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I couldn't find a good financial planning tool that felt modern, nuanced, and actually fun to use... and I ended up spending all my free time this past year bui

I couldn't find a good financial planning tool that felt modern, nuanced, and actually fun to use... and I ended up spending all my free time this past year building one: ProjectionLab https://projectionlab.com https://projectionlab.com It doesn't involve linking your financial accounts, you don't have to make an account to try it, the free version has a lot of features, and there's a sandbox mode if you just want to see how the interface works. Last year I posted a prototype here (back when it was called ProjectiFi): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27844194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27844194, and the early feedback from the HN community was extremely helpful! I've put in about 1,000 more hours of dev time on nights/weekends since then, and it's pretty much a whole new app. Here are just a few of the things you can do with it, many inspired by the HN commentary: - Build detailed and flexible plans for your future that go beyond the standard online retirement calculators - Backtest on historical data and run Monte Carlo simulations - Model international scenarios with various account types and tax estimation presets - Experiment rapidly: the simulation engine runs in your browser and doesn't need to send your data server-side - Control how/where your data is stored: cloud sync, localStorage only, or manual import/export, (client-side by default, no persistence in the free tier) - Plan for goals like achieving financial independence, taking time off for travel, home ownership, starting a rental empire, etc. - Create granular models for how accounts/income/expenses/inflation/etc change over time using interactive plots - Build dynamic configurations using milestones that support multiple criteria and conditional logic - Create custom plots to visualize the metrics you care about - Plan separately or as a couple - Create and manage client accounts with the Pro version - Track progress over time and see it overlaid on top of your projections - Cross-compare between different plans, or stage + analyze multiple changes within a plan (and revert if desired) - Choose your own icons to personalize things - And a lot more; for a full breakdown of everything that's new, see the version history If you feel like checking it out, I would love to hear what you think! Most of the functionality is free (minus data persistence), but for anyone interested in upgrading to Premium, you can use coupon code "HN-10" for 10% off any plan :)

actuallyalys 5y ago
This tool is really flexible and you mention "a rental empire," so perhaps it's covered already, but it might be worth trying to add features for freelancers, contract workers, or people starting side businesses. I think those people would be more willing to spend money on a planning tool, since there's more decisions to make. (I think targeting financial planners is also a smart move.)
- scubakid 5y ago
  What kind of new features do you feel would add the most value for freelancer / side-business use cases?
  - tewwill 5y ago
    Fantastic UI. Congrats. It would be really cool to be able to model personal assets such as businesses. For example, I would like to be able to plan when I sell one of my businesses in X amount of years for a price of Y, then perhaps have options on how to spread the proceeds of that sale into different assets like cash, stocks / shares or one off purchases like a house. One thing I couldn't work out how to do was to add one off purchases once you had already created a plan. Is that possible?
    - scubakid 5y ago
      What kind of one-off purchases do you have in mind? Within the plan interface, there are a bunch of expandable columns at the bottom, and within each of those you can create/manage things like types of income, expenses, assets, cash-flow priorities, etc. You can control frequency on things like income/expenses; I imagine setting an expense to happen once would be an example of the kind of one-off you're looking for? You should also be able to model selling X for the price of Y pretty efficiently as well, perhaps with a single custom income event type and using the Advanced change-over-time editor.
      - tewwill 5y ago
        Thanks, I managed to model buying a house doing a one off expense. I think it might be useful from a usability point of view to put Buy a House as an item in the list of possible expenses as it is such a common goal for people. Anyway I absolutely love what you have done so I subscribed. Best of luck with this. I look forward to see how it grows!

actuallyalys 5y ago

This tool is really flexible and you mention "a rental empire," so perhaps it's covered already, but it might be worth trying to add features for freelancers, contract workers, or people starting side businesses. I think those people would be more willing to spend money on a planning tool, since there's more decisions to make. (I think targeting financial planners is also a smart move.)

scubakid 5y ago
What kind of new features do you feel would add the most value for freelancer / side-business use cases?
- tewwill 5y ago
  Fantastic UI. Congrats. It would be really cool to be able to model personal assets such as businesses. For example, I would like to be able to plan when I sell one of my businesses in X amount of years for a price of Y, then perhaps have options on how to spread the proceeds of that sale into different assets like cash, stocks / shares or one off purchases like a house. One thing I couldn't work out how to do was to add one off purchases once you had already created a plan. Is that possible?
  - scubakid 5y ago
    What kind of one-off purchases do you have in mind? Within the plan interface, there are a bunch of expandable columns at the bottom, and within each of those you can create/manage things like types of income, expenses, assets, cash-flow priorities, etc. You can control frequency on things like income/expenses; I imagine setting an expense to happen once would be an example of the kind of one-off you're looking for? You should also be able to model selling X for the price of Y pretty efficiently as well, perhaps with a single custom income event type and using the Advanced change-over-time editor.
    - tewwill 5y ago
      Thanks, I managed to model buying a house doing a one off expense. I think it might be useful from a usability point of view to put Buy a House as an item in the list of possible expenses as it is such a common goal for people. Anyway I absolutely love what you have done so I subscribed. Best of luck with this. I look forward to see how it grows!