality to be free, so that everyone could use the tool
| to develop insights about their potential life trajectory and
| trade-offs between different decisions, and I didn't want
| anyone to feel priced out of that experience. Likewise, I
| didn't want to bombard people with ads, and would never want
| to collect and sell data or anything like that. Currently,
| even more advanced features like monte carlo mode are
| available for free... I felt all this left me with few
| remaining monetization options, so I'm currently trying the
| model where data persistence (bringing more convenient repeat
| use) is one of the premium features. If you keep the tab open
| and then eventually upgrade, your data will stay.. but
| currently it will disappear if you close the app without a
| subscription.
| newman314 wrote:
| I think you can find a balance.
|
| Maybe persist for the free plan but only for a month. That
| should give me enough time to decide if I want to convert.
|
| I feel like a lot of products with subscription plans want
| to convert too quickly. I have a full time job and family.
| Life gets in the way of being able to dedicate full
| attention to getting something setup.
| neogodless wrote:
| There's also some uncertainty around persistence of data if
| I start a paid plan (or trial) but do not continue.
|
| Does the data I'd entered thus far get purged, and I would
| have to re-enter it if I picked the plan back up?
|
| I feel like this kind of tool might be something I'd update
| once a quarter or once a year, but not want to pay for
| every month. But if my data is deleted in between uses,
| it's also a lot less useful. Is there a rational middle
| ground?
| scubakid wrote:
| If you go to cancel a subscription, there should be a
| modal that pops up warning that persisted data will be
| removed if you continue to cancel.
|
| And yeah I see your point on wanting to come back and
| update things periodically. Is this perhaps where the
| yearly / lifetime plan options make more sense? Or are
| those priced too steeply in your estimation?
| sheol wrote:
| Thanks! I understand that is not your purpose now, but do you
| plan to extending to businesses? I'd be glad to have such
| decision helping tool :).
|
| Also, congrats for your website. I find it very clear to
| understand what the tool does, why it is useful (your example are
| simple and to the point), and what is your pricing. :+1:
| scubakid wrote:
| Extending the tool to accommodate planning for businesses
| sounds like an interesting prospect, though I'll be the first
| to admit I know less about the nuances there than in the
| personal finance domain. I'll take a note to do some more
| research in this direction, and if you have any further
| thoughts/suggestions on what kind of new features would be
| needed to accommodate use cases like that, I'd be all ears!
| ixacto wrote:
| Cookie prompt is super annoying on mobile (safari) and hard to
| close out of.
| scubakid wrote:
| Apologies. I'll take another look at that on various mobile
| resolutions and make it less obtrusive and easier to close.
| newman314 wrote:
| FWIW, Morgan offers a similar type of service (free) as part of
| their yearly review with me.
|
| I'd be interested in seeing how close/different the projections
| are.
| scubakid wrote:
| If you ever do a comparison, let me know! That would be cool to
| see.
| ne9xt wrote:
| May I also add that I really appreciate your plain english
| privacy summary. The first thing that I think about when using a
| tool like this how my data can be used without my permission for
| various nefarious purposes. I do appreciate your effort to leave
| things client side and to save/load data from the client as well.
| scubakid wrote:
| Sure thing! From the beginning I set out to be as respectful as
| possible of people's data, but I gathered from the last HN post
| that I needed to improve some of the communication on that.
| Hopefully the summary helps, as well as some of the new data
| storage options for subscribers.
| mrcolin000 wrote:
| Just created a HN account to say how great this looks. Ive signed
| up and wont be surprised if I grab the paid tier. This is exactly
| the kind of tool I can get a lot out of! nice work.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks! If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to
| reach out any time.
| blastro wrote:
| Very impressive!
| diordiderot wrote:
| Raise your prices
| scubakid wrote:
| What do you think would be reasonable?
| williamdclt wrote:
| This is great, as somebody that's inexperience and uninterested
| in financial planning (but aware I can't ignore it), I really
| appreciate the simplicity and clear language.
|
| I misread what you were saying in other comments about a sandbox
| and thought "nah, what this really needs is prefilled scenarios".
| Looks like you have the right idea: I'd absolutely love that, I
| have no idea what to fill in most of these boxes and would like
| some examples! That could orient your tool towards education
| rather than planning though
| scubakid wrote:
| Wow, if I had known just how popular a feature this would be I
| would have done it already! It's going to the top of the list
| now. And yeah I think the planning process does have an
| educational element to it, and the way you can quickly
| experiment with different ideas can help to discover and
| quantify trade-offs. I'm sure the prefilled template/scenario
| options would enhance that educational aspect further.
| fifthofhisname wrote:
| *Incredible* product. I signed up for the monthly membership and,
| if all goes well, I will likely stick around or buy the lifetime
| membership.
|
| I currently use Undebt It[0] to manage my debts. It supports all
| kinds of debt payment plans like snowball, avalanche, cash flow
| index[1], etc. One feature I love is the "extra debt payment"
| that basically throws an addition X dollars at the highest
| interest debt (or whatever debt is prioritized by the selected
| repayment plan). When that debt is paid off, the amount rolls
| over to the next debt on the list. This helps a person to pay off
| debts faster and reduce total interest paid across the lifetime
| of the debt(s). For a family with a few credit cards, a car
| payment or two, and a mortgage this can save them tens of
| thousands of dollars.
|
| Three suggestions:
|
| 1. Create an "extra debt payment" feature that goes towards my
| prioritized debt(s). This amount is in excess of the total
| minimum payment amounts. It could be towards the highest interest
| rate, lowest balance, split across all accounts, etc. When a debt
| is zeroed out the payment automatically adjusts to target the
| remaining debt(s). Example: two debts, each of $500/mo and an
| additional $100 "extra" per month for a total outflow of
| $1100/mo. When the first $500/mo is paid off then new outflow is
| $600/mo.
|
| 2. For each debt "account" add an option to "roll over" the
| monthly payment when the debt is paid off. This amount would then
| target the next prioritized debt amount. Example: two debts, each
| of $500/mo for a total outflow of $1000/mo. When the first
| $500/mo is paid off the "extra" $500/mo targets the second debt,
| for an unchanged outflow of $1000/mo.
|
| Combining #1 and #2 example: two debts, each of $500/mo and an
| "extra" payment of $100/mo for a total outflow of $1100/mo. When
| the first $500/mo is paid off the "paid off" $500/mo targets the
| second debt (as well as the "extra" $100/mo), for an unchanged
| outflow of $1100/mo.
|
| 3. Stack the icons on the chart. The vertical scaling of the
| chart is wonky when adding a 10+ items all in the same year -
| this makes the chart seem squashed and difficult to parse.
|
| Again - GREAT work. Definitely sent this to a few friends. If you
| don't respond I will shoot you an email in a few days. I'm sure
| you're very busy with the new release. Good luck!
|
| [0] https://undebt.it/ [1] https://undebt.it/blog/cash-flow-
| index-cfi-debt-payoff-metho...
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks for the thoughtful response! And sure, feel free to
| continue the conversation over email if you like.
|
| Currently, when you create a debt item or financed asset "X",
| there should be an "Extra X Payments" financial goal
| automatically generated, which you can click and drag higher up
| the list if you care more about allocating extra available
| yearly income towards that than certain other priorities. Is
| this feature working for you currently? And how close does it
| come to addressing / approximating your use cases above?
| [deleted]
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