[HN Gopher] Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance...
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Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
Hey everyone! After another year of building as a solo dev on
nights and weekends, I'm back with an update on this post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31083093. TL;DR -
ProjectionLab (https://projectionlab.com) is a privacy-friendly
personal finance planning tool where you can create financial plans
that go beyond the standard online retirement calculators. And by
popular request, it now supports self-hosting for Lifetime users!
Something I'm grateful for is that our community here on HN is the
difference between PL existing and not. There was actually a time
early on when I was one day away from halting work on it. I posted
here on a whim, and was shocked to receive some really constructive
and energizing feedback that went on to power my indie dev journey
over the past two and a half years. As a quick recap, the story
started when I dove head-first down the financial independence
rabbit hole. I wanted a hands-on and visual way to explore the
trade-offs between different life paths. One thing led to another,
and I decided to build ProjectionLab. After last year's Show HN, I
really put my nose to the grindstone, and here are some of the big
developments: - Self-hosting for Lifetime users (spin up your own
private deployment, based on Docker Compose, includes support for
auth/encryption) - Cash-flow visualization for each simulated year
(sankey charts) - Tax analytics (detailed breakdowns for projected
income, taxes, marginal rates, effective brackets, etc) - Major
redesign of entire app, with landing page and resources now split
into separate project - Filing separately option to improve
support for international locations that don't have joint filing -
Roth Conversions and 72t (SEPP) distribution modeling -
Improvements to US tax estimation (Secure 2.0 updates, rental
property tax deductions, Medicare + IRMAA, NIIT, principal
residence exclusion, etc) - Better support for planning as a
couple - More modeling options for cash-flow priorities to support
different budgeting philosophies and goals - Extra liquidity +
withdrawal options, ability to fund expenses with specific accounts
or route income to specific accounts - Customization options for
Monte Carlo simulations (characterization of success rates and
outcome types, option to set random seed, etc) - And a whole bunch
more! (https://projectionlab.com/changelog) The HN community has
had a huge role in shaping my overall direction with PL, and I
can't wait to hear what you all think of the updates and where you
would like to see things go from here. As always, PL is free to
try, with no need to create an account. It does not ask to link
your financial accounts, and it has a sandbox mode if you just want
to hop in and see how it works. --Kyle
Author : scubakid
Score : 392 points
Date : 2023-07-24 15:25 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (projectionlab.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (projectionlab.com)
| screye wrote:
| Every few years I see this posted on HN. Every time I play with
| it. Every time I am delighted by it. Every time, I think I'll use
| it. And then I don't.
|
| To be fair, my finances are simple to a fault, so I haven't felt
| like using it. But, once things ramp up, this will be the first
| tool I subscribe to.
|
| It's a great tool. I recommend.
| scubakid wrote:
| Anything you feel the tool is missing that might make it more
| compelling?
|
| Personally I use it more on a monthly or even quarterly basis
| to consider new decisions, update stuff, etc. That fits with
| the usage pattern I initially imagined for a long-term planning
| app, but I'm always open to other ideas.
|
| P.S. I started working on PL in 2021, so we're not quite in
| "every few years" territory yet ;)
| teach wrote:
| I hadn't messed around with this when you posted previously
| but today I did.
|
| I tried to forecast buying a house, but it seems to have
| defaulted to 0% APR for Infinity. I don't know anything about
| buying houses; that's why I'm using a tool like this in the
| first place!
|
| I poked around and was finally able to open a screen to enter
| values for a bunch of things but I don't know what's
| reasonable.
|
| It kinda feels like your onboarding wizard is too good -- it
| creates the illusion that I can use your site even if I don't
| really know anything about anything, but then trying to
| forecast expects me to know a lot more.
|
| I know that's not very actionable feedback, but that's what
| has put me off actually paying for a subscription so far.
| scubakid wrote:
| You make a good point that adding more educational
| scaffolding would be helpful. I try to include some
| sensible defaults where I can (e.g. assuming houses are
| going to have some maintenance/insurance/tax costs
| associated with them), but yeah in some places existing
| knowledge or independent research comes in handy.
|
| Are there sections in the app that jump out to you as good
| places to inject more educational content? As you point
| out, one of the input fields when you add as house and
| choose "financed" is APR. Maybe that could link to a
| dedicated page with common rates based on a few parameters
| like credit score, or perhaps even a separate tool
| dedicated to estimating that sort of thing?
| gymbeaux wrote:
| I love that this has the ability to track multiple scenarios eg
| FIRE and LeanFIRE. I can see people using this to compare kids vs
| no kids as well.
|
| I would love the ability to simulate 401k contributions assuming
| an annual max contribution increase. For example, I will often
| put into an investment returns calculator that I am contributing
| $20k per year to retirement, however 10 years from now the annual
| max will probably be over $30k.
| scubakid wrote:
| PL assumes contribution limits increase over time to match
| inflation, so if you switch to visualizing results in actual
| currency (as opposed to today's currency), and you choose to
| contribute the max, you should see those nominal contributions
| increasing over time.
| aperrien wrote:
| How can I alter the 401k match rate?
| kderbyma wrote:
| Nice! this is the closest to what I have been wanting to build
| for myself.
| scubakid wrote:
| If there are any pieces of what you envisioned that you would
| like to see added to PL, let me know.
| ot1138 wrote:
| Funny how the same things get done over and over again.
|
| I went down this road in 2016. Spent about a year on an
| incredibly sophisticated retirement planner, with customizable
| scenarios. It was personally very useful so I started down the
| commercialization path.
|
| I found that a bunch of people had tried this with a direct-to-
| consumer model and it ended up being small potatoes every time.
| All of the companies who had achieved any scale at all were doing
| so through partnerships with banks or financial planners.
|
| In the end, I decided it wasn't something I wanted to spend years
| of my life with. I found OnTrajectory, which was a "good enough"
| solution at the time (and still is).
| scubakid wrote:
| If you like, feel free to share a link to your tool if it's
| still active -- I'd be curious to check it out.
|
| In a way, my hope was that "small potatoes" for a large company
| might still translate into "sustainable lifestyle business" for
| an indie/solo dev.
