16 ms·
Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
- scubakid 5y agoI had trouble finding a good FI planning and simulation tool that could model things in enough detail to finally ditch my spreadsheets... so I built one. Would love it if any of you want to try it out. It does not involve linking any accounts and almost all the functionality is free. And if anyone wants to become a beta tester for the few premium features, you can use coupon code BETA-6001 for 60% off :) https://projectifi.io/ https://projectifi.io/
- CannisterFlux 5y agoHaving "choose your theme" as almost the first question felt very out of place. Like, someone is really proud of those themes, more than any other part of the site :) I'd just leave that out completely, the default theme is fine and you can change it from the menu anyway. Everything else was really slick, but I didn't understand any of the goals (not in the US).
- Faaak 5y agoSame here. I though: "WTF is this ? Am I on a design your webpage site ?"
- tjbiddle 5y agoI've been stuck on "Confirming Subscription" for the last 5 minutes Edit: Tried again, but with PayPal, and it worked.
- HDMI_Cable 5y agoI love the website, (it actually helps a lot). I think there should be some way to print out the plans, to be used in real-life planning. Also, it would be nice if there was some sort of disclaimer on how the financial data we input is used, because that stuff can be sensitive, and could peer people off.
- samtimalsina 5y agoI've always wanted to build a tool like this, but never went around to it. I am a FIRE nerd, and have used and tried many FI tools. I am an active YNABer and I was looking for a tool for longterm planning. This looked interesting enough that I actually went ahead and got the premium plan for a year. Thanks for the coupon code. It came out at roughly $12/year, which I think is a great value to the kind of insights you can get. To create something like this on my own would take months, if not years. I also like the fact that I am not linking this to any of my real accounts.
- zwass 5y agoThis will be an incredibly useful tool for me. I subscribed with the coupon code, and hope to see you continuing to develop the functionality.
- Eridrus 5y agoI had the same experience and even tinkered around with building this myself! IMO the biggest problem with existing calculators, and yours, is that you have to make some pretty strong assumptions about the future. How will rental & housing prices grow? What returns will I get on my investments? Depending on the numbers you put in you will get very different results, and most people are not good at predicting these! I think the real value here will be to find a way to reduce the number of knobs that users have to specify in some way, with either expert estimates for these variables, or joint distributions of these variables so that users can explore scenarios like "stock market crash" without having to figure out how that could impact every variable.
- scubakid 5y agoYou're right about those user estimates and various knobs having a potentially huge effect on results. When I introduce a Monte Carlo simulation mode, I hope to be able to offer better insights into how distributions around some of these variables will impact likelihood of success. I'll also continue to look for opportunities to create smart defaults and/or links to resources that can be used to help calibrate estimates based on historical data, locality, etc. Thanks for the comment!
- torstenvl 5y agoThis looks interesting but I think it is still a little bespoke. A feature request would be to add an anticipated pension, since that has a major effect on how much you need to put into a retirement savings account.
- vcavallo 5y agois “bespoke” the term you mean to use here?
- quercusa 5y agoIt's a British-ism, and not that uncommon.
- vcavallo 5y agoYep, I know the word, and agree it's not uncommon. My point was that user to whom I replied seems to be using it in a generally negative way. > looks interesting but I think it is still a little bespoke As if "bespoke" is the opposite of "interesting" or othwerwise a counterpoint to a good review. As I understand the word "bespoke", it carries no negative nor positive charge - just means "made individually to order", which seems irrelevant to this app.
- Ruthalas 5y agoI think the parent was trying to express that the app seemed designed for a specific demographic, and didn't generalize as well as it could. (And they therefore suggested a feature that would help it function well for a broader audience.)
- happytoexplain 5y agoI like the icon for debt. Just from that you can tell this software wasn't made by a business. Edit: Hm, seems like sometimes it's a pair of handcuffs, and other times it's a more innocuous iron weight.
- bouchardm 5y agoWow, that is pretty impressive ! I've tried it and its pretty complete :)
- sct202 5y agoI think you should make it a little more obvious that you start off without creating an account, because I was a little off put at first that it looks like Personal Capital, Mint, etc where you have to provide a bunch of personal info before even seeing anything. Anyways very interesting graphs and stuff, I'd be interested if once you have the monte carlo simulations up if there was like a demo mode to just show what it did for a test person to show the value of what it could do for me.
- jetpackjoe 5y agolove love love that I can get started without putting in ANY personal information. I agree that making this more obvious is a good thing.
- spurgu 5y agoYes, seconded! Love it! There are too many tools I never try because I get hit by the "Create account" dialogue.
- scubakid 5y agoAny thoughts on the best way to make this more obvious to new users? Just some copy on the front page saying you can test without an account? Or perhaps focus on the fact that there will be a "sandbox" where you can test everything right away with canned data(?)
- spurgu 5y agoFor me personally it's fine as it is - I was simply positively surprised to see that I got to play around with it without creating an account first. I suppose you could get more users that have a lower interest in the product to try it by adding either one or your solutions. Those that have a higher interest off the bat will click "Getting started" anyways (and expect to get an "Open account" dialogue).
- scubakid 5y ago
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoAwesome work, can’t wait to give it a try.
- Frost1x 5y agoLooks interesting, but based on the privacy policy terms of data usage, transferability, and so forth, I can't in good faith test with real financial data: https://projectifi.io/privacy-policy.html https://projectifi.io/privacy-policy.html Everytime I see a tool that shouldn't need to be hosted remotely as a service and could reasonably be deployed to the client where they have more control over their data (not as a service), it's a non-starter for me. I get it, that's the industry model now and it's how you can get comped for your time investment, gain passive income, control IP, etc. Unfortunately, those cost models will get no comp from me in any way. Having more data rights and ownership for a week or so free trial version where you can later shift to a pay model in which your data is still owned entirely by you during the entire course of the application usage would make more sense for people like me who still want privacy. I'm probably not the target market for something like this though and the number of people like me seem to be on the decline, so there's that.
