3 ms·

Very impressive application, a smooth intuitive UI. The progressive disclosure style works well for inputting all the settings without getting overwhelmed. Tha

Very impressive application, a smooth intuitive UI. The progressive disclosure style works well for inputting all the settings without getting overwhelmed. That said, my go-to for FIRE calculations/simulations is https://www.firecalc.com/index.php https://www.firecalc.com/index.php - and I don't see that changing anytime soon. The FIREcalc UI is very clunky compared to ProjectionLab but once you get used to it, IMO the options are a little more straightforward to understand and set. And FIREcalc is free and makes it easy to "save" your settings for future tuning/revisiting by generating a link with URL query parameters containing your setting values - I'm good with that approach. ProjectionLab does provide more granularity for specifying investment accounts that are taxable vs tax-deferred vs tax-free, which allows it to factor in the effect of taxes in the projections. But I wonder if that's a level of complexity that's better left out of the calculations. Effective tax rate (and yeah verily, taxes) - so damn complicated at least in the US. It will vary considerably over time even during your post-FIRE journey, depending on: your income (of course); your deductions/credits; changes in tax rates and codes; on the state(s) you live in (and how the state taxes social security, HSA earnings); etc, etc and so on and so forth. Also many folks setup their asset allocation across all the various types of accounts to be as tax efficient as possible (https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Tax-efficient_fund_placement https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Tax-efficient_fund_placement), and AFAICT there's no way to reflect that in ProjectionLab currently. All that's a long way of saying that I appreciate that FIREcalc doesn't try to factor in taxes. It's easier to get my head around just allocating a certain amount for taxes in the yearly spending number, maybe based on my tax history or some coarse tax estimation calculator, maybe using an expected case and worst case tax amount in the yearly spending number and then running the FIREcalc simulations and comparing - without trying to account for the effect of taxes in a more granular way, given the inherent squishiness of taxes. YMMV of course. Anyways, nice work on ProjectionLab, I can see where it would be a valuable tool for those who are trying to get a handle on their current finances and FIRE goals and may be a little less comfortable using tools like FIREcalc or home-grown spreadsheets (I geek out on this stuff so naturally I use both!).

scubakid 4y ago
Thanks for sharing your perspective! It's always interesting to see among the flood of feature requests and suggestions that occasionally some people would prefer fewer features and more simplicity haha. Do you think there could be a place in ProjectionLab for a "simple" mode of some sort? With a reduced set of options and some notes on how the simpler assumptions differ from the standard mode? And if so, anything other than the tax config you'd want to see stripped out?
- 0_zymandias 4y ago
  I think a "simple" mode is a great idea and worth considering as the default mode until the user gets comfortable enough understanding the results and then wants to drill-down and provide more details to get more refined results. Taxes would be a good thing to tuck out-of-the-way until the user is ready to wade into it. So too, specifying dividend rate separate from return rate (think I saw this, could be mis-remembering). And even if it's an advanced option, as mentioned before there be dragons with taxes that makes me kind of shrug on the utility. I guess it does help to remind folks that taxes are a consideration in their FIRE planning and drawdown strategy. Folks might be surprised how low the federal effective tax rate could end up being after they FIRE, especially if all your income is passive - this is if you have have built up a nest egg that's enough, say 20-25x a reasonable (ie non-MMM levels of frugality) annual expense, but not like FU money amounts. And this is in the early retirement stage before Social Security, IRA withdrawal eligibility and RMDs come into play. State income tax rate, on the other hand ... (but of course income tax is only one component of your overall state tax burden to consider along with sales tax, property tax, etc).
  - scubakid 4y ago
    What's your take on the utility of researching and implementing feature-sets like what fsflyer was asking for? e.g. optimization techniques and tricks based on current country-specific tax codes, such as carefully timed roth conversions, ACA subsidies, social security claiming strategies, etc. Are you more in the camp that hyper-optimized strategies based on the tax codes of today may not be worth the effort to develop and maintain since there's so much inherent uncertainty with long-term planning?

scubakid 4y ago

Thanks for sharing your perspective! It's always interesting to see among the flood of feature requests and suggestions that occasionally some people would prefer fewer features and more simplicity haha. Do you think there could be a place in ProjectionLab for a "simple" mode of some sort? With a reduced set of options and some notes on how the simpler assumptions differ from the standard mode? And if so, anything other than the tax config you'd want to see stripped out?

0_zymandias 4y ago
I think a "simple" mode is a great idea and worth considering as the default mode until the user gets comfortable enough understanding the results and then wants to drill-down and provide more details to get more refined results. Taxes would be a good thing to tuck out-of-the-way until the user is ready to wade into it. So too, specifying dividend rate separate from return rate (think I saw this, could be mis-remembering). And even if it's an advanced option, as mentioned before there be dragons with taxes that makes me kind of shrug on the utility. I guess it does help to remind folks that taxes are a consideration in their FIRE planning and drawdown strategy. Folks might be surprised how low the federal effective tax rate could end up being after they FIRE, especially if all your income is passive - this is if you have have built up a nest egg that's enough, say 20-25x a reasonable (ie non-MMM levels of frugality) annual expense, but not like FU money amounts. And this is in the early retirement stage before Social Security, IRA withdrawal eligibility and RMDs come into play. State income tax rate, on the other hand ... (but of course income tax is only one component of your overall state tax burden to consider along with sales tax, property tax, etc).
- scubakid 4y ago
  What's your take on the utility of researching and implementing feature-sets like what fsflyer was asking for? e.g. optimization techniques and tricks based on current country-specific tax codes, such as carefully timed roth conversions, ACA subsidies, social security claiming strategies, etc. Are you more in the camp that hyper-optimized strategies based on the tax codes of today may not be worth the effort to develop and maintain since there's so much inherent uncertainty with long-term planning?