| fishtoaster wrote:
| Oh hey, it's you again!
|
| I discovered projectionlab (formerly projectfi) on HN a while
| back and have been loving it. Every other "retirement calculator"
| I found was a dozen text fields and a simple output graph or two
| - Projection Lab gave me what I _really_ wanted, which was the
| ability to do much more involved modeling of various scenarios:
|
| - What happens if I buy a house in X years?
|
| - What happens if my old company IPOs and I get a windfall of $Y
| in X years?
|
| - What happens if I change assumptions on investment returns or
| inflation rates?
|
| - What happens if I retire at various different ages?
|
| - What happens if my salary increases by 2, 5, 10, 30% each year?
|
| - What happens if we do this kind of mortgage or that kind of
| mortgate?
|
| - All of the above, but also modeling my in wife's finances?
|
| - All of the above, but with beautiful, interactive graphs
| instead of my ugly spreadsheet outputs
|
| - All of the above, but without the several formula typos that I
| made while building my spreadsheet
|
| Anyway, it's amazing, I love it, and nothing else out there
| really seemed to compare. I found your free plan more than met my
| needs, but I wound up subscribing just to support it. I'm quite
| hoping you're able to make this successful long-term so that I
| can keep using it until I eventually retire. :)
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks so much! I use PL for all my own planning too of course,
| and keeping it around is very much the plan.
|
| Is there a particular direction in which you'd like to see me
| build from here? The public roadmap is overflowing with ideas
| at this point, and I'm curious how folks would rack and stack
| them.
| j45 wrote:
| I like that this is a solo-dev project, but there's probably
| loke, a good chunk of people who like this tool likely have
| built some kind of spreadsheet or other thing to get close to
| it and likely know exactly what they would like to see for
| certain things.
|
| Having the abilty to perhaps build our own models and keep
| them to ourselves, or maybe have them available to share
| might not be a bad idea.
|
| I'm not sure if this is reporting, or setting up a sequence
| or frequency of payments, etc. Depends on the backend I
| suppose.
| scubakid wrote:
| Having a little trouble parsing the specific feature ideas
| here. It seems like one of them may be an ability to share
| a read-only view of your plans... but on the other(s) I
| might need a little more detail.
| ramses0 wrote:
| Plug-ins. "The Modeling Store":
|
| * Startup9000 Simulator
|
| * ClassicAutosAsInvestments Simulator
|
| * My Personal Stamp Collection API Plug-in (not-public,
| not-for-sale)
|
| Basically, theres enough weird stuff out there that could
| be a component of someone's financial hopes and dreams,
| that communities could sprout on being able to enhance
| around a topic.
|
| There's also that first step of needing/wanting to be
| able to API-into the product to explore the idea to see
| if it's even something that can be modeled.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Being from the UK, having a plugin layer able to
| differentiate US from UK implications on finances would
| be extremely useful. But also as a fellow developer I
| hate to recommend a level of refactoring that might break
| you!
| scubakid wrote:
| have you seen the UK tax template (plan settings > tax)
| and account types? curious what additional controls /
| differentiation you'd like to see.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Ah - no :-) I just read the feature list and didn't dig
| deeper. Just assumed it was going to be US-only.
| Impressive if not. How do you keep up?
| chromatin wrote:
| > share a read-only view of your plans
|
| I think this is because you are conflating "model" and
| "plan"; whereas the conventional use of plan probably
| means model, when playing in your Sandbox it looks as if
| "plan" is model+data.
|
| The grandparent poster is describing sharing models.
| fishtoaster wrote:
| I can't really think of much to add, honestly!
|
| Iirc the last time I was using it heavily, the only issue I
| was having trouble with was modeling drawdowns of existing
| funds. It kept drawing down my wife's account to build up
| mine. It didn't affect the overall outcome (we had the same
| dollar amount together regardless), but it was a little
| annoying and made it harder to figure out which account was
| actually running low. That said, it's extremely possible that
| I was just doing something wrong and just hadn't configured
| it correctly. Whenever I get back to it, I'll work up a
| minimal repro case and ask about it in the discord. :)
| palnewbro wrote:
| Looks awesome! Could you share your tech stack to build it?
| scubakid wrote:
| Sure thing. I'm using Vue.js, Vuetify, Chart.js, Firebase,
| Paddle, and GCP. Happy to field any questions if you've been
| wondering what any of those are like.
| itake wrote:
| I miss when websites had username only login. I get that password
| recovery is a thing, but I use a password manager.
|
| Why do you need my email address?
| scubakid wrote:
| In this case, I'm using Firebase auth and didn't see an auth
| provider option to allow username only. I think it may let you
| sign up with a nonexistent email though, so maybe that's close-
| ish to what you were looking for?
| edent wrote:
| I really appreciate that this includes UK specific stuff! So many
| things are US$ only.
|
| I'm slightly confused by the pricing. Is the free plan persistent
| only in 1 browser? Have I understood that right?
| scubakid wrote:
| The sandbox is free, but data persistence is one of the premium
| features (though there is also a free trial for premium).
|
| My thought process was that I wanted to make as much of the
| planning functionality as I could free to try and low-friction.
| I'm always open to feedback on pricing model though. Sounds
| like you would prefer to see a level of persistence in the free
| tier? If you have more thoughts on how that should work, let me
| know!
| jstummbillig wrote:
| If you want to make it a lifetime thing maybe consider giving
| 6+ month trials to hook people in and show skin. I considered
| this for this type of app. Congratulations on the launch!