- scubakid 5y agoThanks for the feedback! I've thought about maybe creating a version which is wrapped up as an Electron app and runs natively and with no google analytics, etc. Does it sound like that might alleviate some of your concerns?
- scubakid 5y agoI guess I should also add that with the current web version, you can opt out of sending telemetry data via cookie preferences, and with the Premium version you choose whether or not you want your data persisted or not. (there is also a button to remove all your data at a later date if desired). Perhaps something else that might be helpful to add is an import/export button so you can save and load data locally(?)
- GordonS 5y agoCan I ask how you are using the telemetry that you collect?
- jetpackjoe 5y agoLove it. I do have some notes: For "Financial Goals", allow me to opt set a fixed number, not just a percentage of income (i.e, if I want to max out my 401k). When inputting investments, instead of having a field for the sum of the different categories, have line items, so I can add my copy/paste my 401k, IRA, etc into the website without having to add them up myself. Great work!
- scubakid 5y agoThanks for the input! Within financial goals, if you're looking to max out your 401k, you could always put in a high percentage and it should stop contributions within the sim if it reaches the IRS limit. But you do have a great point -- it would be more useful to have additional input options there such as fixed amounts.
- ChrisGammell 5y agoI agree, having a general % vs absolute value switch for entry boxes would be nice. I think about my 401K contributions in terms of dollars, and this forced percentages, ostensibly because many employers work that way and there's a focus on salary. Would be nice to just plug in, "My goal is $10000 per year" or whatever the goal is.
- simlan 5y agoWow impressive. I clicked through some and it does look really polished !
- nonameiguess 5y agoThere is no reason at all for this to be server-hosted. I have of course done this for myself a very long time ago creating an effectively identical feature set using spreadsheets and even put them onto Microsoft's sharing pages (no idea what happened to them, it was such a long time ago). I'm not saying this isn't a better solution than Excel. You work with what's available at the time. But there is nothing at all about the size of the data or complexity of the calculations that requires it to be centrally hosted. This is financial data and you're not a bank with reporting and privacy requirements being audited by state charter associations and federal law enforcement. No reason for people to trust you with this data. Make this an executable someone can put on their own machine. Don't require a network connection. Don't send telemetry. Like Frost1x, though, maybe I'm just a minority and you don't need my business. Ultimately, do what the market will tolerate, I guess.
- Bostonian 5y agoI think many people have gotten out of the habit of installing software on their computers and prefer web-based solutions.
- giantg2 5y agoYou can still have it be client side if you're web based, right?
- andi999 5y agoHow?
- halfmatthalfcat 5y agoPWA
- Mavvie 5y agoJavaScript (store + compute everything client side)
- 5y ago
- ed312 5y agoLooks fantastic. I entered some close to real numbers and found the flow fairly easy. I specifically like the edge-case prompts ("you didn't enter mortgage/rent, are you sure?"). In that case I just entered an average monthly total expenses, but I like the checks. The graphs at the end are nice. Something like a toast for "congrats your goals are probably going to happen" might be good.
- vallas 5y agoShould be renamed "personal finance for the poor class"
- vallas 5y agoMisleading, should be renamed "personal finance for the middle-class"
- Graffur 5y agoDamn bankrupt by 38
- gregwebs 5y agoI briefly tried this out. I prefer Personal Capital because it gives you a probability of meeting a retirement goal. I can see though how this would be a little nicer to use if you don't want to link your accounts as encouraged by Personal Capital.
- luminousbit 5y agoGreat job, I wish you the best! I'm sure you'll get lots of feedback about issues and will work to fix them. But overall the polish, simplicity, power, and uniqueness are an amazing start!
- Semaphor 5y agoThis was also posted 9 days ago [0], when OP created their account, with 3 other also freshly created accounts (with no other activity on them) praising it. Make of that what you wish. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26862841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26862841
- throwthere 5y agoThank you for digging into this! Private finance data like this, submitted to a server, makes me uneasy. This isn't some calendar app or a game. The reputation of the site should be beyond reproach.
- scubakid 5y agoFair point. I've been a long-time HN reader but never made an account before. After working hard building the app, I was excited to create my first post to share it, and mentioned to my friends I had posted it to HN. Evidently a few of them decided to create accounts to show support. If this was any kind of breach of HN etiquette, my sincere apologies -- that certainly was not the intent.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dang 5y agoBoth the site guidelines and the FAQ explain that this is not allowed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html The HN community considers it spamming and guards its integrity rather zealously.
- goatcode 5y agoMaking an account to post something and coincidentally having friends who on their own decided to make accounts to comment is against the rules?
- dkobia 5y agoI ran through it and it is pretty impressive. Good work!
- grouphugs 5y agothis figures out something, but neither my personal finances, nor my life. nazibuxxx are not a good thing. the nazis have to die
- nwsm 5y agoTwo digits of precision on interest rates would be nice!
- elil17 5y agoNothing makes me more annoyed than when simulations like this make assumptions which don't make any sense. For example. >"Note: currently, ProjectiFi taxes inheritance as ordinary income for simplicity and to maintain a conservative estimation strategy. More nuanced options that more closely mirror current inheritance tax liability scenarios are coming soon." This is an absolutely ridiculous assumption. Federal inheritance/estate taxes in the US don't start until $11 million. If you can't figure that out your app is not ready to publish.
- samtimalsina 5y agoI guess that's why they are in BETA? Nobody makes perfect product in their first attempt.
- kenned3 5y agoThankfully most people have over $11 million and therefor your proposal really does impact the majority of the users? Most developers want to build features that service the majority, then add more functionality later.
- stevofolife 5y agoI like the UI. I like the process. I'm just a basic guy who likes to put in basic numbers. What's next?
- Xcelerate 5y agoTough crowd. I think this looks great. I've been managing these sorts of calculations manually, and I think there's definitely a market for better tools in the financial planning space. (I agree with removing the theme selector though.)
