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Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence

projectifi.io

131–140 of 166 posts

Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence

#131
post #130

Very cool. Love the tool! Is there an option to invest the savings? It seems like the savings just accumulate as cash?

That's where the financial goals section comes in. Once you add some goals like retirement account contributions or taxable investments in independent brokerage accounts, the simulation will rebalance/invest according to the order of those priorities you define.

Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what major changes and developments we might be likely to see within our lifetimes... do you have any intuitions there? If so, I wonder if there might be additional variables or situation types/probabilities that could be interesting to throw into a monte carlo simulation.

2: I might also play around with crash and correction frequencies if you’re not already doing so, which, without thinking deeper about credit cycles, should be fine to simulate based on previously occurring frequencies. It seems like you already have some sort of analog to this with historical performance to begin with, though.

Those are some very interesting systemic issues to think about indeed.

Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence

#133
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Localization could be important too, for broader adoption - not just for currency display but (most importantly) the kinds of investments available and tax rates vary a lot. A minor thing is that the 'default' values for % return and inflation are also different in different places

Good point. In addition to customizable income tax brackets, another idea I've been mulling over is a custom investment type with more controls to model a wider variety of investment vehicles. Perhaps I could add more templates as well, and show/hide some based on the localization settings.

Yes custom investment types! Up in Canada I have access to a registered retirement fund (tax-deferred, like a 401k but not as closely tied to employer) and a tax-free savings account (for untaxed growth), and I couldn’t figure out how to model monthly contributions to both out of a single salary stream.

Being able to fund both (and then in retirement, set a max annual withdrawal from the tax-deferred account before withdrawing from the tax-free) is to me an important bit of modelling that I couldn’t figure out how to get sorted in 15-20 minutes.

Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence

#134
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, this sounds like the kind of thing that could happen if you have a huge percentage value in an expense or tax input by mistake, or something along those lines that could create an immediate bankruptcy scenario. If you double-check everything though and think there is a more sinister issue at play, I'd be happy to look into it and/or help troubleshoot.

JFYI, maybe it is just me, but in Assets ->House you have: Effective yearly tax rate Yearly maintenance costs Yearly insurance rate I automatically visualize "rate" as a percentage but I see "costs" as being expressed in actual money, so I inserted ( believed to be inserting ) 2,000 Euro in maintenance costs which of course ended up being 2,000% of the asset value. Quickest bankrupt ever! Maybe Yearly Maintenance Rat…

It's not just you, I made exactly the same mistake

Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence

#135

I'm super interested in this, but, every time I try this you end up losing me in the funnel. It takes too long to set everything up and I eventually lose interest and exit.

Do you think it would help if I make a "sandbox mode" where you can skip onboarding and plan creation and jump straight into a scenario pre-configured to model one of several selectable templates / personas? That's something I've been debating about building for a while but haven't had a chance yet.

I'm not sure if it would help, but maybe a way to import financial data from something like personalcapital or mint?

It'd save on some of the starting questions, but I don't know if that's even possible.

Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence

#136

Confused by the assets. It's starting with my current home's value, and decreasing it over time, maybe at the rate that it decreases the debt associated with the asset? But that payment should only be applied to the debt, not the value of the asset.

If you're puzzled by asset value appearing to decrease over time, it's possible this is because values are shown in Today's Dollars, i.e. values are adjusted to account for inflation. If you set the asset to appreciate in value at a higher rate than inflation, you should see the value go up over time.

This was a little confusing to me too - I put in an estimate of salary increasing 2%/year and it showed my gross salary decreasing in dollars each year. That's apparently because the salary increase was in nominal terms and the gross salary was in real terms. Maybe make this clearer - anyone who wants this level of control and detail should know the difference between nominal and real.

Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence

#137
post #37

There are a lot of buttons without labels, please consider adding alt/title/aria attributes at the minimum. The simulation page is a sea of unlabeled buttons.

Just clicked to try -- found the display currency I wanted, British Pound Sterling between Egyptian Birr and Georgian Lari. Was expecting it to be amongst the other 'B's.

Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence

#138
post #89

The cookies popup seems opt out rather than opt in, unless I missed something. I felt annoyed when I visited all the tabs and withdrew permissions that I never gave.

Ah, I see what you mean. The way it works now, if you ignore the banner, things are disabled by default (e.g. Google Analytics). If you click settings from the banner, the switches default to on at that point (and you can toggle them off), but GA doesn't activate unless you confirm that dialog with them on. Does that make sense? Or do you feel it should be implemented differently? I'm definitely open to changing it.

Thanks the reply and for the details.

> If you click settings from the banner, the switches default to on at that point

This is annoying; also, not allowed under GDPR. Cookie and privacy consent should be opt in instead of opt out. Clicking “settings” should not be treated as opting in.

Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence

#139

If you don't mind asking, how did you come up with the design? It's really slick! I ask because it's always the part I struggle the most in projects.

Thanks! In this case I guess you could say I started out with a design idea in mind first. I wanted a tool that could model my whole life in a single view and re-render changes immediately to encourage quick experimentation. I had an approximate vision in my head for how this would look from the beginning, and once I had a decent MVP together, I spent a lot of time user testing with friends and iterating on various d…

Thank you!

Re: Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance and financial independence

#140
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I see what you mean. The way it works now, if you ignore the banner, things are disabled by default (e.g. Google Analytics). If you click settings from the banner, the switches default to on at that point (and you can toggle them off), but GA doesn't activate unless you confirm that dialog with them on. Does that make sense? Or do you feel it should be implemented differently? I'm definitely open to changing it.

Thanks the reply and for the details. > If you click settings from the banner, the switches default to on at that point This is annoying; also, not allowed under GDPR. Cookie and privacy consent should be opt in instead of opt out. Clicking “settings” should not be treated as opting in.

Thanks for the heads-up, I'll take a note to change that behavior.
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