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks, good point. I do grant extended trials on request
| (as described on the pricing page), but maybe I should make
| that a more prominent thing?
| jstummbillig wrote:
| I think you could easily use it to drive a point home:
| It's designed to be a for life SaaS -- and you believe in
| that design so much that the first year of many to come
| is on you.
| tarwin wrote:
| Looks super awesome. I was worried about where the data was
| stored, but it looks like you've already answered that.
|
| Have you looked at adding Google Drive sync? I've done it myself
| (on a project you've just inspired me to post about on HN) and is
| a super easy way for people to sync their own data without having
| to do any kind of setup.
|
| It seems you should be able to do this with other online storage
| using OAuth but I haven't found anything else that works frontend
| only.
| scubakid wrote:
| Google drive sync didn't occur to me, but I'll check it out!
| Could be a nice option to add to the storage method suite if
| they have APIs that would be easy to integrate.
| aperrien wrote:
| Is there an option to add Non-Publicly Traded Securities?
| scubakid wrote:
| It might be helpful to repurpose/rename one of the existing
| account types and set up some custom liquidity/withdrawal
| settings. Or perhaps use a custom asset from the assets
| section.
|
| If there are any specific mechanics you have trouble modeling,
| let me know -- would be good to capture them on the roadmap.
| mitchel0022 wrote:
| Looks a bit expensive but they again you're targeting finance
| nuts so maybe not.
|
| As a Canadian it looks like you're missing the FHSA as well,
| though it is relatively new.
|
| Any plans to allow adding stocks to accounts? So I could add that
| I hold 1000 shares of XEQT in my TFSA and it would update the
| value automatically? At the very least a flat interest option
| would be nice for savings accounts.
| scubakid wrote:
| Good point on FHSA! For savings accounts, you should be able to
| go into the Growth section of the account form in the plan
| interface and edit what the account yields.
|
| It would be great to get your thoughts on tickers/tracking in
| the item on the public roadmap about account linking. Some good
| back-and-forth on there, and I'm still not settled on which
| approach to take.
| tantalic wrote:
| Is there any way to trial the self hosted version? I'm rather
| interested, partially as someone who doesn't like the idea of
| putting such data "in the cloud." (For products with less
| sensitive data I would try the monthly subscription first.) I'm
| assuming not, and that the self hosted is probably a small
| percentage of your customer base. But worth asking!
| scubakid wrote:
| Easiest way to get a feel for the self-hosted version is just
| to play around with the sandbox in the web app and enter fake
| data if you like. The planning experience is essentially the
| same.
|
| If you did end up jumping for the self-hosted version though
| and hated it for whatever reason, I could always refund you.
| mcjiggerlog wrote:
| I just had a play around with this for the first time in a long
| while (I tried it when it was projectfi), and it's in a really
| great place - well done!
|
| Love that you support countries other than the US - that's very
| much appreciated.
|
| What I find when setting up long-term plans like this is that you
| realize just how much key life decisions affect the outcomes,
| along with how much uncertainty I have over those life decisions!
| Being able to explore those permutations is definitely very
| insightful.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks for playing around with the new version! And sounds like
| it's a good thing I rebranded to ProjectionLab -- that first
| 'i' in ProjectiFi was way too easy to miss ;)
|
| Is there a certain direction you'd like to see me take the tool
| from here?
| mcjiggerlog wrote:
| One thing I'd like to see is a better way to estimate the
| cost of kids, and specifically per-child. If I could just
| click a button and have the average cost for a child for my
| country added from a certain year, that would be awesome.
| scubakid wrote:
| That's a neat idea! when I estimate future expenses,
| typically I'll do independent analysis and then bring my
| final numbers into PL. But I think you're right that
| there's an opportunity to include some country/region
| benchmarks or perhaps integrate APIs to pull them on-
| demand. Do you happen to know of any data providers that
| might be straightforward to integrate for that sort of
| thing?
| epolanski wrote:
| Is the pro tier where you manage clients legal?
|
| Quite sure you *cannot* give financial advice and manage anything
| in Europe this would be illegal.
| ravenstine wrote:
| This looks awesome! It's exactly what I've been looking for; not
| a tool for investment geeks, but a practical, everyday, personal
| finance app. Just signed up for a trial!
|
| Some feedback I have after I signed up and filled out my finances
| and financial plan:
|
| - It would be nice to somehow get back to the original wizard
| that I went through when I signed up. Could swear there were some
| things such as "spend my remaining income" or whatever that I
| can't seem to find elsewhere in the app. (EDIT: I found this,
| it's at the bottom of the Plan page, and was a bit hard to find)
|
| - I'd love to be able to export my data even though I agreed to
| cloud storage. Maybe that conflicts with something about the way
| that stuff is stored in the cloud, but just being able to
| download any of the data, even if it isn't all of it, would be
| nice. Maybe there is a way to do this, but I haven't figured it
| out.
|
| - Thank you for providing dark mode!
|
| - I don't know what "Starting Cost Basis" is when adding a Roth
| IRA, and it would be nice to just have a tooltip explaining it; I
| have a Roth IRA and kinda know what a cost basis is, but honestly
| have no clue what "starting cost basis" really means or whether
| it applies to me. Maybe I _should_ know, but this would also be
| good learning opportunity for users.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks for giving it a shot! If you go to the account menu
| (upper right) > Export, you can export your data as JSON.
|
| The sim uses cost basis as how much of the existing $ in there
| represents your contributions (as opposed to gains), which is
| useful to know b/c your contributions to a Roth IRA can be
| withdrawn tax-free and penalty-free. You should see a
| corresponding category for that in Plan Settings > Drawdown as
| well.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > I don't know what "Starting Cost Basis" is when adding a Roth
| IRA
|
| Cost basis is irrelevant for Roth IRAs since you don't pay
| gains tax on them. I wonder why this is being asked?
| beret4breakfast wrote:
| This is fantastic, smooth and really very polished. It clearly
| covers a lot of stuff and you've really got a lot covered so
| great work. I've not sat down and tried to fill out all my
| details as I'm worried I'll lose all my details and have to start
| again. But this kind of stuff I find really interesting and most
| online are really bad/basic.
|
| Main concerns are around price tbh (I'm a cheap bastard) and I
| think $14 a month is steep for something I'd use loads one
| evening and then probably use once every quarter after that.
|
| I think the persistent storage is the key thing to make someone
| want to pay and the way it's presented feels wrong to me. If I
| revisit the site you basically say 'hey I've got all your data
| stored, sign up to premium and you can have it back without
| entering it all' to me that comes across a bit of a ransom. I
| think that's fine I'd say a couple of days/weeks have passed. But
| I think if you Accidentally closed the tab or it timed out it
| might put people off.
