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Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
Hey everyone! After another year of building as a solo dev on nights and weekends, I'm back with an update on this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31083093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31083093.
TL;DR - ProjectionLab (https://projectionlab.com https://projectionlab.com) is a privacy-friendly personal finance planning tool where you can create financial plans that go beyond the standard online retirement calculators. And by popular request, it now supports self-hosting for Lifetime users!
Something I'm grateful for is that our community here on HN is the difference between PL existing and not. There was actually a time early on when I was one day away from halting work on it. I posted here on a whim, and was shocked to receive some really constructive and energizing feedback that went on to power my indie dev journey over the past two and a half years.
As a quick recap, the story started when I dove head-first down the financial independence rabbit hole. I wanted a hands-on and visual way to explore the trade-offs between different life paths. One thing led to another, and I decided to build ProjectionLab.
After last year's Show HN, I really put my nose to the grindstone, and here are some of the big developments:
- Self-hosting for Lifetime users (spin up your own private deployment, based on Docker Compose, includes support for auth/encryption)
- Cash-flow visualization for each simulated year (sankey charts)
- Tax analytics (detailed breakdowns for projected income, taxes, marginal rates, effective brackets, etc)
- Major redesign of entire app, with landing page and resources now split into separate project
- Filing separately option to improve support for international locations that don't have joint filing
- Roth Conversions and 72t (SEPP) distribution modeling
- Improvements to US tax estimation (Secure 2.0 updates, rental property tax deductions, Medicare + IRMAA, NIIT, principal residence exclusion, etc)
- Better support for planning as a couple
- More modeling options for cash-flow priorities to support different budgeting philosophies and goals
- Extra liquidity + withdrawal options, ability to fund expenses with specific accounts or route income to specific accounts
- Customization options for Monte Carlo simulations (characterization of success rates and outcome types, option to set random seed, etc)
- And a whole bunch more! (https://projectionlab.com/changelog https://projectionlab.com/changelog)
The HN community has had a huge role in shaping my overall direction with PL, and I can't wait to hear what you all think of the updates and where you would like to see things go from here.
As always, PL is free to try, with no need to create an account. It does not ask to link your financial accounts, and it has a sandbox mode if you just want to hop in and see how it works.
--Kyle
- gymbeaux 3y agoI love that this has the ability to track multiple scenarios eg FIRE and LeanFIRE. I can see people using this to compare kids vs no kids as well. I would love the ability to simulate 401k contributions assuming an annual max contribution increase. For example, I will often put into an investment returns calculator that I am contributing $20k per year to retirement, however 10 years from now the annual max will probably be over $30k.
- scubakid 3y agoPL assumes contribution limits increase over time to match inflation, so if you switch to visualizing results in actual currency (as opposed to today's currency), and you choose to contribute the max, you should see those nominal contributions increasing over time.
- edent 3y agoI really appreciate that this includes UK specific stuff! So many things are US$ only. I'm slightly confused by the pricing. Is the free plan persistent only in 1 browser? Have I understood that right?
- scubakid 3y agoThe sandbox is free, but data persistence is one of the premium features (though there is also a free trial for premium). My thought process was that I wanted to make as much of the planning functionality as I could free to try and low-friction. I'm always open to feedback on pricing model though. Sounds like you would prefer to see a level of persistence in the free tier? If you have more thoughts on how that should work, let me know!