[HN Gopher] Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance
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Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance
Author : scubakid
Score : 146 points
Date : 2022-04-19 13:52 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (projectionlab.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (projectionlab.com)
| hammeiam wrote:
| I'm so incredibly impressed with this tool. In addition to the
| slick interface, it has some killer features and niceties:
|
| - You can add a "dependent expense" (have a kid) at a certain age
|
| - You can run Monte Carlo simulations of your portfolio
| performance
|
| - Expenses can be configured to increase linearly, with
| inflation, up to an amount, or using a custom function that the
| user can input graphically
|
| - Adding a house purchase automatically cancels out your existing
| rent expense if you indicate that it will be your residence
|
| - Easily visualize all of your projected earnings from portfolio
| growth and losses due to inflation and taxes
|
| As an avid YNAB-er, this is heaven.
| geeny777 wrote:
| This is absolutely awesome. I really appreciate how snappy it
| feels. I wouldn't mind if it was supported by something like
| (tasteful) personal capital or credit card affiliate links.
|
| Otherwise, it's too expensive for cheap fire-minded folks like
| myself. Adding a subscription to this would push back our FIRE
| dates :)
|
| Persistent storage (even if it's just a text file I have to copy-
| paste every time) for $12/ a year would add enough value to be
| worth it for me, and for me to replace my spreadsheet with this.
| samtimalsina wrote:
| Wow, I had completely forgotten about this. My login still works!
| I signed up for the original ProjectiFi when it came out but did
| not use it much. I am a heavy YNAB user and this type of software
| is right up my alley. I am going give this a whirl again.
| scubakid wrote:
| Let me know how it goes! One trend I noticed with people coming
| to this from budgeting apps like YNAB is that sometimes the
| Cash-Flow Priority system in ProjectionLab takes a minute to
| grasp. And for emergency fund / cash reserve goals, I'm in the
| process of adding a few more options to try to provide better
| support for different strategies there. If you find yourself
| looking for those, you can try them out on the early access
| site here (v3.0.1): https://projectifi-201a2--dev-
| xsmyy9im.web.app
| shorne525 wrote:
| I like the interface and the fact I don't have to connect any of
| my personal accounts. I've used other products that require
| permissions or user/pw and usually the connections fail or have
| some issue that makes them useless. It's nice I can do this
| manually, which I have a spreadsheet I use once a month anyway
| manually. I'm going to keep playing with this, maybe I can get
| rid of my spreadsheet!
| scubakid wrote:
| If there's anything you feel your spreadsheet still does
| better, just let me know! Always working on new features and
| improvements. In the past I've had some bad experiences with
| services that require linked accounts as well; seems like
| there's still a surprising amount of friction there.
| leoqa wrote:
| I'm also a subscriber and wanted to export the some stuff to
| a Google Sheet to give to my financial adviser- I had to do
| some funky js console stuff.
|
| Adding an export, with yearly/monthly resolution and
| customizable columns would be trivial probably.
| scubakid wrote:
| Recently I added a tabular view with JSON/Excel export
| option (v2.7.0); let me know if that helps!
| ackbar03 wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, do you have a lot paid customers for this?
| It's clearly a useful tool but I'm just wondering whether there
| is a significant cohort that is interested in paying actually
| paying for value added services.
| scubakid wrote:
| Not enough for me to work on this full-time, but enough that it
| continues to be an energizing side project. I'm sure there
| could be more if I would pull my head out of the sand and spend
| more than ~0% of the time doing marketing haha. Certainly all
| the options and customization appeal more to the DIY types
| and/or people interested in building detailed plans for
| financial independence / FIRE.
| YPCrumble wrote:
| I worked at a startup that pivoted away from this product so
| have the same question. We found that people wouldn't pay for
| our product that showed financial projections based on current
| data.
|
| I would be really interested to hear how this product is
| different - maybe there's a different monetization strategy or
| a different marketing strategy?
| scubakid wrote:
| So far I've just been building what I really wanted to exist
| for my own planning purposes combined with the best ideas
| from early adopters, and then I've posted in a few places and
| gotten a little traction here and there. I can see how it
| might be difficult to build and sustain a real startup around
| this kind of product; it does feel a bit niche, and I haven't
| tried ads but I've always imagined that the target audience
| would probably be especially hostile towards them.
| ekanes wrote:
| A startup pivoting away can mean a few different things,
| but one thing it doesn't mean is this couldn't turn into
| something big for a long-term-focused solo dev!
| actuallyalys wrote:
| > I can see how it might be difficult to build and sustain
| a real startup around this kind of product
|
| Yes, I think the most important difference is that, as far
| as I can tell, you're looking for a bit of side income
| rather than trying to jump start a whole company.
| scubakid wrote:
| What direction did that startup take their product out of
| curiosity? Did they ditch the projection/forecasting
| element altogether or still keep a vestige of it?