|
| I think the real money maker here is likely financial planners
| who can pay a large fee and share/use it with their clients over
| zoom or whatever. Or perhaps some kind of insights/
| yearly/monthly forecast summaries for a fee.
|
| All in all amazing job, I hope it's a great success.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks for trying it out! I agree the recovery dialog needs
| some improvement. Ideally I'd like a way to let people back in
| for a limited time if they accidentally close their browser.
| Couldn't think of a sufficiently tamper-resistant
| implementation with the current architecture.. but as another
| commenter pointed out, maybe that's still net better(?)
|
| Sounds like your notional usage pattern fits with how I use the
| tool as well, i.e. more like monthly/quarterly. If a discount
| or extended trial of the annual plan would be helpful, always
| happy to set those up as mentioned on the pricing page.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| I used it about a year ago and it was pretty useful in making
| some large decisions but the more I used it, the harder it became
| to use as I couldn't duplicate and mutate easily without breaking
| my prior work, or basically without a version control system. I'm
| probably at a point where I would look at it again but today I
| would like it if actually worked with my day to day transactions
| as well, reconciling with all my checking accounts. Also multi-
| currency support would be very useful.
| hackama wrote:
| Hung browser tab on Safari iPad.
| scubakid wrote:
| Oh that sounds odd. Same experience with another browser or
| just safari? If you can recall anything else around that time
| that might help with reproducing the issue, let me know.
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| "ProjectionLab has no link to your real financial accounts and
| the data you enter stays in your browser unless you choose
| otherwise. "
|
| I don't see why this would be a positive? I'd love an alternative
| to Personal Capital (since it got bought out), but without a
| direct connection to my banks/creditcards/etc, that connection
| just ends up being less secure.
| xeromal wrote:
| They're going to get this comment regardless of the direction
| they take so it doesn't matter.
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| True. I wonder what the use case for this is exactly. Maybe a
| strictly offline platform for techies?
| scubakid wrote:
| I'm pretty agnostic on the existing account linking/aggregator
| services out there, but I know some folks prefer not to use
| them, and I wanted to build a tool that gives the user direct
| control of their data and how/where it's stored.
|
| If a (strictly optional) account linking feature is something
| you'd like to see added though, there's an item on the public
| roadmap for it that you might like to upvote. It's currently
| still in the Suggestions category because it's a bit of a
| contentious topic within the PL community, and we've had a few
| discussion threads about that on the discord.
|
| In the past, I've tried account linking in some other tools,
| but always ran into syncing issues (especially on 2FA
| accounts). From what I understand, that's still somewhat common
| even with solutions like Plaid.
|
| With PL, I also wanted to initially steer clear of that
| support/maintenance tar pit (especially since I'm a solo dev),
| and design a tool where the focus is more on long-term
| projection rather than fixating on the latest daily stock price
| fluctuations.
| pc86 wrote:
| Man I loved PC when it actually worked. I think I had about 8
| or 9 months of seamless integrations and then half my accounts
| blew up overnight with the response being "yeah we know, we're
| working on it" for months before I gave up. That was probably 5
| years ago now.
|
| The tricky thing about a service whose main value prop is
| aggregating all your account data together is that 99% of them
| working isn't that much better than 1% of them working. Looking
| at your financial dashboard is pretty useless if it can't sync
| one of your 401k accounts, or one of your loans is using 90-day
| old data.
|
| I think this is actually a positive for the non-aggregators
| like ProjectionLab. If I spend 10 minutes manually updating
| everything when I check it once a month (or however often), I
| know everything is up-to-date and don't need to spot check
| things.
| tverbeure wrote:
| Some feedback:
|
| - I filled in a bunch of data. I closed the window. I then went
| back to the website, it tells me that it has recovered my
| previous session, and it gives me the option to either "Remove
| data" or "Upgrade now". I want to use the recovered session. I
| guess that's not allowed? It's _really_ jarring to put it on the
| user to actively click a button that deletes the data that they
| have painstakingly entered just a few minutes before.
| Psychologically, it feels like an AH move: "I have your data,
| but you can't get it." TBH, it would be better to pretend the
| data wasn't recovered at all. If you really don't want a user to
| recover their data without paying, I suggest that you put an
| expiration timer on it: you can recover without paying if you do
| so within, say, a day, but not after that.
|
| - It's unclear what's expected when entering RSU grants.
|
| - 401k can have a before-tax and an after-tax part. Due to mega-
| backdoor Roth 401k conversion, I expect a major part of my 401k
| withdrawals to be tax-free. Is there a way to model that?
|
| - Cash flow: the destination of excess money is not very clear. I
| can see how excess money is going into savings, but it's not
| obvious how to tune this. You can say that RSU grants are going
| to a certain investment account, but that's not how things work
| in the real world: cash comes in from various sources into a
| single put (the checking account). Investments are made based on
| allocation. E.g. Every month, $XXXX goes to an investment account
| from that checking account. I don't think you can set things up
| this way?
|
| - Is there a way to way to model a rental investment, where
| expenses (property tax, insurance, interest, etc.) can be
| subtracted from rental income and only the difference is added as
| taxable income?
|
| - After retirement, I see my effective tax rate going up quickly,
| peaking out at 60%. I have no idea where that's coming from. If
| that needs debugging, I can, unfortunately, not share the data
| because I couldn't recover it. ;-)
|
| - For me, the future projections are way lower than other
| retirement calculators. I find it hard to judge where the
| discrepancy is coming from, but I assume that the effective tax
| rate thing is a major contributor. There might just be too many
| knobs to play with and I probably have some things set up
| incorrectly.
|
| - Personally, I would no pay $9/month for this. It's a very nice
| tool, but retirement planning is not a monthly on-going thing,
| and I already have way too many recurring services that I don't
| use a whole lot. For me, it would make more sense to be able to
| enter my info and save it under an account, have limited free
| functionality, and offer a way to pay for more. Ideally, in a
| non-recurring way. E.g. I'd be totally fine paying $10 for a day
| planning. And I might use that once per year. That's obviously
| much less than paying $9 per month, but at least you'd get
| something instead of nothing at all? I have no idea how this
| would change conversion and how many people are in my boat.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks for the detailed feedback! I appreciate you checking out
| the tool.
