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Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

projectionlab.com

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Re: Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

#51

Post by scubakid »

samtimalsina wrote: post #44

Wow, I had completely forgotten about this. My login still works! I signed up for the original ProjectiFi when it came out but did not use it much. I am a heavy YNAB user and this type of software is right up my alley. I am going give this a whirl again.

Let me know how it goes! One trend I noticed with people coming to this from budgeting apps like YNAB is that sometimes the Cash-Flow Priority system in ProjectionLab takes a minute to grasp. And for emergency fund / cash reserve goals, I'm in the process of adding a few more options to try to provide better support for different strategies there. If you find yourself looking for those, you can try them out on the early access site here (v3.0.1): https://projectifi-201a2--dev-xsmyy9im.web.app

Re: Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

#52

Post by bestinterest »

I just put in some numbers and wow. Unless I'm missing something incredible my findings are kinda depressing.

The top 5% salary in the UK is £81,000 -> after tax is £54,817. £4568 a month. Say you spend £2k a month. That's £2568 for investments per month. Using the calc, it seems you would be able to retire at age 50.

I quickly checked the US salary percentiles and the top 5th percentile of £81,000 in the UK is equal to the top 15th in the US. Thats 3x ceiling you could climb through not to mention taxes in the US are much much better?

Am I crazy?

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-f... https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-perce...

Re: Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

#53

Post by scubakid »

feedmethecorn wrote: post #50

The interface is really awesome. Nice work overall! I feel like this is something a financial institution/investment firm would seek to acquire.

Thanks! And I definitely didn't build it with acquisition in mind (or have any experience navigating those waters), but I suppose stranger things have happened haha. My intuition is that big firms/institutions would probably be looking for something with more crazy growth metrics and stickiness though, don't you think?

Re: Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

#54

Post by neill »

This is great, I took some time to get a fairly in depth plan together. There are two things that stuck out:

1. You've got RSU's (at first it wasn't clear to me where this would be addressed, but I think it made sense once I came across it) but I don't see a dedicated strategy for dealing with ISO/NSO's. That'd be helpful for the tech community especially.

2. I spent the 10-15 minutes working on a plan knowing that I'd need to upgrade to pro for every feature, but it seems like I need to upgrade to save my plan. I ended up not paying because I don't have enough time right now to fully evaluate this, but I might look back later. It would have been great if I could have entered my email and saved my plan without paying, and then had to later pay to access it. This gives you the benefit of getting my email address, and then sending me an email to access my plan so that I've got a second touchpoint to your product when I check my email in the future.

Looking forward to using this more in depth in the future!

Re: Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

#55

Post by scubakid »

bestinterest wrote: post #52

I just put in some numbers and wow. Unless I'm missing something incredible my findings are kinda depressing. The top 5% salary in the UK is £81,000 -> after tax is £54,817. £4568 a month. Say you spend £2k a month. That's £2568 for investments per month. Using the calc, it seems you would be able to retire at age 50. I quickly checked the US salary percentiles and the top 5th percentile of £81,000 in the UK is equal…

It does seem like there are some pretty wild discrepancies in total comp between countries. If the distributed/remote trend continues progressing, I wonder if we'll see things start to equalize at all in our lifetimes, or if there are other geopolitical / macroeconomic / other factors that are more significant.

Re: Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

#57

Post by chrishemsworth »

It looks pretty great, I hope to try it more extensively in the future. I was somewhat surprised how intensely I was overcome with existential dread as I put in my information, and just left. It's hard to approach thinking at all about finances, being some years into a pretty volatile career and having basically no assets, investments, savings of any kind, debt, and very rapidly rising costs.

Re: Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

#58

Post by feedmethecorn »

scubakid wrote: post #53
feedmethecorn wrote: post #50

The interface is really awesome. Nice work overall! I feel like this is something a financial institution/investment firm would seek to acquire.

Thanks! And I definitely didn't build it with acquisition in mind (or have any experience navigating those waters), but I suppose stranger things have happened haha. My intuition is that big firms/institutions would probably be looking for something with more crazy growth metrics and stickiness though, don't you think?

Financial institutions have been known to throw big money at products like this one. Many are looking to incorporate new, unique features into their online banking platforms.

Re: Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

#59

Post by scubakid »

neill wrote: post #54

This is great, I took some time to get a fairly in depth plan together. There are two things that stuck out: 1. You've got RSU's (at first it wasn't clear to me where this would be addressed, but I think it made sense once I came across it) but I don't see a dedicated strategy for dealing with ISO/NSO's. That'd be helpful for the tech community especially. 2. I spent the 10-15 minutes working on a plan knowing that I…

If you've still got your plan up, happy to give you an extended trial if you want!

But overall I think you're right on both points. I've been wanting to add better support for modeling options for a while; for anyone who'd like to bump priority there, feel free to upvote this item in changemap: https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi/task/5735-better-...

For #2, I'll do some thinking to gauge level of effort in rigging up a mechanic like that with the current stack. Losing data sucks, and I should take more steps to reduce the chances of that happening to anyone in the onboarding funnel.

Re: Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

#60

Post by d4mi3n »

scubakid wrote: post #55
bestinterest wrote: post #52

I just put in some numbers and wow. Unless I'm missing something incredible my findings are kinda depressing. The top 5% salary in the UK is £81,000 -> after tax is £54,817. £4568 a month. Say you spend £2k a month. That's £2568 for investments per month. Using the calc, it seems you would be able to retire at age 50. I quickly checked the US salary percentiles and the top 5th percentile of £81,000 in the UK is equal…

It does seem like there are some pretty wild discrepancies in total comp between countries. If the distributed/remote trend continues progressing, I wonder if we'll see things start to equalize at all in our lifetimes, or if there are other geopolitical / macroeconomic / other factors that are more significant.

It should up to a point. A lot of high paying tech jobs are in regulated industries that sometimes have hard restrictions on who they're allowed to employ. For example, I know someone who works at Oracle Cloud and works on projects for the US DoD. For these projects Oracle is required to employ US citizens, perform background checks, and in some cases ensure those workers have clearance to work with classified information.

I suspect there are other high paying jobs/markets with similar restrictions. It'll be interesting to see how the dust settles over the next few years as geographical location within a country and without impacts the labor market.

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