Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

projectionlab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 240 posts

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

#71

Post by sthatipamala »

Great work! This might be unpopular among the HN crowd, but I think you can monetize this further by bundling this with an advising service.

This idea of FIRE has been spreading beyond techies/Internet nerds and into other highly paid professionals like doctors. [0]. The main difference is that non-programmer professionals generally don't get a thrill out of min/max-ing financial projections.

Such people might be willing to pay a few hundred dollars a year for someone to generate this kind of analysis with them and simply execute on it each year. Similar to how people pay for CPAs. My employer actually pays Goldman Sachs to provide a similar service for its employees (no commission, fiduciary advisors) but their tools suck compared to this.

[0] For example https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/, https://www.physicianonfire.com/

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

#72

Post by mikeg8 »

scubakid wrote: post #12
jasfi wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely, the web design and UI immediately grabbed my attention.

Thanks! It was tricky to build in so much flexibility and customization while still keeping the overall UI feeling relatively clean.. I try to strike a good balance there, but if you feel there are areas where I haven't succeeded, definitely let me know.

I've noticed a lot of humility in your comments which is always nice, but you have truly done an incredible job design-wise. Like many users have said, it looks very professional and feels fast/snappy. I have an enormous amount of respect for you doing this solo. I would love to get to this level some day.. Keep it up!!

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

#73

Post by gkop »

scubakid wrote: post #36
greenpizza13 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew this looked familiar! I paid for Projectfi this year. Can I use the same account?

Yep! Provided you mean ProjectiFi, same account should work. Man, that first "i" really did get lost a lot, didn't it?

Google may have squatted some mindshare here by launching a product called Project Fi (later renamed to just “Google Fi”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fi

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

#74

Post by scubakid »

mjsir911 wrote: post #70

Wow, this seems cool! Would love some integration with [plain text accounting]( https://plaintextaccounting.org/ ) so that I don't have to re-document all my finances though, even just a simple `ledger equity` import.

That could be an interesting suggestion to add on changemap. Can't say I'm familiar with the site yet, but what would your vision for a good workflow look like if the right integration was in place?

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

#75

Post by scubakid »

sthatipamala wrote: post #71

Great work! This might be unpopular among the HN crowd, but I think you can monetize this further by bundling this with an advising service. This idea of FIRE has been spreading beyond techies/Internet nerds and into other highly paid professionals like doctors. [0]. The main difference is that non-programmer professionals generally don't get a thrill out of min/max-ing financial projections. Such people might be wil…

To an extent, I was hoping to support use cases like this with the Pro version I rolled out recently. But perhaps I'm currently more out of the loop than you envision, in the sense that I'm not actively pairing people with advisors and it's just a product that advisors can use if they want. What do you imagine a more "bundled" offering might look like?

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

#76

Post by aidenn0 »

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…

> taxes in the US are much better

This is complicated. Taxes in the US are different. For example, a lot of higher earners are concentrated in California and New York, which have fairly high taxes; in New York or San Francisco a single person making $105k would take home about $75k (slightly less in SF, slightly more in NY) or about £3k more. I would suspect (but do not know) that the UK government pension and health-care is at least slightly better than the US version.

On top of that, people of a given income level spend more in the US (either because things are actually more expensive, or people in the US are more spendthrift; probably a bit of both), so if you come to spend like a typical American[1] your savings won't necessarily be higher in the US. Bay area rent, in particular is insane (rent alone would be more than the £2k a month you proposed for expenses, though $105k/year in the bay area would be a very low salary for a bay-area tech worker).

Now, you can do better. I have a friend who works as a DBA in a very inexpensive part of the country; he makes more than the $105k per year. In fact his yearly salary is higher than what he paid for his house. When remote became normal during COVID a lot of people moved to cheaper parts of the country while keeping their high salaries. Also, everything else being equal, a higher top-line will always provide more opportunities for savings

1: Before you dismiss this completely, there are real social costs to spending less than your peer group. IMO they are worth it, but they should be factored into any planning you do.

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

#77

Post by scubakid »

gkop wrote: post #73
scubakid wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep! Provided you mean ProjectiFi, same account should work. Man, that first "i" really did get lost a lot, didn't it?

Google may have squatted some mindshare here by launching a product called Project Fi (later renamed to just “Google Fi”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fi

Seems like Project Fi predates this; I was just a bit of an idiot at first and didn't realize how common the confusion would be until too late haha. Pronunciation was solid, but readability... not so great.

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

#79

Post by scubakid »

jkhdigital wrote: post #78

I took a look around and just want to confirm my impression: this is not an accounting system, right? I’ve been trying to automate my accounting workflow for a long time and this is the kind of tool that I’d love to not have to build myself.

What kind of workflow are you trying to automate? ProjectionLab's current focus is long-term projection/forecasting and planning your whole life based on where you are today and what you want to do. I'd hazard a guess that you might be looking for something a bit different, more along the lines of analyzing/organizing current transaction-level data?
Post reply on HN