- creativeembassy 5y agoSigned up! I'd love to see a little more flexibility in putting some kinds of numbers in, especially as someone not great with understanding financial data. For instance, I'm currently plugging numbers in about my mortgage. I know how much I currently pay per year in homeowner's insurance, but ProjectFi is asking me for the annual rate. I divided what I'm paying per year by the current estimated market value and got 0.3%... but I'm sure that's not accurate.
- samtimalsina 5y agoI had a similar problem with the mortgage insurance. I had to bring out my calculator to calculate the % it was asking for. Who pays mortgage insurance as a percentage of their mortgage? I think this should be a dollar amount, with inflation added.
- scubakid 5y agoYou're right, more flexibility on those inputs would definitely be a good thing. That's already on the road-map, so stay tuned!
- dmcbrayer 5y agoI'd love to see some kind of pre-populated sample account to play around in. My willingness to test out an app has an inverse relationship to the number of forms that app asks me to complete to view its functionality. In this case, i felt like there were quite a few forms that I needed to fill out to get to the charts. Beyond that feedback, I think this looks really interesting and would love to see where it goes.
- monkeydust 5y agoThere is definitely a market for this. I had wealth management review recently and they used a 3rd party piece of software that was doing something similar, their entire pitch revolved around this app. What you really need to have is a demo setup so I can just play with the output without having to input any data. Also concerned about sharing this much personal detail with a start-up so I would not use it unfortunately as it is (at least with real data)
- foo92691 5y ago+1 to "demo setup so I can just play with the output without having to input any data"
- scubakid 5y agoThanks for the feedback! In the near future I'm hoping to add templates you can choose from to optionally skip the onboarding process and play with an example simulation pre-populated with some interesting data. Based on this and some other commentary on here, I'll boost the priority of that feature.
- neogodless 5y agoMaybe I missed it in the text/instructions, as I was going pretty fast just trying to "see what it is" and typing a bunch of things in, but it asked me about Debt, so I put in a mortgage. Then it asked me about a house, and when I said it wasn't paid off, it wanted mortgage details. I already added that under debt. (Also Delete is disabled on that debt, so I cannot go back and change that.) EDIT: OK I started over and see that it specifies that Debt is "not associated with a specific asset." Later Debt seems to become "Expenses" which is a little confusing. Not big complaints, just trying to make sense of it. Similar confusion with the plan, where it asked for a payment amount for the mortgage, but then wanted it again as a payoff plan? This was even though I unchecked Pay Off As Soon As Possible? What's going on here? It's confusing. Also it seems like excess salary is going into cash savings, not taxable investments OR tax-advantages accounts. That is severely limiting growth in the projections. <-- No I was partially wrong, it's just that it has my mortgage payment in twice as I mentioned previously due to the confusing wizard. So my expenses were way higher and the investment amount was reduced. But even removing that my "Cash" at the end of the period of income is massive; it should be putting "cash" into investments.
- thatmikefellow 5y agoKicking the tires, here's a quick piece of product feedback: It seems like the "Stacked Financial Breakdown" chart actually _adds_ your level of debt on as just another stacked layer, as if it were an asset. I don't think that makes much sense - with this representation, if next year I take on $1M of debt to buy $1M in assets, then my financial breakdown curve jumps by $2M. Ideally you'd subtract off debt so that you could easily read off net worth from the chart, but that's not easily compatible with a stacked-chart representation (I don't know how you'd visually represent "negative stacks"). I'd suggest instead you just take debt off that chart, which would make you at least able to read off "total assets under management" from it.
- scubakid 5y agoThat's a good point. My initial thought process with it was to stack the datasets so that everything underneath debt contributes to your net worth, with debt at the top "weighing it down" so to speak. You can also click the debt checkbox in the legend to hide that dataset from the plot. Still, your point stands that the stacked chart doesn't quite visualize the negative effect that debt has on net worth. Do you prefer the "Net Worth Over Time" plot?
- thatmikefellow 5y agoI think that approach of having debt on top would only work if you made the "sum of all assets" line somehow highlighted; thicker, bolder, etc. But I think that approach is still going to result in an unintuitive chart. (And I think that's fairly important, since this chart is the biggest part of the default view in your app.) My main product design point here is that in a stacked chart like this, you want the summed line to have _some_ meaning - since the summed level is the most prominent feature of this type of graphic. Here, as you're summing assets together with debt, it makes the sum meaningless - which is a flag that this visualisation isn't suited to the data you're putting into it. I think the simplest fix to this (without coming up with some new more complex visualisation) is just to lop off the debt. In your current product model, that might mean just making it unticked by default. Assuming you were evolving this product longer term, I'd reckon it'll be important at some stage to visualise both positive and negative quantities. Maybe something like a two-side stacked chart? https://www.anychart.com/products/anychart/gallery/Column_Charts/Stacked_Column_Chart_with_Negative_Values.php https://www.anychart.com/products/anychart/gallery/Column_Ch...
- disambiguation 5y agovery cool app, appreciate that i could click through without making an account! two features i'd like to see off the top of my head * i know privacy is important for a lot of folks -- but it would be cool if graphs / plans were shareable. I'm interested what the rest of you are up to :) * action items for how to steer your current plan to a "better" plan. The app is currently like a hand-held map that shows me the lay of the land, but I want google maps which recommends ideal routes.
- dangoor 5y agoLooks nice on the surface. One request for the promo site part of things: One thing I _always_ look for in a SAAS is a "pricing" page, because prices are all over the map on these sorts of things and I want to know if I think the price is reasonable before I jump in.
- scubakid 5y agoGood point! I'll make sure to add a feature and price breakdown accessible from the main page.
- JeanSebTr 5y agoThere's something weird going on with the mortgage calculation when configuring the house's value. When I set it to 0, I'm paying the mortgage way faster than should be possible, when I set it to anything meaningful, I'm bankrupt in one year!
