This is awesome, well done.
Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
251–260 of 266 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
#252I think this tool needs to provide a quick way of pre-filling a reasonable set of monthly expenses. I entered some stuff quickly and the projection seems to be too good to be true, so I don't trust the data it projects.
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
#253Love 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".
Thanks for the feedback. I would love to add better generalization for international use; so far it's just been out of scope for a solo dev to account for all the intricate tax rules that differ from country to country. If you have further suggestions though on additional features that might help to start bridging that gap, feel free to shoot an email to projectifi.io@gmail.com!
I'm not even asking for generalisation, I appreciate you're a solo dev. Just be kinder to non US users by warning them before they are several clicks into your flow!
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can also just check browser locale, show a warning if != US as early setup step. Offer to take their email and tell them when more countries are added (and capture all the traffic to reactivate later).
Maybe I am mistaken about this, but I think the "browser locale" shows the preferred languages, not where the user lives. As such it would be the wrong information to use for this. For example, I am German and live in Germany, but my browser locale is en-US.
And on the other side, one could live in the US but have a different locale configured.
The locale can be used to have a quick guess, but it absolutely must not block using the product.
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
People thought that data is the new oil, but it turns out it's not. Data is the new uranium. Powerful, yet toxic and irradiates everything in proximity. You most emphatically do not keep large piles of it if you can help it, and if you do, you silo and audit the sh*t out of that to control access and prevent theft because the potential for abuse is very high.
I love the oil vs. uranium analogy. Uranium can be powerful and useful, but risky to hold, difficult to protect, and probably more of a liability than an asset.
This is exactly why I like to use this analogy as well. Being all naïve and starry-eyed about the potential of data without considering the fallout from its use belongs to the pre-GDPR stone age of technology.
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
#256There's something weird going on with the mortgage calculation when configuring the house's value. When I set it to 0, I'm paying the mortgage way faster than should be possible, when I set it to anything meaningful, I'm bankrupt in one year!
Very interesting. Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out!
oh! I just did the onboarding again and I just realized that the yearly maintenances were in %! I had set it to a few thousand percents thinking it was $!
That's why the value of my home was making me broke...
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
#257it 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...
Hmm I'll have to think about what can be done to make it more clear to users that things like mortgages are modeled as part of one "financed asset". Maybe some better cues can be added in the onboarding process..
even just something like "don't include a mortgage or vehicle payments here" on the debt screen. give more example ("cc debt, student loan, etc"). "unsecured debt" vs "secured debt", with examples, I guess??
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making an account to post something and coincidentally having friends who on their own decided to make accounts to comment is against the rules?
It's not coincidentally.
Have you any proof? By the same justification, I could claim that you're a competitor, and trying to make things difficult for OP. Say you're not? Well, you are.
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
“With your new KEK, we just re-encrypt your DEK” ⇒ when users change their password, you have access to the DEK (you decrypt it and then encrypt it with the new KEK) “one to encrypt your data (the 'data encryption key' or DEK)” ⇒ when users change their password, you could decrypt their data. I think this boils down to “you don’t store user passwords, but when users change their password, they must trust you to not l…
The 'error', as you put it, is that the password change process (i.e. the changing of the KEK and the re-encryption of the DEK into the EDEK) all happens client-side (except for the part where we verify your old password against the hashed version in the database, for obvious reasons). 'We' have 'access' to your DEK at all times — if you define 'we' as the 'client-facing portion of the app'. All of the encryption/dec…
Thanks. I never would have thought “we encrypt” to mean “your browser encrypts”.
I think a few pictures showing how passwords and data flow between the user’s browser and the backend when you do various things would make your technical description easier to understand.
Lacking that, using phrases such as “our code, running in your browser” rather than that ambiguous “we”, would have made things clearer for me, too.
Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
#260Love it. I do have some notes: For "Financial Goals", allow me to opt set a fixed number, not just a percentage of income (i.e, if I want to max out my 401k). When inputting investments, instead of having a field for the sum of the different categories, have line items, so I can add my copy/paste my 401k, IRA, etc into the website without having to add them up myself. Great work!
I agree, having a general % vs absolute value switch for entry boxes would be nice. I think about my 401K contributions in terms of dollars, and this forced percentages, ostensibly because many employers work that way and there's a focus on salary. Would be nice to just plug in, "My goal is $10000 per year" or whatever the goal is.