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Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance

projectifi.io

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

#171

Post by okr »

system2 wrote: post #150
Frost1x wrote: 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…

Agreed. Giving up my financials to a site is unacceptable. I rather use Excel sheet with fancy graphs myself.

So a site like youneedabudget would not be useful either to you?

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

#172

Post by vallas »

kenned3 wrote: post #117
elil17 wrote: post #54

Nothing makes me more annoyed than when simulations like this make assumptions which don't make any sense. For example. >"Note: currently, ProjectiFi taxes inheritance as ordinary income for simplicity and to maintain a conservative estimation strategy. More nuanced options that more closely mirror current inheritance tax liability scenarios are coming soon." This is an absolutely ridiculous assumption. Federal inher…

Thankfully most people have over $11 million and therefor your proposal really does impact the majority of the users? Most developers want to build features that service the majority, then add more functionality later.

Most devs probably want that but what they really want is developping for a minority that represents a majority

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

#173

Post by zwass »

Really useful for me! I subscribed.

Few pieces of feedback:

1. It would be helpful to be able to visualize how property tax is effecting the reduction in other assets.

2. It would be nice to be able to use arrows to move the retirement age up and down and watch the scenario change. Currently having to click on the box, edit the age, and then click out is cumbersome.

3. It would be nice to be able to easily click on and off the income/expenses/other/goals in the bottom so that there would be a quick way to see how each of them (or combinations of them together) effects the scenario.

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

#174

Post by TheGeminon »

caycep wrote: post #166
devinsit wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I feel like this is a great use-case for WASM, being able to push down fully features apps that can run locally.

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

#175

Post by jakear »

andi999 wrote: post #28
Bostonian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many people have gotten out of the habit of installing software on their computers and prefer web-based solutions.

The big problem is: installing a dubious (not saying this is dubious, but lets say anything not from a MNC) program on your computer might lead to a hostile takeover of your computer. But a web-based solution means your data is in somebodies else hand. So one has to pick ones poison...

I’d like to see everything as a web app (a secure sandbox everyone already has installed in their computer), but running with service workers and using indexeddb for persistence. Best of both worlds: you can access everything offline, the data stays local, and the app can’t infect your computer (absent a browser exploit that’d be bad news regardless)

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

#176

Post by fragileone »

cddotdotslash wrote: post #136
nonameiguess wrote: post #15

There is no reason at all for this to be server-hosted. I have of course done this for myself a very long time ago creating an effectively identical feature set using spreadsheets and even put them onto Microsoft's sharing pages (no idea what happened to them, it was such a long time ago). I'm not saying this isn't a better solution than Excel. You work with what's available at the time. But there is nothing at all a…

There is absolutely a reason. It's a service and many people (myself included) don't want to download a desktop app to use it. He's not asking for your SSN or your address. If you want to use a burner email and a VPN or enter fake data to try it out, you can. This hardline approach of "every service should be an open source desktop app that I can run with zero telemetry from my cabin in the woods with no internet" so…

> He's not asking for your SSN or your address.

They're asking for even worse - all your historical financial data. Why would you want to give some random guy on the internet that?

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

#178

Post by devinsit »

caycep wrote: post #166
devinsit wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, uFincs is a PWA, so you could 'install' it that way. We send a little in-app notification whenever a new update is pushed, so you could theoretically just ignore those and never update to keep using that one version of uFincs forever (assuming your browser never decides to update it otherwise).

But yeah, in terms of more standalone distribution and sandboxing, that's where the future desktop/mobile apps would be more appropriate. Of course, they'd be Electron-esque, but that would at least fulfill my end-goals of being privacy-first, offline-first, and providing 'long-term' software.

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

#179

Post by endominus »

gofreddygo wrote: post #159
Frost1x wrote: 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 with owning your personal financial data. Very few people I know understand and appreciate double entry bookkeeping for finances. I learned about it recently from beancount [1] and it was a revelation. I don't go overboard with detailed transactions and keep it high level with around 5 accounts salary/mortgage/cc/investments etc. I now personally keep my raw data (monthly income/expense/balances) in a spreads…

The importance of this cannot be overstated. I used to use Mint when I was in college, but got sick of them pushing credit cards on me, and the uncomfortable feeling of giving a service full access to my bank account. I tried tracking all my expenses in a spreadsheet for a year, which worked fine, but wasn't the most flexible system (or rather, it very quickly became a UX monstrosity).

Now I use hledger, which has been fantastic. I back up the file to a shared drive that's sync'ed to my phone, so every time I get a message from the bank or pay with cash, I can immediately note it down (this would have been much less workable before I found the "cone" app) and track my spending across dozens of accounts.

There are some improvements that could be made as to the visualization of data, which I might write a quick webapp for, but in terms of simplicity, robustness, and ease of use, plaintext is definitely the way to go.

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

#180

Post by jameskraus »

Aachen wrote: post #149

Just as a heads-up, this privacy policy is not legal in the EU because it doesn't fulfill even the primary requirements (say what you process, for what purpose, stored for how long), but also this huge template (28 minutes estimated reading time) is not helpful to anyone -- it's just an enumeration of every possible method of data tracking -- so I'm not sure why you would even use this when it's not legal anyway. It'…

Lol, my impression is that OP did exactly that – copied a template privacy policy. They probably don't have a budget for a lawyer to write them a privacy policy, much less a EU-compliant one. If this was a big player in the space, sure, maybe they should have a better policy. But for a homegrown tool like this that's just launching? It makes sense they're using off-the-shelf stuff.
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