- foo92691 5y agoThe name (ProjectiFi) and the logo (which looks like LTE signal strength) are probably much too close to Google's Project Fi (now Google Fi).
- manuelisimo 5y agoI had the same thought, the service is quite different but the name is too similar
- pupdogg 5y agoThis feels like Mint.com all over again. I do not feel comfortable sharing personal banking data with a hosted platform. We all know what happened when Mint sold out to Intuit!
- 09bjb 5y agoWhat are you referring to? That Intuit killed the product? I use Mint and don't particularly like it but am not yet aware of data abuses or breaches.
- pupdogg 5y agoNot sure about your personal experience but it was only a matter of time until I started receiving promotional offers from various credit card companies based on my spending habits via snail mail. I could directly tie them to Mint.com becuase I was shown the exact same offers on their portal. What other proof do you need?
- g_sch 5y agoOne thing I've always struggled with in these "financial planning" products is how to make the numbers make sense on a gut level. My problem is that, after doing some level of "taking charge of my finances" to make a savings/investment plan, it still feels like I'm treading water and barely making any progress toward my goals. Yet when I plug my numbers into any financial planning app (including this one), they inevitably not only tell me that I'm going to be a millionaire when I retire, but also that I'll have tons of money within just a couple years. This usually makes me reflexively dismiss their conclusions. I realize that part of the problem is that it's hard for my brain to extrapolate a few months of observations into a decades-long trendline, but I really would love to see a product that helps my brain bridge the gap between my own perception and the big money chart.
- hirako2000 5y agoYes. And these tools will always provide significantly inacurate forecasts, I think, because 1/ it is hard for humans to predict their spending habits, since spending often increase proportionally to income, and not just inflation. 2/ most people have a very different path ahead of them, along with so many unknowns in the equation. That's probably why people serious about their money consult a professional, who has hopefully historical data at hand and in his head, who produces a forecast, each year, that is very tailored to the person, the person's personality, habits, job industry and many other important factors that a financial planer coded with if and else, avg and linear projection etc can't match. Maybe machine learning can get decent results of training properly on very good data sets. And about most planners showing we will be millionaire in a few years, I'm tempted to say it's for the exact same reason demo data and screenshots for a CRM or analytics system always tend to display over optimist income/sales.
- sgtnoodle 5y agoMy entirely speculative guess is that the discrepancy is in human behavior that's not modeled. The tools assume the money is invested in a timely manner, but in reality folk procrastinate and their saving spend arbitrary months / years sitting around in low interest rate accounts. My first 5 years of full time employment with a salary, I was making enough to live comfortably and contribute to a 401K, and finances and investing aren't inherently interesting to me, so I didn't really think too much about the money accumulating in my savings account. The money definitely lost value over those 5 years because of inflation. I finally figured out how to put money into ETFs, and 5 years later that same amount of money has at least doubled in value. A lot of that probably has to do with the economy being crazy, but I suspect I missed out on a lot of compound growth not investing those savings initially. That is to say, my savings over time didn't look like a "PERT" plot until I took concrete steps (and the associated risks) to invest in the market. Not to say that sitting on money or being slow to invest in higher growth accounts is good or bad. There's risk and everyone has their own personal risk tolerance, and diversification is important. If all you have is $5000, dumping it all into the stock market would seem pretty risky and perhaps foolish. That $5000 sitting in a checking or savings account is losing value over time rather than growing, though. I suppose that could be another example of it being easier to live frugally when you have money, i.e. buying a $100 pair vs. $20 pair of work boots. On the other hand, many folk with very little savings still seem to find a way to buy luxuries like iphones and vacations. In addition to luck, personal discipline and sacrifice must factor in to some degree when it comes to achieving a financial goal.
- frabjoused 5y agoI would suggest the first step of onboarding should not be the selection of your theme. This is already a long onboarding process and every additional step will lose you users. When you build something you're technically proud of, it makes sense you'd like to show it off, but you have to evaluate its relative importance to your public.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoI know, I thought that was weird: "Here's a personal finance website, first things first: what's your favorite web scheme out of these 16..." ¿Como?
- alfonsodev 5y agoI didn't mind the number of steps, at least is not asking for creating a user before trying. But I'd replace the theme selection with currency selection, much more relevant.
- scubakid 5y agoGreat point! Currency selector coming soon. Would you recommend demoting the theme selection to like a last step in the onboarding process? Or not showing it at all during onboarding and leaving it for users to find on their own?
- cpitman 5y agoIntroduce features to users as they continue to use the tool. They don't need to know everything as soon as they start using it, and you want to have the ability to introduce new features later on anyways!
- knoebst 5y agoI wanted to like it but I live in the EU and it's too focused on dollars.
- scubakid 5y agoGood point. Currently it's tailored more towards the US, but I'm hoping to find time to add features for other locations. That said, the idea of supporting every tax system out there is probably a bridge too far, but simple things like being able to switch currencies seems quite doable.
- mmastrac 5y agoI'd pay for a self-hosted version of this, although I'm in Canada and it would require a bunch of different integrations and tax calculations. I imagine there are plenty of folks like me in the states. Heck, I'd pay for a secure little RPi in a box running this software. I can't give my financial passwords to anyone else at all - most of my accounts specifically disclaim any responsibility for losses if I give my passwords out.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoThis is really well done. First, I've been using the same Excel spreadsheet since 1992 to create a one-panel view of financial modeling and you've captured everything I've put into it over the years. Second, there is a lot of state information in this website, I'm impressed: its nontrivial to get right. That said, I didn't fuzz it, but I'm sure you've got it down. Lastly I like how it eases the user in: it asks basics, then funnels to specifics. That makes it less intimidating. Sorry to be "that guy" but I've been using my Excel for ~30 years and it has been solid so I doubt I would use this, but I think it might be a great starting point for youngin's who haven't thought about this yet.