|
| And sorry to hear you ran into trouble with the sandbox. It
| should warn about unsaved data if you try to close the tab. Did
| that not happen in your case? In the past, if you closed it,
| that was that. But a couple people slipped through the cracks
| and said it would have been much better if a recovery mechanism
| existed. So now it does haha... but maybe there's a way it can
| strike a better tone? FWIW I also love the idea of a time-based
| restore system, I just couldn't think of a good way to
| implement it that wouldn't be easy to tamper with (within the
| context of the current architecture anyway).
|
| For RSU grants, folks usually model the amounts they expect to
| vest in each year. The Advanced change-over-time editor may be
| helpful.
|
| For mega backdoor, would a Roth 401k cash-flow priority with
| custom limit be helpful? In the long-run though, I'd like to
| have a more formal option to make this easier.
|
| For rental properties, this is where the Generate Income option
| on a House asset (real assets column) comes into play. The best
| experience here is if you have the premium features and set tax
| estimation to US mode. If you want to kick the tires on that, I
| do offer extended free trials and/or general discounts on top
| of the default trial period.
|
| Oh right, and the effective tax rate metric is customizable. Do
| you currently have that set to include things like
| local/property taxes?
| tverbeure wrote:
| > ... it would have been much better if a recovery mechanism
| existed
|
| I didn't get a warning and it's definitely better to have a
| recovery mechanism... if you can use it.
|
| > I just couldn't think of a good way to implement it that
| wouldn't be easy to tamper with
|
| I wouldn't initially waste time trying to address those who'd
| go through the effort of tampering with it. It's something to
| address when you have proof that it's a real problem.
|
| > this is where the Generate Income option on a House asset
| (real assets column) comes into play.
|
| I missed that.
|
| > Oh right, and the effective tax rate metric is
| customizable.
|
| I played around a bit with tax rates, but I definitely did
| not enter anything close to 60%.
|
| > Do you currently have that set to include things like
| local/property taxes?
|
| I don't know. I couldn't restore the data!
| scubakid wrote:
| What browser/OS? (unless you'd rather not share, that's
| fine too). I just re-tested chrome, safari, and firefox on
| Mac OS and seems like the close tab warning works as
| expected. That being said, it's always possible there's
| some specific flow that's not handled properly, so I'd be
| curious to hear more details if you remember.
|
| To clarify what I meant on the recovery mechanism, the
| current implementation is what folks had asked for. afaik
| it does work(?), but does currently require signing up for
| the free trial. No worries if that's not for you though;
| and FWIW you could be right that perhaps it would be better
| to have a non-tamper-proof time-based permissive restore
| system if it would reduce friction in the average case.
|
| My guess on effective tax rate is it was likely including
| property taxes. Adding those to the numerator during
| retirement when taxable income is usually lower could drive
| up that number.
| tverbeure wrote:
| It was Win10/Chrome. Definitely did not see a warning
| (though I was aware that the data would be lost.)
|
| > ... but does currently require signing up for the free
| trial.
|
| I don't remember the exact working. Did it explicitly
| mention the free trial in the data recovery dialog?
|
| > My guess on effective tax rate is it was likely
| including property taxes. Adding those to the numerator
| during retirement when taxable income is usually lower
| could drive up that number.
|
| That's possible. I didn't fill anything related to
| property taxes, so it was probably implied? With CA
| proposition 13 (which caps the property tax increase),
| the property tax on rentals will be low compared to
| property value when you've owned the property for decades
| (as would be the case when you're in retirement.)
| scubakid wrote:
| Oh dang, you're right! I thought the recovery process
| made the free trial aspect clear, but it's not explicit
| enough if you bail without viewing the upgrade page. I've
| taken a note to improve the copy.
| rozap wrote:
| Just playing around with it and the UI is really intuitive and
| snappy. Nice job!
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks for checking it out! That UI is the product of more than
| a few sleepless nights.
| r0b05 wrote:
| Are you using Angular for the UI?
| scubakid wrote:
| I'm using Vue.js, Vuetify, Chart.js, Firebase, Paddle, and
| GCP.
| nosefurhairdo wrote:
| Very impressed with the mobile UI. Only thing I found was
| on the Plan tab on mobile there's that tiny extra
| horizontal scroll. Looks like your app wrapper does max-
| width: 100%, so if you add overflow-x: hidden you can fix
| it.
| scubakid wrote:
| Oops, thanks for the heads-up!
| contingencies wrote:
| A vision of the future. Camera pans across a shoebox sized
| apartment, suspended above a nondescript city with light
| pollution, air traffic and highway noise. The space is furnished
| sparsely with generic wall art and take-out containers. Camera
| shifts to a middle aged, impoverished wageslave sitting alone,
| displaying a nervous tick, and staring in to their iMirror with
| an expression of concerned gravity. The camera zooms in to the
| lips, which begin to move: _" Model me this..."_
| n42 wrote:
| the app looks incredible, but I'm apprehensive about putting all
| of my financial details into a solo project without knowing a
| little more about how you've addressed security & privacy - is
| there somewhere I can read about how you are ensuring my
| information stays secure?
|
| as a HN user/pretty senior webdev, I'm happy to get into the more
| gritty details :)
| scubakid wrote:
| let me know if this helps, or if there's more you'd like to
| see: https://projectionlab.com/help/enter-data
| n42 wrote:
| oh, that's wise - don't even take the data in the first
| place. good idea :)
| mcemilg wrote:
| I liked it, highly detailed and wanted to try. I created a plan
| and it showed me that I am going to bankrupt in two years :).
| Seems like it is not suitable for economically unstable countries
| like Turkey. Many factors that can affect your financial plan are
| out of your control here. Inflation is changing every month,
| nothing can be predictable, salary is draining even if you
| promoted in your job. You need stronger methods than monte carlo
| simulations to survive here...
| divbzero wrote:
| Thank you for developing and offering the self-hosting
| capability. I use spreadsheets for my planning at the moment but
| self-hosting makes this a serious option.
