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Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance

projectifi.io

161–170 of 266 posts

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

#161

Just out of curiousity, Would you become really a happy person when you become so much focused on financials, investments, growth, independence etc I wonder. I personally have a good income. But I do not invest at all. I hate it. I just spend whatever I think is possible and needed for a happy today. And so far money is something I barely have to think about. I see so much people around me busy with cryptos. Busy wit…

Well that strategy works, till it doesn't. There is a difference between being rich and being wealthy, and that is sustainability of wealth. You can live your life and still contribute to long term wealth growth. What if you need to pay for some big unexpected expense, like your pet getting sick or you getting in an accident? Without proper financial backbone, even one of those type of incidents can throw you off and take you down the rabbit hole of catching up with debt.

"It's Not What You Make that Matters; It's What You Save." - Somebody

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

#162
I just played around with a little and I really like it! The onboarding flow and entire look and feel of the app is really smooth and modern, while also remaining simple. It makes me want to use it more! I recently signed up for a free trial of a similar online financial planning service at Charles Schwab and it was awful and clunky. Maybe you can sell this to them? ;-) I will keep using. I'm not as concerned about handing over my data since it's not linked anywhere so even if breached or sold, no one would really know that it's accurate. I guess the worst that can happen is that I will get slightly more targeted financial deals.

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

#163

Just out of curiousity, Would you become really a happy person when you become so much focused on financials, investments, growth, independence etc I wonder. I personally have a good income. But I do not invest at all. I hate it. I just spend whatever I think is possible and needed for a happy today. And so far money is something I barely have to think about. I see so much people around me busy with cryptos. Busy wit…

There are lots of ways to live your live, and achieve some happiness, either now, ongoing, or merely in the future.

It sounds like you found one method that creates some measure of happiness for you, right now. Will anything in your future change the variables so that you have to adapt? What will your options be then?

Now, your premise here is "so much focused" or to reword, "intently focused" on growing wealth for the purposes of financial independence. If you start with that premise, there might a a corresponding decrease or minimization of competing focuses, including "what makes you happy in the present."

If you shift the premise a bit to more of a Pareto Principle approach of "do at least the 20% you need to plan for your future, and get 80% of the benefit", you might see things a little differently. Extremes don't make for good arguments, but they can be illustrative. If you feel like you have to spend "everything" you have, and invest "nothing" then any break in your income stream will instantly crush everything that you currently use to make you happy. If, on the other hand, you find that you can be really quite happy while spending 75% and investing the other 25%, you might find that over time, you've been happy all along, and you've gained a resilience to changing life circumstances as well, and increased your options for what you are required to do, and what you can choose to do.

As for just "investing" or "not investing", the common wisdom is that simple savings will tend to lose value when adjusted for inflation. You do not need to become "busy with cryptos" to invest, though. You can simply think long-term, buy broad total market index funds, and stop thinking about those investments almost instantly. It does not take focus. You don't have to go all the way down the rabbit hole to intently focus on what you might consider absolutely optimizing your investments. It's quite unlikely to pay off, so take a simpler path.

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

#164
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what uFincs is, a modern version of GnuCash! I had the exact same thoughts as you did :) The simple tech stack breakdown is that the client-side is React + Redux + TypeScript + Sass. Of note, I use redux-saga, which has been an absolute boon for some of the more complex flows. Design system is completely custom. Backend API is Node + Feathers. Database is Postgres. Marketing site is served separately f…

"but I actually did just acquire my first paying customer yesterday!" Congratz!

Thank you!

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

#166
post #9

Looks interesting, but based on the privacy policy terms of data usage, transferability, and so forth, I can't in good faith test with real financial data: https://projectifi.io/privacy-policy.html Everytime I see a tool that shouldn't need to be hosted remotely as a service and could reasonably be deployed to the client where they have more control over their data (not as a service), it's a non-starter for me. I get…

I agree. The trend of handing over all your data ( especially your financial data) to some nebulous service isn't exactly my favourite. Which is why I built https://ufincs.com , a nebulous service where you hand over all your financial data! Yes, that was a joke. In reality, uFincs is more of a stop-gap between what you seek (native app where you own the data) and what the status quo is (web-based app where your data…

I wonder if the "most private" way to do this would be to distribute as a jupyter notebook or some sort of local bundle/distro to run as a local webapp?

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

#167
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess I should also add that with the current web version, you can opt out of sending telemetry data via cookie preferences, and with the Premium version you choose whether or not you want your data persisted or not. Rather than ameliorate concerns about privacy, this intensifies them. This is the approach I would expect from a megacorporation hellbent on mining my private data to death while pointing to the by-s…

Oops, it seems my attempt to add clarity on the current implementation only added more confusion. Sorry about that. Let me try to break down the status quo in more detail. 1. User arrives on the site, no google analytics activated unless user accepts cookie settings (which includes option to accept some types and not others). 2. User onboards and creates a plan for free, experiments with app -- no plan data or result…

Thank you! That clears things up considerably.

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

#168
post #2

I had trouble finding a good FI planning and simulation tool that could model things in enough detail to finally ditch my spreadsheets... so I built one. Would love it if any of you want to try it out. It does not involve linking any accounts and almost all the functionality is free. And if anyone wants to become a beta tester for the few premium features, you can use coupon code BETA-6001 for 60% off :) https://proj…

This will be an incredibly useful tool for me. I subscribed with the coupon code, and hope to see you continuing to develop the functionality.

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

#169

Gave it a quick spin, it looks potentially useful. The mortgage calculator seems way off though; I put in some toy numbers ($1m 30yr fixed mortgage @ 3%, copying in values from the external calculator that's linked) and it's computing the payoff in about 5-6 years instead of 30. Ideally you could enter the mortgage terms like period, APR, and have the calculator back in to the mortgage payment, since the monthly paym…

It seems to automatically select "pay off ASAP" (probably a bug). You can turn this off by resetting the monthly payment and then it seems to work as expected.

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

#170
post #155
post #9

Looks interesting, but based on the privacy policy terms of data usage, transferability, and so forth, I can't in good faith test with real financial data: https://projectifi.io/privacy-policy.html Everytime I see a tool that shouldn't need to be hosted remotely as a service and could reasonably be deployed to the client where they have more control over their data (not as a service), it's a non-starter for me. I get…

> ProjectiFi You might want to reconsider the name -- it looks way too similar to Google's Project Fi. Or at least the logo, which looks like cell phone reception bars, which even further reminds me of Project Fi.

HN tropism at its fullest.

IMO, 99% of the real people know or care about Google's Project Fi.

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