| kyharri wrote:
| This is fantastic. Kudos on the hard work you've got one more
| paid subscriber here.
| scubakid wrote:
| Glad you like it so far! Possibly the hardest I've worked on a
| side project by an order of magnitude... actually maybe that's
| not true, in years past I did spend an irresponsible amount of
| time coding video games that no one would ever buy :D
| simanyay wrote:
| Played around with the sandbox for a few minutes and it feels
| great! Can't wait to try it out properly on the weekend.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks! Did you find the sandbox intuitive? Or did you feel
| like it needs more persona types? Recently some people
| expressed they would prefer a parameterized system that tries
| to dial things in a little closer to their situation... but
| since then I've tweaked the presentation/phrasing a bit to try
| to make it clearer the sandbox is just for showing how things
| work.
| eprout wrote:
| Lovely interface. What does your tech stack look like?
| jasfi wrote:
| Definitely, the web design and UI immediately grabbed my
| attention.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks! It was tricky to build in so much flexibility and
| customization while still keeping the overall UI feeling
| relatively clean.. I try to strike a good balance there, but
| if you feel there are areas where I haven't succeeded,
| definitely let me know.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks! I built it with Vue.js, Vuetify, Chart.js, and
| Firebase. Firebase only comes into play for those who get
| premium and enable data synchronization though.
| eprout wrote:
| feedmethecorn wrote:
| The interface is really awesome. Nice work overall! I feel like
| this is something a financial institution/investment firm would
| seek to acquire.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks! And I definitely didn't build it with acquisition in
| mind (or have any experience navigating those waters), but I
| suppose stranger things have happened haha. My intuition is
| that big firms/institutions would probably be looking for
| something with more crazy growth metrics and stickiness though,
| don't you think?
| feedmethecorn wrote:
| Financial institutions have been known to throw big money at
| products like this one. Many are looking to incorporate new,
| unique features into their online banking platforms.
| scubakid wrote:
| I couldn't find a good financial planning tool that felt modern,
| nuanced, and actually fun to use... and I ended up spending all
| my free time this past year building one: ProjectionLab
|
| https://projectionlab.com
|
| It doesn't involve linking your financial accounts, you don't
| have to make an account to try it, the free version has a lot of
| features, and there's a sandbox mode if you just want to see how
| the interface works.
|
| Last year I posted a prototype here (back when it was called
| ProjectiFi): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27844194, and
| the early feedback from the HN community was extremely helpful!
| I've put in about 1,000 more hours of dev time on nights/weekends
| since then, and it's pretty much a whole new app. Here are just a
| few of the things you can do with it, many inspired by the HN
| commentary:
|
| - Build detailed and flexible plans for your future that go
| beyond the standard online retirement calculators
|
| - Backtest on historical data and run Monte Carlo simulations
|
| - Model international scenarios with various account types and
| tax estimation presets
|
| - Experiment rapidly: the simulation engine runs in your browser
| and doesn't need to send your data server-side
|
| - Control how/where your data is stored: cloud sync, localStorage
| only, or manual import/export, (client-side by default, no
| persistence in the free tier)
|
| - Plan for goals like achieving financial independence, taking
| time off for travel, home ownership, starting a rental empire,
| etc.
|
| - Create granular models for how
| accounts/income/expenses/inflation/etc change over time using
| interactive plots
|
| - Build dynamic configurations using milestones that support
| multiple criteria and conditional logic
|
| - Create custom plots to visualize the metrics you care about
|
| - Plan separately or as a couple
|
| - Create and manage client accounts with the Pro version
|
| - Track progress over time and see it overlaid on top of your
| projections
|
| - Cross-compare between different plans, or stage + analyze
| multiple changes within a plan (and revert if desired)
|
| - Choose your own icons to personalize things
|
| - And a lot more; for a full breakdown of everything that's new,
| see the version history
|
| If you feel like checking it out, I would love to hear what you
| think! Most of the functionality is free (minus data
| persistence), but for anyone interested in upgrading to Premium,
| you can use coupon code "HN-10" for 10% off any plan :)
| actuallyalys wrote:
| This tool is really flexible and you mention "a rental empire,"
| so perhaps it's covered already, but it might be worth trying
| to add features for freelancers, contract workers, or people
| starting side businesses. I think those people would be more
| willing to spend money on a planning tool, since there's more
| decisions to make. (I think targeting financial planners is
| also a smart move.)
| scubakid wrote:
| What kind of new features do you feel would add the most
| value for freelancer / side-business use cases?
| tewwill wrote:
| Fantastic UI. Congrats. It would be really cool to be able
| to model personal assets such as businesses. For example, I
| would like to be able to plan when I sell one of my
| businesses in X amount of years for a price of Y, then
| perhaps have options on how to spread the proceeds of that
| sale into different assets like cash, stocks / shares or
| one off purchases like a house.