- hipjiveguy 5y agoIs your excel spreadsheet shareable in any fashion, or is it too revealing? Sounds like it could be useful for sure!
- drewg123 5y agoWould be nice if there were alimony and child support expense categories.
- lesinski 5y agoI will try this out! Currently the gold standard for this kind of FI simulation is OnTrajectory. There’s a learning curve but it’s so much more comprehensive than any spreadsheet you could build. I consult it every time I make a big decision. Get in touch with your email and I can provide a referral link.
- adjkant 5y agoSo I have a Google Sheet that basically does this and I tested this out and got some similar numbers as my sheet, so some things seem to be working well! This is also a great UI! I was pretty impressed with the depth of detail as well, and one thing this seems to have better tooling for than my manual sheet is for tax treatment and long term tracking there Two bugs/issues I found: 1. I couldn't tell if inflation was applied in future years at all. Despite selecting an increase in income and inflation matched expenses, neither seemed to be reflected when I selected the future year. 2. Setting 401K by percentage caused lots of issues as it allowed me to go over the IRS limit. I just wanted to set it by amount and be done with it! Would be good to have options to allocate savings like that as well as by percentage. Honestly, this is really intriguing for me as I've covered a lot of these cases and as a developer I've thought about the UI/UX for this but basically have always thought that the edge cases were so vast that it would be hard to get users while also making sa reasonable UX. Truly, using this changed my mind and this seems like something that could be possible. I'm not sure what your team size is and I have limited time, but I'd be interested in talking and seeing if there's any way to contribute / help here! Feel free to contact me @gmail or via my bio's website contact form if you're at all interested in that!
- joshgel 5y agoAgree the tax calculations are a little bit off. Also, only lets you take the individual standard deduction (12k vs 24k for married filing jointly)
- scubakid 5y agoThanks! For #1 is it possible that you haven't yet factored in that values in the simulation are adjusted to be in today's dollars? i.e. expenses that match inflation exactly would show as the same value each year. For #2, I'd be happy to help troubleshoot if you want to send a message to projectifi.io@gmail.com. There is existing logic that should be capping your 401k contributions at the IRS limit. But if you have a scenario where this isn't behaving correctly, I'll gladly look into it. Thanks for the comments! And currently "team size" is one haha. At the moment I don't have plans to bring on additional staff and deal with the business complications that adds, but I really appreciate the thoughtful commentary and if you'd like to have any more discussion feel free to email any time.
- freddymilkovich 5y agoIm less concerned about data provacy for this one for whatever reason, but im having issues with it saving really off numbers. like ive input a 400$/ month payment in and its showing in a plan as like $4800 / month and this is with nearly all the data. its got me paying out like 380,000$ this year alone...? i dont even have a fraction of that debt anywhere.... what even.... is going on here... it says im underwater by like 200k+ . my net worth is -40k for sure, but def not -200k.
- scubakid 5y agoYikes, I haven't seen that behavior before but would be happy to help troubleshoot if you'd like to send a message to projectifi.io@gmail.com
- 0xffff2 5y agoThe thing I find most difficult about retirement planning is that assumptions about market returns and inflation always seems to overwhelm all other factors by a large margin. I typically assume a 4% inflation-adjusted return for planning purposes (7% average return minus 3% inflation), but half a percentage point in either direction could leave me broke shortly after retirement or wealthy beyond all need. I guess partly this is just because I'm still 30+ years from retirement, but does anyone have any advice on how to account for the incredibly wide range of possible outcomes based entirely on factors that are impossible to accurately predict?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- singingboyo 5y agoSimilar situation, but the way I figure it, it's best to err somewhat on the side of caution. Aim to save more than you expect to need, so that a bad return is still enough. The thing to remember is that if you are somehow wealthy beyond need, you can just retire. You don't have to keep working if you're financially stable earlier than expected.
- scubakid 5y agoErring on the side of caution and conservative estimation is usually a good thing. And within the next few weeks, I hope to be implementing a Monte Carlo simulation mode which should help to account for the fact that many of these variables really follow their own distributions. Hopefully this will help make it clearer what the chances of success are given a broader range of scenarios, events like market crashes or longer downturns, etc.
- jokethrowaway 5y agoLove the idea, I toyed with the idea of building something like this. When talking to friends, I realised that even smart and relatively wealthy people have zero planning skills and freak out about the idea of "planning your life in the next decades". I suspect your market is going to be small.
- scubakid 5y agoHaha you're probably not wrong. Still, it's a tool I felt I needed for my own life planning purposes; and if others happen to enjoy it too, that's a nice bonus.
- evnc 5y agoThis is really nice to use and well-designed! One feature request: spouses / joint incomes. Obviously my financial picture looks very different if I include my partner's income and assets than if I just include my own, but my partner is a different age than me, so if I just add it up and act like I'm one person who makes our combined household income, it's not going to be quite accurate.
- joshgel 5y agoSimilarly, the ability to share with another account, so that my spouse can also poke around and create models based on our base case.
- scubakid 5y agoGood point, and thanks for the comment! I agree having a married filing jointly mode would be helpful. If time allows, I hope to implement something for that in the near future.
- Dave_Rosenthal 5y agoNice start, onboarding needs lots of work. My suggestion: have the users start with the big hitters (house, income, savings) and then add more and more. Users could see the model change as they go and the onboarding process itself would become informative as they see the effect of their various assets, 401Ks, asset sales plans, etc. You also really need monte carlo simulation to elevate this far above 'pretty version of my excel spreadsheet' into 'powerful financial planning tool' category. Lastly, there is one always overlooked part of retirement planning which is that spending plans should not be set-in-stone. For example, if you plug "spend X per year" into a monte-cargo retirement calculator to get a 95% chance of not running out of money you will need to have a lot. But, if you are willing to adopt a spending policy of 'spend X per year unless there is a stock market crash, in which case spend .75X for three years' you will need a lot less. If you are willing to modulate your spending in response to events you can be comfortable with a lot less.
