Love the idea, I toyed with the idea of building something like this. When talking to friends, I realised that even smart and relatively wealthy people have zero planning skills and freak out about the idea of "planning your life in the next decades". I suspect your market is going to be small.
Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
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Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
#242it wasn't clear to me that 'debt' was not the same as 'mortgage'. I entered 'debt', then a couple steps later, the 'asset' of house had a 'mortage' box below. this also doesn't account for second mortgages, but you're likely aware of this. nice job overall...
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
#243All I can see is a blank page :(
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
#244Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
#246* Not being able to save progress after you enter all of it is devious, but really turned me off. I don't just dislike it. It might be the one thing to permanently turn me off from the tool. I just spent 20 minutes adding all my info, and now you want to hold me hostage, unless I get a subscription? How dare you. (hyperbole, but I'm feeling sassy)
* Why should I care about the theme so soon ?
* No, I am not paying for a financial management tool until I have at least tried it out for 3 months.
* If everything else is absolutes, I would keep 401k as absolute too. (Also just call it 401k)
* On the same note, is my employer matching 50% of my contributions or 50% of my income ?
* It makes no sense to make the landing page the 'what is projectfi' blog page instead of the 'Official plan' page
* It makes no sense to open 'where you are today' instead of 'official plan' when I click on my account
* I won't pay $30/year even if I liked it. The tool is a one-and-done sort of thing, and I would be more down for an upfront price. I might pay $30 to buy it up front if I get to use it 1 year for free and see if I like it. I would accept a shorter timeline for other apps, but sadly my financial information just doesn't change fast enough and I would need 1 year before I recognize if I find it useful enough.
* If I am using it long term, I don't want to rely on someone's server staying up. Can you offer this as a client-side app ?
* Feature request - Export to Excel
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OP, I hope you don't take this harshly.
I genuinely like the tool ,and the only reason I agreed to write such a huge review of it is because I'd like to see it get good. Best of luck, you might just get me as a customer if it was a purely offline app with excel exports with a one-time fee.
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
#247I really like tool, but dislike a lot of the dark patterns. I love how fast and intuitive it is. I also like having all the info on one page to look at. The dashboard is great. I like most of it, so I won't speak for the good and will focus on the constructive criticism part. * Not being able to save progress after you enter all of it is devious, but really turned me off. I don't just dislike it. It might be the one…
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
#248Love the idea, enjoyed the interface, but I feel my time was wasted when I only found out the US focus several clicks into the flow. Speaking as someone not from the US, I do wish more websites didn't just assume that all their traffic was coming from the US. You could alleviate this by having a flag on the home page saying "This is really more for Americans only".
As a former American expat, I felt this deeply. A lot of the online financial analysis tools, like Mint, looked cool. But since they had a US focus and I was not in the US I couldn't take advantage of any of them. And once GDPR came into effect I was effectively locked out of any of them.
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
#249Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
#250I really like tool, but dislike a lot of the dark patterns. I love how fast and intuitive it is. I also like having all the info on one page to look at. The dashboard is great. I like most of it, so I won't speak for the good and will focus on the constructive criticism part. * Not being able to save progress after you enter all of it is devious, but really turned me off. I don't just dislike it. It might be the one…
I felt foolish after filling out a bunch of data only to not be able to save it. I'm active in the FIRE community and I really, really enjoyed the app, but it left a very bad taste in my mouth.
What’s the point of a “free” financial planning tool that needs 20 min of input that you can’t save? Too much friction! At least give me a fully featured trial, or can track 1 goal, etc