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A year and a half ago I started building a better personal finance simulator / retirement calculator, mainly for myself and friends/family to use. I was about

A year and a half ago I started building a better personal finance simulator / retirement calculator, mainly for myself and friends/family to use. I was about T-minus one week from halting work on it and starting something else when I posted to Show HN on a whim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26969173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26969173. I didn't even think to check back on it until during a meeting I noticed my inbox was suddenly filling up :) I was astonished and inspired by the response, and haven't stopped working on it since!

AdamTReineke 4y ago
I don't remember when I signed up, but I'm a fan. Love when the emails come with the regular updates. I need to do my monthly data update. <3
- scubakid 4y ago
  Glad to hear someone likes the email updates! Usually it feels like sending those into the void. If you ever want to beta test and help shape new features before they make it to production, I post to #early-access in the discord fairly often during the dev process.
samtimalsina 4y ago
Keep up the good work!
- scubakid 4y ago
  Wow, good eye! I see you're one of the OG people who tried it out. If there's still a product area you'd like to see fleshed out more, do let me know. It's been a whirlwind of a year trying to maintain a high development velocity as a solo dev working on nights/weekends, but in the grand scheme of things it's easy to do when you love what you're building.
pbronez 4y ago
Wow! I have long wanted a tool like this. Will sign up for the trial.
- scubakid 4y ago
  Before this, that was me. In fact, PL originally started as just a spreadsheet I shared around with a few friends, but as I added more to that it became exponentially more difficult to maintain. All the formulas got really nasty, which made it super opaque how everything actually worked. Eventually I realized there must be a better way!
  - pbronez 4y ago
    100%. I'm at that point where I've got very complex spreadsheets and need to make some kind of change. What's the best place to provide feedback / ask questions? Discord?
    - scubakid 4y ago
      Yep, the PL discord is perfect for that.
timbargo 4y ago
I'm a new grad who's starting his first big boy job tomorrow. Finding Projection Lab in that first Projectifi post was transformative for me! It helped more than anything else to understand my potential financial future. I've used it when comparing potential jobs, lifestyles, locations. It's been incredibly valuable to me. I have quite a few friends who have become fans of the tool as well. And I used it to show some friends that yes they can retire with some smart early decisions! So thank you! I'm glad you posted it on HN and kept up development. I plan to keep using Projection Lab indefinitely to better understand my finances as they develop. And I do subscribe to the newsletter as well! :) It serves as a nice reminder to check-in.
- scubakid 4y ago
  That's awesome. Makes me happy to hear it's helped others weigh the same kind of decisions that I have. At this point it still feels like a pipe dream to one day be able to go full-time on it, but either way the plan is to keep making it better and better (no shortage of ideas!). Ironically, I'm sure grinding leetcode instead and switching to FAANG would result in much better projections in PL for myself; but sometimes I think it's more about what keeps you energized and passionate than what optimizes total comp.
fishtoaster 4y ago
I'm a huge fan of ProjectionLab (good call on the name change)! I had just had a windfall from an old employer's IPO. Not life-changing, but enough that "save as much as I can and hope for the best when I hit retirement age" was no longer the only option. I was looking for tools to help me plot out some scenarios and the only options I could find were: 1. 5-input 'retirement calculators' that various sites had up as lead-gen tools 2. Build a complex and bug-riddled model in a spreadsheet 3. Pay for a financial planner to plug my situation into their spreadsheet I saw ProjectionLab on HN, though, and it was exactly what I was looking for. The end result I cam up with was good, but even just playing around with the modeling helped me build up a much better intuition than I'd started with. Thanks for your work, and I'm glad you stuck with it!
- scubakid 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing your experience! I agonized over that name change for so long that I even built a custom name generator and availability checker to run through all the permutations of relevant words, themes, prefixes, suffixes, etc... all to end up coming back to one of the first ideas from my initial brainstorming session XD You touch on something I've noticed as well; that if you play around with models like this long enough, your intuitions start to become noticeably more refined. I can tell the way I think about finance has definitely evolved throughout the course of building the tool.

AdamTReineke 4y ago

I don't remember when I signed up, but I'm a fan. Love when the emails come with the regular updates. I need to do my monthly data update. <3

scubakid 4y ago
Glad to hear someone likes the email updates! Usually it feels like sending those into the void. If you ever want to beta test and help shape new features before they make it to production, I post to #early-access in the discord fairly often during the dev process.

samtimalsina 4y ago

Keep up the good work!

scubakid 4y ago
Wow, good eye! I see you're one of the OG people who tried it out. If there's still a product area you'd like to see fleshed out more, do let me know. It's been a whirlwind of a year trying to maintain a high development velocity as a solo dev working on nights/weekends, but in the grand scheme of things it's easy to do when you love what you're building.

pbronez 4y ago

Wow! I have long wanted a tool like this. Will sign up for the trial.

scubakid 4y ago
Before this, that was me. In fact, PL originally started as just a spreadsheet I shared around with a few friends, but as I added more to that it became exponentially more difficult to maintain. All the formulas got really nasty, which made it super opaque how everything actually worked. Eventually I realized there must be a better way!
- pbronez 4y ago
  100%. I'm at that point where I've got very complex spreadsheets and need to make some kind of change. What's the best place to provide feedback / ask questions? Discord?
  - scubakid 4y ago
    Yep, the PL discord is perfect for that.

timbargo 4y ago

I'm a new grad who's starting his first big boy job tomorrow. Finding Projection Lab in that first Projectifi post was transformative for me! It helped more than anything else to understand my potential financial future. I've used it when comparing potential jobs, lifestyles, locations. It's been incredibly valuable to me. I have quite a few friends who have become fans of the tool as well. And I used it to show some friends that yes they can retire with some smart early decisions! So thank you! I'm glad you posted it on HN and kept up development. I plan to keep using Projection Lab indefinitely to better understand my finances as they develop. And I do subscribe to the newsletter as well! :) It serves as a nice reminder to check-in.

scubakid 4y ago
That's awesome. Makes me happy to hear it's helped others weigh the same kind of decisions that I have. At this point it still feels like a pipe dream to one day be able to go full-time on it, but either way the plan is to keep making it better and better (no shortage of ideas!). Ironically, I'm sure grinding leetcode instead and switching to FAANG would result in much better projections in PL for myself; but sometimes I think it's more about what keeps you energized and passionate than what optimizes total comp.

fishtoaster 4y ago

I'm a huge fan of ProjectionLab (good call on the name change)! I had just had a windfall from an old employer's IPO. Not life-changing, but enough that "save as much as I can and hope for the best when I hit retirement age" was no longer the only option. I was looking for tools to help me plot out some scenarios and the only options I could find were: 1. 5-input 'retirement calculators' that various sites had up as lead-gen tools 2. Build a complex and bug-riddled model in a spreadsheet 3. Pay for a financial planner to plug my situation into their spreadsheet I saw ProjectionLab on HN, though, and it was exactly what I was looking for. The end result I cam up with was good, but even just playing around with the modeling helped me build up a much better intuition than I'd started with. Thanks for your work, and I'm glad you stuck with it!

scubakid 4y ago
Thanks for sharing your experience! I agonized over that name change for so long that I even built a custom name generator and availability checker to run through all the permutations of relevant words, themes, prefixes, suffixes, etc... all to end up coming back to one of the first ideas from my initial brainstorming session XD You touch on something I've noticed as well; that if you play around with models like this long enough, your intuitions start to become noticeably more refined. I can tell the way I think about finance has definitely evolved throughout the course of building the tool.