- scubakid 5y agoThese are excellent suggestions, thanks for the thoughtful feedback. For onboarding, I initially tried a version of what you suggested, but in usability tests many felt there was too much on the screen. Perhaps now it is too minimal though -- I'll think about how to find a better middle ground. You're spot-on about the need for Monte Carlo simulations. A robust Monte Carlo mode with a variety of variables you can control is the next development priority. And great point on flexible expense plans. I'll consider how to build some (hopefully) intuitive UI widgets to allow for that in the Monte Carlo mode.
- cddotdotslash 5y agoThis is really excellent work! I love the UI and the data points feel very complete but not overly detailed (it took me only about 15 minutes to enter everything and get to the projection charts). Contrary to many other commenters here, I don't mind that this is a hosted service. In fact, I _don't_ want to download an application for this. If users are concerned they can just use a burner email address.
- 12ian34 5y agoLove the idea, enjoyed the interface, but I feel my time was wasted when I only found out the US focus several clicks into the flow. Speaking as someone not from the US, I do wish more websites didn't just assume that all their traffic was coming from the US. You could alleviate this by having a flag on the home page saying "This is really more for Americans only".
- yardie 5y agoAs a former American expat, I felt this deeply. A lot of the online financial analysis tools, like Mint, looked cool. But since they had a US focus and I was not in the US I couldn't take advantage of any of them. And once GDPR came into effect I was effectively locked out of any of them.
- GrifMD 5y agoLunchmoney is a good multi currency financial analysis app that's been shown on Hackernews a bit http://lunchmoney.app http://lunchmoney.app
- scubakid 5y agoThanks for the feedback. I would love to add better generalization for international use; so far it's just been out of scope for a solo dev to account for all the intricate tax rules that differ from country to country. If you have further suggestions though on additional features that might help to start bridging that gap, feel free to shoot an email to projectifi.io@gmail.com!
- 12ian34 5y agoI'm not even asking for generalisation, I appreciate you're a solo dev. Just be kinder to non US users by warning them before they are several clicks into your flow!
- scosman 5y agoYou can also just check browser locale, show a warning if != US as early setup step. Offer to take their email and tell them when more countries are added (and capture all the traffic to reactivate later).
- ixacto 5y agoThis app wants you to sign in and change the color scheme before using. This is not good UX, it should be more like https://www.firecalc.com/ https://www.firecalc.com/ where you just type some numbers and hit "go". Not everything needs a google/fb/clever login.
- jakubp 5y agoThat's not accurate. You actually type numbers in right after the color choice and it shows you chart of the projection etc. No login necessary.
- chank 5y agoI do this already in excel.
- davidu 5y agoReally great v1 -- nice job. Ignore the haters.
- rafael09ed 5y agoI had to create a small simulator[0] a few months ago to figure out my personal finances for my first job and to figure out how early I could move out without acquiring debt. I wanted to compare different options so I could weigh the impact of my decisions on how much money I could save. I like the idea of plans but they feel a bit bulky to use and you can't compare them. If you could directly compare plans against each other I think I would find it more useful. Also making them faster to create could be nice. I can change all the defaults in the actual view so why force me to go through the pages? I do like the stacked breakdown of each plan and the behind the scenes calculation of taxes, investing and inflation. [0]: https://gist.github.com/Rafael09ED/61568afa8a2308b53917915ee37acfb2 https://gist.github.com/Rafael09ED/61568afa8a2308b53917915ee...
- bsanr2 5y agoDoes this model consider the disparities in costs, rates, and growth potential as dictated by race? I say this not to be divisive but because revelations about such disparities over the past few years are a real and substantial concern, such that spending, borrowing, employment, and other such decisions might be altered to account for these realities. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/25/realestate/blacks-minorities-appraisals-discrimination.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/25/realestate/blacks-minorit... https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/19/lenders-deny-mortgages-for-blacks-at-a-rate-80percent-higher-than-whites.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/19/lenders-deny-mortgages-for-b... https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/compensation/pages/racial-wage-gaps-persistence-poses-challenge.aspx https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/compensatio...
- Aachen 5y agoJust as a heads-up, this privacy policy is not legal in the EU because it doesn't fulfill even the primary requirements (say what you process, for what purpose, stored for how long), but also this huge template (28 minutes estimated reading time) is not helpful to anyone -- it's just an enumeration of every possible method of data tracking -- so I'm not sure why you would even use this when it's not legal anyway. It's more helpful for users to just write a short, custom notice with a bit of required boilerplate at the bottom (e.g. 'you have the right to complain go your local authority' needs to be in each of them), then it's both informative and legal. Edit: somehow ctrl+f privacy gave me 0 hits (maybe I started typing before the page loaded fully? Not sure, but I did look), just noticed when actually starting to read the comments that something similar is also the top comment, sorry for being (at least partially) redundant.
- jameskraus 5y agoLol, my impression is that OP did exactly that – copied a template privacy policy. They probably don't have a budget for a lawyer to write them a privacy policy, much less a EU-compliant one. If this was a big player in the space, sure, maybe they should have a better policy. But for a homegrown tool like this that's just launching? It makes sense they're using off-the-shelf stuff.
- Aachen 5y agoObviously there isn't an original word in this (see the word 'template' in my comment), and indeed it makes sense to not spend a lot of time on this when you're just starting out. That's exactly why I'd recommend to just write what you actually do instead of finding huge text that isn't actually fulfilling the law. Writing up what data you process takes the time of writing a blog post where you barely have to research anything because the subject you're reporting on is yourself. Or just don't have a privacy policy (effectively the same as having one that isn't legal and doesn't say anything): saves you even more time as well as the reader.