| scubakid wrote:
| It's always been a goal to put the user in direct control of
| their data, so when the HN community asked for a self-hosted
| version last year, it felt like a natural fit.
|
| Way back, PL actually started as one of my personal planning
| spreadsheets as well. I'm sure there are more talented
| spreadsheet creators out there than me, but I remember that
| mine ultimately reached a point where the complexity became so
| difficult to maintain (and trust) that I threw in the towel and
| decided to build a web app instead.
| [deleted]
| pov wrote:
| I find the pricing structure a little odd. I think it's expensive
| for individuals (selfishly, as this is the group I would be in),
| and it seems way cheap to me for advisors. I'm admittedly not in
| the financial world, but I would think the value-add for advisors
| would make this a no-brainer.
| scubakid wrote:
| If a few people are starting to complain about pricing, then
| maybe I'm finally in the right ballpark now haha. I do also
| offer general discounts on request (form on pricing page).
| caseyf wrote:
| wow this is so nice! somebody tell the bogleheads. they'll let
| you know if anything is missing ;)
| scubakid wrote:
| A while back, I asked the bogleheads mods if it would be a good
| topic for a forum thread or the wiki. At the time, I think the
| fact that I was asking as the creator may have been a turn off.
|
| But it seems like at some point they added it to this page at
| least:
| https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Retirement_calculators_and_s...
| chillbill wrote:
| I'm yet to spend time on this, just wanted to let you know that I
| absolutely despise those walking tour flying dialogs. They're
| very annoying and quickly move my eyes from the dashboard (what I
| want to see) to something I couldn't care less about.
| scubakid wrote:
| Me too! haha. I only added those after a bunch of people
| requested them.
|
| If you dismiss them, they don't reappear do they? They
| shouldn't at least...
| plorntus wrote:
| I had it reappear 3 times when I was trying it out moving
| between pages. First time was before I created an account
| though in the sandbox. Not sure exactly the replication steps
| for the second and third time it showed up.
| scubakid wrote:
| A complicating factor is that there are at least 2
| different tours for different sections of the interface
| (e.g. high-level dashboards vs plan interface).
|
| Do you think it would be better to infer from one tour
| dismissal that a user never wants to see another tour for
| anything else?
| blondie9x wrote:
| These finance apps bore the heck out of me. Seems like they all
| do the same thing. When to retire based on sufficient money. It's
| not hard to know you shouldn't overspend in life. Then you just
| need to figure out when you want to stop working. Not about money
| but about when you're over it.
| brooodie wrote:
| Hey - this looks like a great project. Congratulations for
| getting to this point.
|
| I'm UK Based. I'm looking for a consumer facing replacement for
| (https://www.timeline.co/) which is buggy and not really meant
| for non Financial Advisors.
|
| Kicking the tyres of this I'm running into an issue - not sure if
| this is a forum for bug reports/issues - if you'd prefer it
| elsewhere (discord?) I'm happy to do that. I've entered my data
| but my plan is cratering into bankruptcy long before it should.
|
| There are various questions I have about this but for starters,
| looking at the 'Cashflow' tab it seems that the two 'Assets'
| (property) that I entered (Fully Owned) seem to be automatically
| incurring yearly recurring fees. I already accounted for the
| various charges associated with these properties in my yearly
| expenses (1 catchall of 'general') but it seems that these assets
| rather than contributing to my NW are detracting from it by
| causing yearly expenses in the region of ~3.5% of the value of
| the asset.
|
| We don't have 'property taxes' in the UK, but this aside I seem
| to be unable to edit these properties in any way (when I entered
| them I was able to set estimated yearly appreciation of the asset
| value - but no way to edit the tax on them at the point on entry
| and no way to edit anything else relating to them within the
| 'Assets' tab of 'Current Finances').
|
| Happy to help any debugging and contribute as this looks like a
| really solid project.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks! And luckily I think I know what this is :)
|
| Sounds like you may just need to pay a visit to the Expenses
| subsection of the House form within the plan interface (Real
| Assets section beneath the primary chart in the Plan tab).
|
| If you've modeled those externally instead, then you can
| probably just zero-out the default assumptions for maintenance,
| insurance, property tax, etc.
| brooodie wrote:
| Thanks for the quick reply - I just found it myself (this
| comment helped:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36853067)
|
| Given it's come up twice maybe a UI tweak or prompt might be
| useful here but I'm loathed to give you any advice to you -
| this is superb work. Once I have more of a play I'll come
| back with any further thoughts.
|
| Thanks again
| mcho9257 wrote:
| Would love to see some integration of insurance and risk modeling
| (e.g. techniques to minimize downside risk, healthcare insurance,
| ACA subsidy interaction, P&C/home insurance, auto insurance risk)
| included as a feature -- that's been incredibly hard for me
| personally in my own risk spreadsheets! DM me if you are
| interested in some of the actuarial data on some of these and how
| I model it...
| scubakid wrote:
| Is there a certain kind of UI you envision for more first-class
| support for insurance modeling? Curious to hear your take on
| the best way to integrate that into the current setup.
| mcho9257 wrote:
| Most unexpected insurance-covered events follow a Poisson-
| like distribution in both cost and frequency. By modeling
| different deductibles, premiums, and frequency of events, you
| can help plan and optimize for what insurance coverage you
| should purchase, how much drawdown you could expect to see in
| worst case scenarios, etc.
| Def_Os wrote:
| I'm a very happy user of the app.
|
| Love the sankey charts you added. I had a DIY version of that
| before.
|
| Excited to try the self-hosting when I have some free time.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks! When you kick the tires on self-hosting, I'd love to
| hear your thoughts on the setup flow and if you find it smooth
| + intuitive enough.
| ripberge wrote:
| Very cool. Is there an easy way to easily toggle on/off various
| scenarios like "pay for private school for my children" to see
| how that affects wealth? I didn't see a way to do this without
| copying a whole plan.
|
| My financial advisor does this with emaplan or blackmountain (or
| something) and I don't have access to this feature. It's very
| annoying and an incredibly important part of financial planning.
