7 ms·

I gave a quick try and just from the first look this looks amazing. It's precisely what I'm missing in my spreadsheets for my personal finance: probabilistic pl

I gave a quick try and just from the first look this looks amazing. It's precisely what I'm missing in my spreadsheets for my personal finance: probabilistic planning. I'd consider paying the premium tier but I miss a few things: - Support for tax brackets in other countries (maybe let users introduce them manually) - Support for "disasters" in the probabilistic case. I'd be interested in knowing how robust is my strategy to being fired, or having a reduced salary. For example, letting me input a "probability of losing employment" per year and possible ranges for time being unemployed would be interesting. - Also, support for variable-rate mortgages would be interesting. Here in Spain there are quite a lot of offers on mortgages at X% + euribor, and it'd be interesting to put together the behaviour of the mortgage index and the investments. Related with the previous points, simulation of economic crisis could be interesting: investments go down, increased probability of losing my job, increased mortgage payments maybe... Do I survive those crisis? What's my margin? All in all, pretty interesting, congratulations on the job.

scubakid 5y ago
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. It's great to see that you tested out the probabilistic planning mode enough to identify ideas like this that would further enhance it. In fact, some of these things like being able to inject "simulated recessions" are already in my feature backlog, kind of waiting to see how much demand there might be. I'm definitely looking to keep evolving the tool over time, and I'll put some thought into how to accommodate custom tax brackets (seems pretty doable), as well as the other probabilistic features you mention.
gota 5y ago
Localization could be important too, for broader adoption - not just for currency display but (most importantly) the kinds of investments available and tax rates vary a lot. A minor thing is that the 'default' values for % return and inflation are also different in different places
- scubakid 5y ago
  Good point. In addition to customizable income tax brackets, another idea I've been mulling over is a custom investment type with more controls to model a wider variety of investment vehicles. Perhaps I could add more templates as well, and show/hide some based on the localization settings.
  - jamie_ca 5y ago
    Yes custom investment types! Up in Canada I have access to a registered retirement fund (tax-deferred, like a 401k but not as closely tied to employer) and a tax-free savings account (for untaxed growth), and I couldn’t figure out how to model monthly contributions to both out of a single salary stream. Being able to fund both (and then in retirement, set a max annual withdrawal from the tax-deferred account before withdrawing from the tax-free) is to me an important bit of modelling that I couldn’t figure out how to get sorted in 15-20 minutes.
dr_orpheus 5y ago
Along the vein of supporting "disasters" one of the most interesting useful features when seeing a financial planner for our family was looking at possible effects of death and disability. I haven't gotten very far in to it so I haven't been able to explore the life events very much. But looking at the long term impact of "what if I died/what if I had life insurance (and what term)" is very helpful to explore.

scubakid 5y ago

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. It's great to see that you tested out the probabilistic planning mode enough to identify ideas like this that would further enhance it. In fact, some of these things like being able to inject "simulated recessions" are already in my feature backlog, kind of waiting to see how much demand there might be. I'm definitely looking to keep evolving the tool over time, and I'll put some thought into how to accommodate custom tax brackets (seems pretty doable), as well as the other probabilistic features you mention.

gota 5y ago

Localization could be important too, for broader adoption - not just for currency display but (most importantly) the kinds of investments available and tax rates vary a lot. A minor thing is that the 'default' values for % return and inflation are also different in different places

scubakid 5y ago
Good point. In addition to customizable income tax brackets, another idea I've been mulling over is a custom investment type with more controls to model a wider variety of investment vehicles. Perhaps I could add more templates as well, and show/hide some based on the localization settings.
- jamie_ca 5y ago
  Yes custom investment types! Up in Canada I have access to a registered retirement fund (tax-deferred, like a 401k but not as closely tied to employer) and a tax-free savings account (for untaxed growth), and I couldn’t figure out how to model monthly contributions to both out of a single salary stream. Being able to fund both (and then in retirement, set a max annual withdrawal from the tax-deferred account before withdrawing from the tax-free) is to me an important bit of modelling that I couldn’t figure out how to get sorted in 15-20 minutes.

dr_orpheus 5y ago

Along the vein of supporting "disasters" one of the most interesting useful features when seeing a financial planner for our family was looking at possible effects of death and disability. I haven't gotten very far in to it so I haven't been able to explore the life events very much. But looking at the long term impact of "what if I died/what if I had life insurance (and what term)" is very helpful to explore.