- gourneau 5y agoCool project. If any FIRE people are looking for a more minimalist simulator checkout https://ficalc.app/ https://ficalc.app/
- theptip 5y agoGave it a quick spin, it looks potentially useful. The mortgage calculator seems way off though; I put in some toy numbers ($1m 30yr fixed mortgage @ 3%, copying in values from the external calculator that's linked) and it's computing the payoff in about 5-6 years instead of 30. Ideally you could enter the mortgage terms like period, APR, and have the calculator back in to the mortgage payment, since the monthly payment is more of an output rather than an input in mortgage planning calculations. Mortgage details are likely to be the dominant term for homeowners, so seems like this one would be important to fix. Plus mortgage interest compounding calculations are pretty opaque to most people, so it would help with explaining different structures (e.g. ARM vs. fixed vs interest-only, what portion of your payment is going to principal vs. interest over time, etc.).
- zwass 5y agoIt seems to automatically select "pay off ASAP" (probably a bug). You can turn this off by resetting the monthly payment and then it seems to work as expected.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- holoduke 5y agoJust out of curiousity, Would you become really a happy person when you become so much focused on financials, investments, growth, independence etc I wonder. I personally have a good income. But I do not invest at all. I hate it. I just spend whatever I think is possible and needed for a happy today. And so far money is something I barely have to think about. I see so much people around me busy with cryptos. Busy with stock markets. And they always talk and dream about the future. Live a life today I always tell them.
- ksubedi 5y agoWell that strategy works, till it doesn't. There is a difference between being rich and being wealthy, and that is sustainability of wealth. You can live your life and still contribute to long term wealth growth. What if you need to pay for some big unexpected expense, like your pet getting sick or you getting in an accident? Without proper financial backbone, even one of those type of incidents can throw you off and take you down the rabbit hole of catching up with debt. "It's Not What You Make that Matters; It's What You Save." - Somebody
- neogodless 5y agoThere are lots of ways to live your live, and achieve some happiness, either now, ongoing, or merely in the future. It sounds like you found one method that creates some measure of happiness for you, right now. Will anything in your future change the variables so that you have to adapt? What will your options be then? Now, your premise here is "so much focused" or to reword, "intently focused" on growing wealth for the purposes of financial independence. If you start with that premise, there might a a corresponding decrease or minimization of competing focuses, including "what makes you happy in the present." If you shift the premise a bit to more of a Pareto Principle approach of "do at least the 20% you need to plan for your future, and get 80% of the benefit", you might see things a little differently. Extremes don't make for good arguments, but they can be illustrative. If you feel like you have to spend "everything" you have, and invest "nothing" then any break in your income stream will instantly crush everything that you currently use to make you happy. If, on the other hand, you find that you can be really quite happy while spending 75% and investing the other 25%, you might find that over time, you've been happy all along, and you've gained a resilience to changing life circumstances as well, and increased your options for what you are required to do, and what you can choose to do. As for just "investing" or "not investing", the common wisdom is that simple savings will tend to lose value when adjusted for inflation. You do not need to become "busy with cryptos" to invest, though. You can simply think long-term, buy broad total market index funds, and stop thinking about those investments almost instantly. It does not take focus. You don't have to go all the way down the rabbit hole to intently focus on what you might consider absolutely optimizing your investments. It's quite unlikely to pay off, so take a simpler path.
- lowercased 5y agoit wasn't clear to me that 'debt' was not the same as 'mortgage'. I entered 'debt', then a couple steps later, the 'asset' of house had a 'mortage' box below. this also doesn't account for second mortgages, but you're likely aware of this. nice job overall...
- scubakid 5y agoHmm I'll have to think about what can be done to make it more clear to users that things like mortgages are modeled as part of one "financed asset". Maybe some better cues can be added in the onboarding process..
- lowercased 5y agoeven just something like "don't include a mortgage or vehicle payments here" on the debt screen. give more example ("cc debt, student loan, etc"). "unsecured debt" vs "secured debt", with examples, I guess??
- irinai13 5y agoI just played around with a little and I really like it! The onboarding flow and entire look and feel of the app is really smooth and modern, while also remaining simple. It makes me want to use it more! I recently signed up for a free trial of a similar online financial planning service at Charles Schwab and it was awful and clunky. Maybe you can sell this to them? ;-) I will keep using. I'm not as concerned about handing over my data since it's not linked anywhere so even if breached or sold, no one would really know that it's accurate. I guess the worst that can happen is that I will get slightly more targeted financial deals.
- scubakid 5y agoThanks! And agreed on many of the big players having surprisingly clunky interfaces. As a solo developer, no clue on the viability/likelihood of partnering or selling to one of them... but who knows I guess :)
- geuis 5y agoThis thing appears to be broken. You just get to a certain point after entering some basic info and it just stops. There’s nothing to indicate what next steps should be.
- DesiLurker 5y agoI remember seeing something similar geared towards financial independence here: https://www.fireleap.com https://www.fireleap.com
- zwass 5y agoReally useful for me! I subscribed. Few pieces of feedback: 1. It would be helpful to be able to visualize how property tax is effecting the reduction in other assets. 2. It would be nice to be able to use arrows to move the retirement age up and down and watch the scenario change. Currently having to click on the box, edit the age, and then click out is cumbersome. 3. It would be nice to be able to easily click on and off the income/expenses/other/goals in the bottom so that there would be a quick way to see how each of them (or combinations of them together) effects the scenario.
- scubakid 5y agoThanks a bunch! Duly noted on 1 and 2. For 3, you should already be able to hover over each event icon and click it to "hide" or "show" the event; i.e. temporarily take it out of the simulation.
- vallas 5y agoWho in the hell use options Just buy Bitcoin Or stay poor
- jameskraus 5y agoNifty calculator! I wish it was a bit easier to max out two 401ks (e.g. for a married couple). Otherwise, it's very slick and gives a similar result to my personal projections.
- ragar90 5y agoPretty cool app, but how can i use this to plan my fiances better? I do not have much background in finance and there was some things i did not understand how to fill in, would it be possible to include some video tutorial on how to do a good planning?