| Bostonian wrote:
| Probability of success is a common and relatively simple metric
| to compute and explain, but it is not a good one. If you retire
| at 60 and expect to live until 90, there is a big difference
| between running out of money at 70 vs. 85. A metric such as
| expected shortfall
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3674232 is
| better since it considers the magnitude of the shortfall.
| scubakid wrote:
| The monte carlo module includes the ability to break down
| outcome categories based on how far you make it during each
| trial. But I definitely want to add more metrics and
| customization to that mode over time. Expected shortfall (I
| assume from point of failure till end of plan?) sounds like a
| good one!
| irrational wrote:
| This is one that concerns me. My family members typically live
| into their 100s and are still very independent and mentally
| healthy up until a week or so before dying. I am incredibly
| healthy and don't expect anything different, barring accident.
| I plan on waiting as long as possible to start collecting
| social security, but I'm wondering what else I need to consider
| when anticipating 30-40 years of retirement.
| Syzygies wrote:
| Yes, the twin idiocies of the freebie planners offered by the
| major investment firms: "Expect to live until" huh? My death
| has a probability distribution that's better understood than
| the market, any Monte Carlo simulations should include varying
| my life expectancy? And "probability of success" huh? Are we so
| stupid that we fly the plane into a mountainside at 85, rather
| than modifying behavior? I want to simulate my actual varying
| life expectancy and varying budget as I respond to market
| forces. Our house is paid off and I'm a great cook, but I love
| to spend money as our budget allows.
|
| MaxiFi Planner is the best consumer tool I know; my advisor
| also uses it. A puzzle that's too hard for it, making me want
| to script scraping its reports: Should I choose an annuity for
| part of my TIAA-CREF retirement savings? Even if one
| understands that the answer is generally no, there's always a
| number that flips the decision. TIAA annuities pay more than
| market, but enough more? There's an annuity paradox that
| programs like MaxiFi Planner reveal: Even a poorly priced
| annuity lets one plan to spend more. On the other hand we want
| to optimize our daughter's inheritance.
|
| Economists optimize varying notions of "utility". The above is
| a game, scoring what one gets to spend adapting to market
| conditions, taking into account the inheritance as one's year
| of death varies. This is beyond any planning software I've
| seen, yet it's exactly the game I will instead play out badly
| by hand.
| Bostonian wrote:
| A current WSJ article may interest you: "A Retirement Tax
| Break That Ends the Fear of Outliving Your 401(k): The pros
| and cons of using your nest egg to buy a special longevity
| annuity in retirement"
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/retirement-tax-break-qlac-
| annui...
| tunesmith wrote:
| I really like the "early retirement now" spreadsheet for that
| reason. (https://earlyretirementnow.com/2018/08/29/google-
| sheet-updat...) It allows you to plug in expected cash flows
| and your allocation model, and compares it to the stock market
| history to get a safe withdrawal rate.
|
| Using that you can also try out alternate scenarios like "what
| if I converted x00k of my savings to an annuity in exchange for
| a predictable cash flow" and see how it affects your withdrawal
| rate.
| OJFord wrote:
| Immediate feedback on the initial sandbox flow (UK perspective) -
| there's no reason 'mid-career UK' should be a defined benefit
| pension (or not) and 'early career UK' defined contribution (I
| assume? Since it doesn't say?). Could also be a mix, bit more
| likely in the case of mid-career. DB vs DC is just a function of
| where you work, these days the former is _mostly_ public sector
| only (too many private companies with DB pensions blew up and
| wiped out /raised a lot of questions for their DB pensions).
| scubakid wrote:
| Would you prefer to see those sandbox examples configured
| differently? Or would you rather see a different and more
| nuanced kind of sandbox system where it asks you some questions
| first and constructs an example based on your responses?
|
| Oh and to answer your question on DB vs DC -- if you're talking
| about the workplace pension cash-flow priority, that would be
| for modeling Defined Contribution pensions. For DB, that's an
| integrated section within the corresponding income stream.
| badcppdev wrote:
| I came here to say the same thing. Defined benefit pensions
| are very rare these days in the UK.
|
| Also I have to add that your sentences saying, "workplace
| pension cash-flow priority" and " corresponding income
| stream" are very confusing.
|
| I think the figures for the UK example are not great. Living
| expenses, health care, and medical expenses are a lot larger
| than seems correct.
|
| Also you should probably put a tool tip defining concessional
| vs non-concessional Australian superannuation. Also that
| should be in AUD rather than PS
|
| Amazing interface BTW
| scubakid wrote:
| Display currency is more of a global setting (About You
| section), and iirc the Australian sandbox example should
| already be using AUD there(?)
|
| When you add a new account or cash-flow priority for super
| contributions, the choices should have subtitles
| distinguishing Concessional from Non-Concessional. But
| sounds like there are some other places it would be helpful
| to show those subtitles too?
|
| Always happy to tweak/update the sandbox examples based on
| what folks would like to see. Any good data sources you'd
| recommend for more typical UK expense figures?
| CobaltFire wrote:
| I see you have Pensions for Commonwealth Countries; what about US
| Government Pensions? I FIRE'd at 40 with a US Military Pension
| and some other investments, and can't really adapt your tool to
| my case due to that.
|
| There are some interesting things about those pensions though
| (and the related VA compensation metrics). I have a spreadsheet I
| use to advise veterans who get sent my way because there are no
| decent tools out there for that population.
|
| Otherwise it looks awesome!
| scubakid wrote:
| Congrats! (or in FIRE parlance, f you haha)
|
| Curious what you feel is missing for modeling military
| pensions. Have you checked out the configuration options for
| Custom income streams, the Advanced change-over-time editor,
| and/or binding the start/end of things to milestones?
| CobaltFire wrote:
| Nope, I completely missed where you put them. I've always
| considered them as an asset, as it were, not a fixed income
| stream. That's my mistake, and I found where you put them. It
| just wasn't where I expected!
| scubakid wrote:
| No worries, if there's anything else you run into trouble
| modeling, feel free to reach out any time.
| JoshTko wrote:
| Seems to be a discoverability issue.
