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Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance

bou.ke

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Re: Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance

#91

Post by scubakid »

Aeolun wrote: post #89
scubakid wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean the animation should be faster when you open a new one? If so, good to know -- that'll be a simple tweak. I'm sure I should put more effort into the landing page overall... the reality is that so far I've spent nearly all my time trying to make the core app robust but intuitive.

In my opinion, the countdown bar (not sure until what it is counting down) is the anxiety inducing part. I’m trying to read, but my eyes keep skipping to the bar to see if I have enough time left.

Gotcha. Yeah after the countdown it auto-advances. I hoped that widget might feel playful, but I totally see your point.

Re: Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance

#92

Post by neilv »

jplr8922 wrote: post #37

I have an MSC in quant finance, and i'm seriously considering learning Django (in top of my backend skills) to build an complete app for personal finance management. Key features ; - Budget (aka cashflow management, what am I doing with my paycheck next month?) - Project planning (aka balance sheet, what is the purpose of my inflows and outflows over time?) - End of year results(aka do my projected budget match my pr…

For a non-startup personal open source project, you can consolidate all that data in the desktop program https://gnucash.org/ .

Offhand, I suspect you could layer all those features you mention, using a mix of GnuCash customizable existing reports, and their (poorly documented) extension in Guile.

The UX might not be what you want with just reports and scripting, but you can definitely analyze data and generate arbitrary noninteractive HTML reports, and there's some limited facility for dialogs that way. (For example, the features to help keep an ITOT & AGG ETF portfolio balanced for risk tolerance seems trivial, and it could even have a sense of calendar schedule for periodic rebalancing. But instead of it doing the rebalancing for you, the UX would probably just be a generated report that shows the balance, and tells you the exact two transactions to rebalance.)

Or, alternatively, get into the code of GnuCash itself, and do whatever interactive GUI and maybe even (if very brave/foolish) making your code talk to your brokerage, etc.

Re: Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance

#93

Post by Aeolun »

Alupis wrote: post #43
kachnuv_ocasek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you want to pay less taxes?

It is not somehow patriotic to pay more taxes than one legally owes. Overpaying taxes (what a lot of people unintentionally do that don't have resources to navigate every nook and cranny of the labyrinthian tax code) accomplishes nothing but make the individual more poor than they already were. Minimizing overpayment is the best possible thing an individual can do.

There are governments that I happily overpay to because they’re actually a net good to the people.

Others, not so much.

I very much try to follow thr spirit of the law though, not the letter, both in laws I ignore and adhere to.

Re: Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance

#95

Post by lotsofpulp »

basseq wrote: post #22
kccqzy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HealthEquity, where I keep my HSA account, manages to get this right. They use modified Dietz return which is easier to calculate than the IRR but remarkably similar. I calculate the modified Dietz return for my other accounts too. It's easy enough that unlike IRR you don't need the function to be built in to the spreadsheet software to calculate it.

This is great! Thanks for the info.

Health equity looks like it has a bunch of unnecessary fees compared to Fidelity (which has no fees).

https://www2.healthequity.com/indexinvestor/

Re: Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance

#96

Post by PascLeRasc »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #95
basseq wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great! Thanks for the info.

Health equity looks like it has a bunch of unnecessary fees compared to Fidelity (which has no fees). https://www2.healthequity.com/indexinvestor/

Fido fails the XIRR test though. Lively HSA on the other hand passes and has zero fees as well.

Re: Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance

#97

Post by yarky »

scubakid wrote: post #86
modeless wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you gotten much traction on the subscriptions? I made some financial simulations for my own use and was thinking about ways to monetize, but I dismissed subscriptions as I didn't feel there would be a big market. I'd love to be wrong about that. Anyway, I don't plan to actually make a product out of mine, but if you're interested in speeding up Monte Carlo financial simulation by literally a million times, let m…

It does seem a bit niche, but there's been modest traction so far. And sure, I'd be curious to hear how your Monte Carlo implementation might differ. Feel free to reach out on email/discord if you'd like to chat more.

> And sure, I'd be curious to hear how your Monte Carlo implementation might differ.

Excel is just too slow/not the right tool for MC (or most serious statistics). From my experience with mcmc, compiled languages come in pretty handy to speed up any loop that just can't be vectorized with some linear algebra. So I'd use any tool I'm comfortable with to set up the simulation but delegate the hardcore simulation loops to something like c++.

Re: Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance

#98

Post by ics »

9erdelta wrote: post #73
jplr8922 wrote: post #37

I have an MSC in quant finance, and i'm seriously considering learning Django (in top of my backend skills) to build an complete app for personal finance management. Key features ; - Budget (aka cashflow management, what am I doing with my paycheck next month?) - Project planning (aka balance sheet, what is the purpose of my inflows and outflows over time?) - End of year results(aka do my projected budget match my pr…

There is a dire need for a good personal finance app. Mint is just out there to grab data, YNAB is ok but super limited. And then pretty much every bank site is lacking in any meaningful tools and API access.

I have been using Lunch Money[0] after it was mentioned here and am pretty happy with it. It took a while for the API[1] to launch but it's in beta at the moment and they're pretty responsive to user feedback.

[0] https://lunchmoney.app [1] https://lunchmoney.dev

Re: Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance

#99

Post by sokoloff »

Aeolun wrote: post #90
jplr8922 wrote: post #37

I have an MSC in quant finance, and i'm seriously considering learning Django (in top of my backend skills) to build an complete app for personal finance management. Key features ; - Budget (aka cashflow management, what am I doing with my paycheck next month?) - Project planning (aka balance sheet, what is the purpose of my inflows and outflows over time?) - End of year results(aka do my projected budget match my pr…

> when should I purchase insurance to protect my projects Basically always?

Disagree. I take the view that you should only insure against risks that would be significant hardships if they occurred. (Maybe a secondary exception if insurance buys you significant peace of mind.)

At this point, I don’t carry collision insurance on our cars (I have liability, of course, but not insurance to pay if we wreck and fault is ours or undetermined.) Why not? Because buying a replacement car wouldn’t be a significant hardship that would be alleviated by the insurance coverage. (Our cars are 2005 and 2015.)

Re: Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance

#100

Post by sokoloff »

jplr8922 wrote: post #45
kachnuv_ocasek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you want to pay less taxes?

Its not that I want to completely avoid them. Its that tax laws of many countries are poorly written (or applied) and not doing optimization is financial suicide. Consider tax sheltered accounts (TFSA-RRSP in Canada, 401k in the US). Many people do not understand how they work or even what they are ; a lot of stranger tell me they ''purchased RRSP at their bank last month''. Also consider the case of freelance consul…

> capital gains of non primary residence is not tax deductible.

I think you’ve stated this oddly at a minimum. Why would capital gains on anything be deductible anywhere? Did you mean losses? Or that there’s an exemption amount that you miss for non-primary?

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