|
| One thing I couldn't work out how to do was to add one off
| purchases once you had already created a plan. Is that
| possible?
| scubakid wrote:
| What kind of one-off purchases do you have in mind?
| Within the plan interface, there are a bunch of
| expandable columns at the bottom, and within each of
| those you can create/manage things like types of income,
| expenses, assets, cash-flow priorities, etc. You can
| control frequency on things like income/expenses; I
| imagine setting an expense to happen once would be an
| example of the kind of one-off you're looking for? You
| should also be able to model selling X for the price of Y
| pretty efficiently as well, perhaps with a single custom
| income event type and using the Advanced change-over-time
| editor.
| rco8786 wrote:
| This is fabulous, will definitely be giving you some money next
| time I sit down to do finances.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks so much! If you have questions, suggestions, or new
| feature ideas, feel free to hit me up on discord any time:
| https://discord.com/invite/dZQ5DDEmT7
| jpuderer wrote:
| Same. This is exactly the product I didn't know I wanted until
| I saw it.
| bestinterest wrote:
| I just put in some numbers and wow. Unless I'm missing something
| incredible my findings are kinda depressing.
|
| The top 5% salary in the UK is PS81,000 -> after tax is PS54,817.
| PS4568 a month. Say you spend PS2k a month. That's PS2568 for
| investments per month. Using the calc, it seems you would be able
| to retire at age 50.
|
| I quickly checked the US salary percentiles and the top 5th
| percentile of PS81,000 in the UK is equal to the top 15th in the
| US. Thats 3x ceiling you could climb through not to mention taxes
| in the US are much much better?
|
| Am I crazy?
|
| https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-f...
| https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php
| https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-perce...
| scubakid wrote:
| It does seem like there are some pretty wild discrepancies in
| total comp between countries. If the distributed/remote trend
| continues progressing, I wonder if we'll see things start to
| equalize at all in our lifetimes, or if there are other
| geopolitical / macroeconomic / other factors that are more
| significant.
| d4mi3n wrote:
| It should up to a point. A lot of high paying tech jobs are
| in regulated industries that sometimes have hard restrictions
| on who they're allowed to employ. For example, I know someone
| who works at Oracle Cloud and works on projects for the US
| DoD. For these projects Oracle is required to employ US
| citizens, perform background checks, and in some cases ensure
| those workers have clearance to work with classified
| information.
|
| I suspect there are other high paying jobs/markets with
| similar restrictions. It'll be interesting to see how the
| dust settles over the next few years as geographical location
| within a country and without impacts the labor market.
| scubakid wrote:
| It'll be interesting to see how quite a lot goes over the
| next few years, given recent events...
| TheHideout wrote:
| Nice work. I remember being very critical of the first version of
| this a year ago and it looks like you legitimately took the
| feedback to heart. Thanks.
| scubakid wrote:
| Sure did! Many of the original comments were tough but fair,
| and I appreciated that. And if you play around with it some
| more and end up feeling like it's still rough around the edges,
| don't hold back.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Very cool. I vaguely remember the ProjectFi version. It seems
| like you made a lot of enhancements. Looks good.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks! I've put a ton of work in since then, and it's been a
| fun side project that kept me focused and energized and
| thinking positive thoughts during the pandemic. Also, the fact
| you remember it as "ProjectFi" is one of the many reasons for
| the rebrand -- that first "i" in ProjectiFi got lost by so many
| people.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Ha! Fortunately, in my case I was in a position not to make
| that mistake. Project Fi (now Google Fi) used to be my phone
| provider. That does seem like it would be a common mistake,
| though.
|
| It's a good product so it's nice to see that it's still
| getting some love.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Haha I did missed that "i". Seems like a it's worthy of more
| than just "side project" title. My side projects look like
| crap compared to this. Very professionally done.
| scubakid wrote:
| Well, I must admit there is a graveyard of 60 or so other
| projects over the years before making anything worth
| posting here. The dream would be to find a way to work on
| ProjectionLab full-time, but so far I'm preferring the
| side-project/bootstrap route focused on growing it slowly
| and sustainably, in contrast to the VC "unicorn or bust"
| mentality.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I think many investment firms would be interested in
| buying it out. Just look at the ancient tools the big
| places use. Places like r/stocks pretty much joke about
| Vanguard having outdated interfaces/tools.
| neill wrote:
| This is great, I took some time to get a fairly in depth plan
| together. There are two things that stuck out:
|
| 1. You've got RSU's (at first it wasn't clear to me where this
| would be addressed, but I think it made sense once I came across
| it) but I don't see a dedicated strategy for dealing with
| ISO/NSO's. That'd be helpful for the tech community especially.
