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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

#181

Post by Eridrus »

scubakid wrote: 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…

I had the same experience and even tinkered around with building this myself!

IMO the biggest problem with existing calculators, and yours, is that you have to make some pretty strong assumptions about the future. How will rental & housing prices grow? What returns will I get on my investments? Depending on the numbers you put in you will get very different results, and most people are not good at predicting these!

I think the real value here will be to find a way to reduce the number of knobs that users have to specify in some way, with either expert estimates for these variables, or joint distributions of these variables so that users can explore scenarios like "stock market crash" without having to figure out how that could impact every variable.

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

#184

Post by matmann2001 »

This is a fantastic tool but honestly my favorite part is that I can try what seems like most of the features without ever having to create an account and providing personally identifiable info that will inevitably lead to yet another mailing list for me to ignore. So thank you for having faith in your users!

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

#185

Post by gowld »

devinsit wrote: post #98
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. 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…

You could store the data in the user's cloud (or local) storage, so you don't have a copy of the data.

Having an "encrypted" copy of the data, with a key controlled by you (unless there's some browser API for encrypting using the user's key?) is a lot shorter than a "ten foot pole"

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

#186

Post by gowld »

devinsit wrote: post #116
calderarrow wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ufincs looks very cool! During my December holiday, I was thinking of making a web-based platform that had a more modern UI than GNUcash, and it looks like you built it already! Just curious, what's your tech stack, how long have you been working on it, and how many users do you have?

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…

Is it open source? That's a critical aspect of the "Gnu" part of GnuCash.

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

#187

Post by cddotdotslash »

fragileone wrote: post #176
cddotdotslash wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Again, unless you provide some _other_ piece of data (full real name, email, etc) connecting that data back to you, I fail to see the harm. Regardless, no one is forcing you to use the site, or even provide real numbers. If anonymously providing your salary and savings data worries you then don't use it.

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

#188

Post by devinsit »

gowld wrote: post #185
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…

You could store the data in the user's cloud (or local) storage, so you don't have a copy of the data. Having an "encrypted" copy of the data, with a key controlled by you (unless there's some browser API for encrypting using the user's key?) is a lot shorter than a "ten foot pole"

That's the thing, the key isn't controlled by me. The key is derived from your account password. If you want some more technical details, feel free to check out https://ufincs.com/policies/security. tl;dr Yes, that browser API is called WebCrypto.

As for storage, all data is kept in-browser in local storage (specifically, IndexedDB), until it gets saved to our database. And before it leaves the browser to be saved in our database, it gets encrypted using the user's key.

Finally, if you only ever use the 'no account' option (https://ufincs.com/noaccount), then all your data is only ever stored in-browser; it never gets saved to our database because you don't even have an account to save it to! Feel free to monitor the network requests to prove it for yourself (or even turn off your network connection).

Hopefully that makes things more clear.

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

#189

Post by devinsit »

gowld wrote: post #186
devinsit wrote: post #116

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…

Is it open source? That's a critical aspect of the "Gnu" part of GnuCash.

It definitely isn't. At least, not yet. I've been thinking through different ways we could handle that aspect, but I don't have any concrete plans to open-source uFincs at the moment.
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