Cookie prompt is super annoying on mobile (safari) and hard to close out of.
Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence
101–110 of 166 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence
#102Make a german version (with germany related tax, stock and inflation data) and I "shut up and take my money."
I'll definitely look around and see if I can integrate additional historical datasets. That should be a pretty smooth integration if I can find good sources. For taxes, do you think there are some specific ways the tool could maybe be generalized more so that users can adapt it to their country's rules (or at least approximate them) without having to hard-code all the details of every country's tax system?
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence
#103This is really, really neat. Thank you for making this.
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence
#104*Incredible* product. I signed up for the monthly membership and, if all goes well, I will likely stick around or buy the lifetime membership. I currently use Undebt It[0] to manage my debts. It supports all kinds of debt payment plans like snowball, avalanche, cash flow index[1], etc. One feature I love is the "extra debt payment" that basically throws an addition X dollars at the highest interest debt (or whatever…
Thanks for the thoughtful response! And sure, feel free to continue the conversation over email if you like.
Currently, when you create a debt item or financed asset "X", there should be an "Extra X Payments" financial goal automatically generated, which you can click and drag higher up the list if you care more about allocating extra available yearly income towards that than certain other priorities. Is this feature working for you currently? And how close does it come to addressing / approximating your use cases above?
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence
#105Cookie prompt is super annoying on mobile (safari) and hard to close out of.
Apologies. I'll take another look at that on various mobile resolutions and make it less obtrusive and easier to close.
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence
#106This is super useful but the results were screwed up for me because of the default house maintenance estimate. For HCOL areas, 2.5% in yearly maintenance is HUGE. I'm planning on buying a $2M house in the SF Bay Area and didn't realize this tool was allocating $50K a year just for upkeep. Just a point of feedback :)
Ouch, that's a lot of yearly maintenance. Would you recommend changing the default value or trying to make it dynamic/contextual in some way? Or perhaps just trying to draw the user's attention to it better?
My first inclination would be to base maintenance cost off cost of rebuilding (optionally overridable) -- in effect, you end up with a much lower percent of total value where you're basically paying for an expensive lot, and a much higher percent of total value in depressed markets (e.g. where you can get 100-year-old 7-bedroom for ~= national median home value).
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence
#107Very well done. Clear UI. Simple to use and it delivers a good overview. The one thing I would suggest ( I assume this would be a part where you attempt to monetize it ) is a referral to financial advisors, who can use the information to assist.
Thanks! Interesting thought, though I have a natural hesitance towards recommending advisors (who might steer towards active management) or investment products, since my initial vision was to try to make the tool as unbiased and objective as possible, and more in keeping with some of the principles from the Bogleheads community. You may have a point though; I would be interested to hear where others stand on this.
There is a lot of skepticism around financial advisors and rightful so given the track record of many (picking insanely expensive funds, charging high fees themselves, etc.)
However, I do think there is a place for advisors not to pick investments but rather actually plan for life events (including tax stuff), which is right up the alley of this app). Having someone who could take all of your inputs, ask the right followup questions and appropriately model the likely range of outcomes on this kind of app could be quite attractive.
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence
#108This is really, really neat. Thank you for making this.
You're very welcome! Throughout the course of the pandemic, I went from knowing only a little about personal finance and financial independence, to researching everything I could get my hands on and eventually building this tool. Working on it as my main side project is one of the things that's kept me going through the pandemic months, and it's awesome to see others now enjoying it too.
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence
#109One thought and one bug
Thought: While I appreciate the stuff around child dependents, it feels very weird and tacked on.
Sure sticking an expense called “child” works if you don’t already have kids, but if you do, those costs are inextricably integrated with your existing lifestyle costs. I can’t easily estimate how much my grocery budget will go down if I remove the food my kids eat. Even if I could, I’m certainly didn’t think about removing my kids from the expense calculations at step 1, when dependents get added later, because I didn’t think it would ask me that.
A better solution would be something that discounted expenses after some date. Similarly, you could always bump up the expenses at some date if you don’t already have kids.
Bug: I think the net worth chart is a bit busted. Mine started at 0, but that wasn’t obviously wasn’t true. While the growth line looked reasonable, I think the chart needs to be pushed up by an offset.
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence
#110One thought and one bug Thought: While I appreciate the stuff around child dependents, it feels very weird and tacked on. Sure sticking an expense called “child” works if you don’t already have kids, but if you do, those costs are inextricably integrated with your existing lifestyle costs. I can’t easily estimate how much my grocery budget will go down if I remove the food my kids eat. Even if I could, I’m certainly…
Thanks Jonathan. Appreciate the callout about the chart -- I'll look into that.
For dependents, wouldn't "discount expenses after some date" be roughly the same as taking some from your current living expenses and putting it into a child expense which eventually goes away?
But yeah, point taken. It's probably not the smoothest experience. Perhaps having additional ways to control how expenses change over time would help? Maybe something along the lines of an interactable plot where you can specify different values at different ages to interpolate between?