| CobaltFire wrote:
| I was able to recreate my spreadsheet (in a much more
| pleasing UI!) in a few minutes here.
|
| I think I'm going to be recommending your tool to the
| Veteran's I help advise.
|
| Awesome work here. I really mean that.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks so much! It's a real passion project of mine :)
| pbronez wrote:
| Excited to see the self-hosting option!
|
| I've been distracted from personal finance stuff for a minute but
| am circling back to it now that some life stuff has settled out.
| If this planning cycle works well, I'm planning to buy the
| lifetime program and start self hosting.
|
| Thanks for all your work on this!
| scubakid wrote:
| Glad to hear it! I've put about two and a half years of blood,
| sweat, and tears into building PL at this point, and that kind
| of feedback means a lot :)
|
| If you run into any trouble modeling things, feel free to reach
| out any time.
| sspiff wrote:
| Interesting, but I don't understand how it does taxes. I live in
| a completely different, much more income tax heavy nation than
| the US. It shows me large tax returns in the simulation which are
| orders of magnitude higher than what I'm actually getting. How do
| I disable or change these?
|
| Edit: Found the taxes tab, but it seemingly didn't apply the
| income tax rate I provided in the plan creation "wizard"?
| scubakid wrote:
| Is it possible those large tax returns are a result of not
| having any tax withholding configured on your income sources?
| emrah wrote:
| $45/mo is too cheap for the pro tier. Go for $99/mo
| scubakid wrote:
| For monthly billing, pro is currently $65. But yeah you could
| be right. Anything in particular you base $99/mo on?
| amelius wrote:
| Why don't we have automatic personal finances for every citizen,
| unless they opt out?
|
| I mean, we sort of have this for retirement plans in many
| countries. Why not apply the same ideas to the entirety of
| personal finance, including savings, investments, etc.
| matanrubin wrote:
| Amazing product, well done! I see that you support some country-
| specific stuff. What's your plan for adding more countries?
| Clearly you adding them one by one, and tracking the various
| rules and regulations of each one, isn't scalable. Is there a way
| for the community to help adding (and updating) country-specific
| stuff? I'm personally interested in adding Israeli stuff and I'm
| willing to contribute my free time to that end.
| scubakid wrote:
| My aim is to make the tax config UI increasingly flexible over
| time to allow modeling a wider variety of countries. And since
| you can export your data to JSON via the account menu (upper
| right) > Export, you and others in the community may be able to
| get a sense for what the data model looks like and propose
| tweaks/changes to the international tax templates.
| matanrubin wrote:
| Have you considered creating a github repo with a folder for
| each country, and then let the community add country-specific
| stuff in some simple yaml/json file? Each country can have
| it's own maintainer that verifies the data is correct and up
| to date. You'd then be able to source this data back into the
| app.
| scubakid wrote:
| Thanks, I think this idea is worth looking into!
| thedigitalone wrote:
| I've been tracking finances for years, can I add historical
| information so I can see timelines or is it all just from today
| forward like so many other trackers?
| scubakid wrote:
| You can add historical progress points. Just with the caveat
| that those currently capture a slightly higher-level rollup
| than account-level data. In the future I plan to convert the
| progress point system into more of a "snapshot" system.
| chris_st wrote:
| Something that would be cool would to do Traditional IRA to Roth
| conversion planning; a friend has put together software to
| estimate that, and due to taxes, found that he could save
| _significant_ amounts of money by converting earlier than I would
| have expected.
| scubakid wrote:
| If you open up the account form for your Traditional IRA (plan
| interface, left section), there's a subsection for Roth
| Conversions :)
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| It would be really nice to be able to set my "Cash Flow
| Priorities" to max out, or put some other dollar amount in a 401k
| rather than specifying a percentage of my income.
|
| EDIT: Ah I now see that I can do this, it was just sorta hard to
| discover at the bottom of the form.
| scubakid wrote:
| If you click the "more options" ellipsis next to the Your
| Contribution input, you can switch it to an amount in today's
| currency or actual currency if you prefer.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Thanks, really enjoyed the app by the way!
| j45 wrote:
| This looks amazing, thanks for sharing it.
|
| I'm interested in a few angles that are leading me to look at
| your self-hosted option - is there any customizability that is
| possible?
|
| For example being in Canada, the basic features will work great,
| but some of the other types of accounts or programs will be
| different. It would be nice to be able to set it up in the
| software, and failing that, see if learning how the backend works
| with a self-host license will allow addition of different items.
|
| I was just thinking about something like this last week -
| financial literacy can have an outsized impact on anyone's life,
| and being able to generate so many scenarios can make a huge
| difference in visualizing things so clearly for the formula of
| one's own life.
| scubakid wrote:
| Most of the account and cash-flow priority types have
| customization options that can be used to do things like adjust
| liquidity/withdrawal rules and dial things in based on your
| circumstances. And if there are some specific areas where you'd
| like to see even more of that, just let me know.
| j45 wrote:
| Thanks for the reply, I'll check it out.
|
| What stood out to me was
|
| Roth, etc are very specific to the US.
|
| Things like RRSP, TFSA, etc are more common in Canada. Maybe
| it's just configuring one of the flow types as you mentioned.
| modeless wrote:
| Hey, are you interested in a faster way of doing Monte Carlo
| simulations using the GPU? Demo here:
| https://james.darpinian.com/money/
|
| It runs a million scenarios in a few milliseconds which is fast
| enough to update the results (the percentage at the bottom) in
| real time as you drag sliders. It's several orders of magnitude
| faster than other Monte Carlo retirement simulators; so fast that
| it may not even feel like it's doing anything. But it really does
| run a million scenarios instantly.
| orangepurple wrote:
| I don't trust your random number generator. It takes some
| effort to get extreme speeds out of them.
| modeless wrote:
| The speed comes from running thousands of simulations in
| parallel on the GPU. The random number generator doesn't have
| to be any faster for this to be a huge speedup. It's possible
| to use any one you like. I did validate the one I'm using
| against various others and found equivalent results.
|
| I also have the simulation implemented on the CPU as well to
| validate the correctness of the results.
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