|
| 2. I spent the 10-15 minutes working on a plan knowing that I'd
| need to upgrade to pro for every feature, but it seems like I
| need to upgrade to save my plan. I ended up not paying because I
| don't have enough time right now to fully evaluate this, but I
| might look back later. It would have been great if I could have
| entered my email and saved my plan without paying, and then had
| to later pay to access it. This gives you the benefit of getting
| my email address, and then sending me an email to access my plan
| so that I've got a second touchpoint to your product when I check
| my email in the future.
|
| Looking forward to using this more in depth in the future!
| scubakid wrote:
| If you've still got your plan up, happy to give you an extended
| trial if you want!
|
| But overall I think you're right on both points. I've been
| wanting to add better support for modeling options for a while;
| for anyone who'd like to bump priority there, feel free to
| upvote this item in changemap:
| https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi/task/5735-better-...
|
| For #2, I'll do some thinking to gauge level of effort in
| rigging up a mechanic like that with the current stack. Losing
| data sucks, and I should take more steps to reduce the chances
| of that happening to anyone in the onboarding funnel.
| waterproof wrote:
| Looking forward to trying this. Last time I searched around for a
| tool like this, all I found was OnTrajectory (which seems right
| up your alley). Do you have a comparison with that or other
| similar tools?
| scubakid wrote:
| I haven't given that tool much of a try specifically, but
| overall I wanted to build something where you could do granular
| and flexible modeling across multiple scenarios in a modern and
| responsive UI, where you don't link your accounts, you control
| and experiment with a wide variety of options and assumptions,
| can plot/visualize what you want and see breakdowns of what
| happened in each simulated year, etc. If you check it out, I'd
| be particularly interested to hear what you think of the
| Milestone system, where you can define key events/stages in
| your life, add multiple criteria with conditional logic for
| when they should occur, and bind the start/end of other events
| in your plan to them (with support for offsets as well). So
| far, I haven't seen anyone else try to build that kind of
| system.
| syntaxing wrote:
| I loved this when this first came out but kind of ran into this
| spiral of using it like a game. I couldn't quite do anything
| actionable from it. Any advice on how I can use this to improve
| my future financial situation?
| scubakid wrote:
| I'm curious to hear more about this "spiral" haha. The way I
| use it is to create a few different plans and compare between
| them to assess long-term tradeoffs of different decisions, and
| come back sometimes to update things and consider new paths or
| opportunities. The tool can't give you alpha of course, but my
| hope is that building a better understanding of the spectrum of
| possible outcomes helps people plan more confidently for how to
| live life on their terms.
| zwass wrote:
| Glad to see that you've continued investing in this project! I
| paid for the Premium version back in the Projectifi times and
| would have loved a heads up by email that you made some
| significant updates.
| scubakid wrote:
| I sent out a few rebranding messages and a bunch of updates on
| new features over the past few months, but it sounds like maybe
| you subscribed before I even had an email list haha. Thanks for
| being an early adopter! It's folks like you that helped
| encourage me to keep working on it :)
| greenpizza13 wrote:
| I knew this looked familiar! I paid for Projectfi this year.
| Can I use the same account?
| scubakid wrote:
| Yep! Provided you mean ProjectiFi, same account should work.
| Man, that first "i" really did get lost a lot, didn't it?
| bredren wrote:
| Me too! OG 5/3/21. How do we get on the mailing list?
| scubakid wrote:
| Ayyy thanks! There's an option in the setup wizard now and
| also on the blog section.
| nova27 wrote:
| This looks so pretty, building a web app myself and one thing i
| am struggling with is the UX/UI, I can build the app but my
| initial design/ux looks like crap, op did you design the UX of
| this yourself or do you hire a designer to come up with the
| design ?
| scubakid wrote:
| All me actually.. though I do have a couple UX buddies I bounce
| ideas off from time to time. My programming journey started in
| middle school coding videogames to play with friends, and
| perhaps that's always shaped the way I approach projects: as
| much as possible, I like to visualize the end state (layout,
| interactions, the little things you want to be able to do as a
| user and how that should feel) before getting too far down the
| road coding the underlying systems.
| [deleted]
| morelandjs wrote:
| Congrats! If you decide you want to monetize this, truebill sold
| to rocket mortgage for something like a billion dollars. I could
| see your features supplementing their current product nicely.
| scubakid wrote:
| I wonder what metrics drive acquisitions like that the most...
| I would imagine they might look more for products with a huge
| userbase, stickiness/gamification, or a demonstrably high
| virality factor, no?
| chrishemsworth wrote:
| It looks pretty great, I hope to try it more extensively in the
| future. I was somewhat surprised how intensely I was overcome
| with existential dread as I put in my information, and just left.
| It's hard to approach thinking at all about finances, being some
| years into a pretty volatile career and having basically no
| assets, investments, savings of any kind, debt, and very rapidly
| rising costs.
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