- matmann2001 5y agoThis is a fantastic tool but honestly my favorite part is that I can try what seems like most of the features without ever having to create an account and providing personally identifiable info that will inevitably lead to yet another mailing list for me to ignore. So thank you for having faith in your users!
- ketralnis 5y agoJust a point of feedback on the UI. When I switch between the "official" and the alternative plans, you reset all of the UI elements like which graph is active and the time period and what UI elements have been collapsed or hidden and which year's breakdown is currently visible. That makes it very difficult to quickly switch between them to visually see what the actual changes are which is the only reason I'd set up multiple plans. I'm sure you put a lot of work into the animations but those also detract from this. For the same reason I'd also like to be able to pin the left sidebar (whether collapsed or uncollapsed doesn't matter, but in any case not jumping around every time I click something)
- scubakid 5y agoThose are good insights, thanks! I'll work on that.
- skronch 5y agoIs there a way to specify the % of income that is allocated to cash holdings vs. investments? The modeller seems to assume that I will keep all future income as cash, which seems unrealistic.
- scubakid 5y agoThe way it currently works, the simulation uses income in a given year to cash-flow expenses for that year, and the rest is allocated according to the items you configure in the Financial Goals section. As a simple example, you could define a desired emergency fund of $20k as priority #1, then maximized taxable investments as priority #2... which would mean in any given year, money left over after expenses goes to (A) topping off the emergency fund if needed, then (B) to taxable investments. Does that help add some clarity?
- Fast_Sasquatch 5y agoIt looks pretty but I can't figure out how to add my monthly investment "expenses"? FWIW I currently use firecalc and personalcapital. Also maybe add a url-save feature like firecalc to the free version? *edit: I found it, you have to add monthly savings or investments into your Financial Goals
- udev 5y agoWhat is a good offline alternative? I hear Excel, but one needs also to know how an what to compute. Any books/guides in that sense?
- hexo 5y agoAll I can see is a blank page :(
- scubakid 5y agoIs that still the case? I have not been aware of a hosting outage...
- TheHideout 5y agoThe good: the interface is very slick, nice work, you obviously put a lot of work into this tool. The bad: I was immediately turned off that I was presented with an up-sell to premium on the very first on-boarding step and it was for a color theme... Not only that, but I couldn't find any information on what the pricing was until significantly further into using the tool, another major turn off. The ugly: Not being transparent about premium up front feels deceptive and makes me very weary of giving you any of my data.
- scubakid 5y agoGood points. A lot of people have been really tearing into the color theme selector on here, so it looks like that will be getting demoted out of the onboarding experience haha. As for premium, I'll make the feature breakdown of Free vs Premium available from the home page so that communication is clearer from the start. Thanks for your thoughts!
- stjohnswarts 5y agoI wish this was offline, this stuff is a little too personal to have hooked to identifying information. This looks great for those who don't have issues with that though.
- finniananderson 5y agoLove it, subscribed with the 60% off. Fantastic & beautiful tool, can't wait to see how much it grows. I second multiple currencies, I'm in NZ and would love the tax and stuff to work itself automatically but appreciate the enourmous overheads for doing that. Found a bug: changing the "Maximum Value" field for a house affects all other houses.
- scubakid 5y agoThanks so much! I'll look into that.
- screye 5y agoI really like tool, but dislike a lot of the dark patterns. I love how fast and intuitive it is. I also like having all the info on one page to look at. The dashboard is great. I like most of it, so I won't speak for the good and will focus on the constructive criticism part. * Not being able to save progress after you enter all of it is devious, but really turned me off. I don't just dislike it. It might be the one thing to permanently turn me off from the tool. I just spent 20 minutes adding all my info, and now you want to hold me hostage, unless I get a subscription? How dare you. (hyperbole, but I'm feeling sassy) * Why should I care about the theme so soon ? * No, I am not paying for a financial management tool until I have at least tried it out for 3 months. * If everything else is absolutes, I would keep 401k as absolute too. (Also just call it 401k) * On the same note, is my employer matching 50% of my contributions or 50% of my income ? * It makes no sense to make the landing page the 'what is projectfi' blog page instead of the 'Official plan' page * It makes no sense to open 'where you are today' instead of 'official plan' when I click on my account * I won't pay $30/year even if I liked it. The tool is a one-and-done sort of thing, and I would be more down for an upfront price. I might pay $30 to buy it up front if I get to use it 1 year for free and see if I like it. I would accept a shorter timeline for other apps, but sadly my financial information just doesn't change fast enough and I would need 1 year before I recognize if I find it useful enough. * If I am using it long term, I don't want to rely on someone's server staying up. Can you offer this as a client-side app ? * Feature request - Export to Excel ________ OP, I hope you don't take this harshly. I genuinely like the tool ,and the only reason I agreed to write such a huge review of it is because I'd like to see it get good. Best of luck, you might just get me as a customer if it was a purely offline app with excel exports with a one-time fee.
- thrwn_frthr_awy 5y agoI felt foolish after filling out a bunch of data only to not be able to save it. I'm active in the FIRE community and I really, really enjoyed the app, but it left a very bad taste in my mouth.
- xivzgrev 5y agoYea I almost spent a bunch of time but after a few screens I thought about saving. I noticed “unsaved” and clicked in. Alas, a premium feature! Felt sad there’s not at least a freemium version you can save, and clicked out. What’s the point of a “free” financial planning tool that needs 20 min of input that you can’t save? Too much friction! At least give me a fully featured trial, or can track 1 goal, etc
- johnmoonyy 5y agoGreat layout. looks very clean and I like the tag line. Shows exactly what the site is about
- wills_forward 5y agoI’ve been looking for exactly this. Signed up for premium after doing my first model. So well built, very nice work.
- bradj 5y agoThis is awesome, well done.
- AYBABTME 5y agoI think this tool needs to provide a quick way of pre-filling a reasonable set of monthly expenses. I entered some stuff quickly and the projection seems to be too good to be true, so I don't trust the data it projects.