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I actually have a draft open in gmail that i was meaning to send to you, so ill post it here instead :) I saw your initial release of this many months ago, tri

I actually have a draft open in gmail that i was meaning to send to you, so ill post it here instead :) I saw your initial release of this many months ago, tried it out, was like, ok thats kinda cool, put it down. But then recently i needed to do some serious life financial planning, remembered your tool, searched for the HN post and gave it a real go.... and WOW. Im so impressed. It does exactly what i need; give me a semi-realistic long term plan of finances, retirement, how much house i can afford, effect of jobs, stocks, etc. Being able to play around with scenarios like "what if one of us didnt work for a few years?" really easily. I probably could do all this stuff on a spreadsheet, but the fiddly details of things like inflation, raises, tax, etc are incredibly tedious to model. theres a lot of near term budgeting type apps etc out there, but there was no other product i found that works so well for long term macro stuff. So its well worth the premium subscription fee to me, on a time saved basis alone. The UI/X is mostly great(ill email you some minor suggestions :) ), and your development velocity is really impressive. Perhaps the total market for a tool like this is niche, but hopefully it turns into a profitable enough endeavor for you so you can keep working on it forever :)

scubakid 5y ago
Thanks! It started out as something I knew I wanted for my own planning purposes, as well as friends and family, and it's awesome to hear that it's a tool you too can imagine coming back to when you consider new life plans and decisions. I aim to keep evolving it over time, and I'll be happy to take a look at those UI/UX suggestions you have.
- dalyons 5y ago
  heres a couple: - it was really un-intuitive to me to edit my starting investments/position. The little cal icon top of the left sidebar was not where i was looking for that. Suggestion: add starting conditions it as a collapsed column furthest to the left in the stacks under the main graphs. thats where i expected it to be, along side the other personal detail stacks - adding a house mortgage and having it default to trying to pay it off as fast as possible seems wrong, few people would do that, makes more sense at low interest rates to do the regular 30yr - its easy to accidentally do something that doesnt make sense that has big consequences... eg i was playing around quite awhile before i realized i had my living expenses marked as $X,000 per year instead of per month. I wonder if you could come up with a nice way to warn people when things are significantly outside "normal". eg "hey looks like your living expenses of $200/mo are unrealistic, did you mean this? y/n" dismissable, but might help people into correcting the bigger mistakes
  - scubakid 5y ago
    Thanks for the ideas! I've been feeling like the initial conditions concept could use some work, and this approach sounds promising -- seems like it could also facilitate playing around with different initial conditions in different plans (if desired) as well. I think warnings like you mention would be a great addition as well, though I have an intuition it may be difficult to pin down what outside of normal really is, since things can be different around the world. Still, I bet it's possible to call attention to any truly ridiculous-seeming values.

scubakid 5y ago

Thanks! It started out as something I knew I wanted for my own planning purposes, as well as friends and family, and it's awesome to hear that it's a tool you too can imagine coming back to when you consider new life plans and decisions. I aim to keep evolving it over time, and I'll be happy to take a look at those UI/UX suggestions you have.

dalyons 5y ago
heres a couple: - it was really un-intuitive to me to edit my starting investments/position. The little cal icon top of the left sidebar was not where i was looking for that. Suggestion: add starting conditions it as a collapsed column furthest to the left in the stacks under the main graphs. thats where i expected it to be, along side the other personal detail stacks - adding a house mortgage and having it default to trying to pay it off as fast as possible seems wrong, few people would do that, makes more sense at low interest rates to do the regular 30yr - its easy to accidentally do something that doesnt make sense that has big consequences... eg i was playing around quite awhile before i realized i had my living expenses marked as $X,000 per year instead of per month. I wonder if you could come up with a nice way to warn people when things are significantly outside "normal". eg "hey looks like your living expenses of $200/mo are unrealistic, did you mean this? y/n" dismissable, but might help people into correcting the bigger mistakes
- scubakid 5y ago
  Thanks for the ideas! I've been feeling like the initial conditions concept could use some work, and this approach sounds promising -- seems like it could also facilitate playing around with different initial conditions in different plans (if desired) as well. I think warnings like you mention would be a great addition as well, though I have an intuition it may be difficult to pin down what outside of normal really is, since things can be different around the world. Still, I bet it's possible to call attention to any truly ridiculous-seeming values.