Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

projectionlab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 240 posts

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

#81

Post by mjsir911 »

scubakid wrote: post #74
mjsir911 wrote: post #70

Wow, this seems cool! Would love some integration with [plain text accounting]( https://plaintextaccounting.org/ ) so that I don't have to re-document all my finances though, even just a simple `ledger equity` import.

That could be an interesting suggestion to add on changemap. Can't say I'm familiar with the site yet, but what would your vision for a good workflow look like if the right integration was in place?

Looking over the app in-depth, I see a lot that could be done depending on how much you want to do ;-)

- The initial import can be done pretty easily, `ledger bal` reports my current balances, so for example I can do `ledger bal Assets` and it will report back totals on my `Assets:`, `Assets:Retirement:401k`, `Assets:Retirement:Roth 401k`, etc.

- You could potentially get a very in-depth "progress points" import with `ledger reg`, which just shows the history of my ledger. `ledger reg Assets: --monthly --collapse --total-data` gives me a monthly tally of my savings since forever.

- It would be possible but harder to infer future events & spending I think. I can somewhat figure out how much I spend monthly looking at my data, but you'de need heavy processing to get anything useful out of that.

I think maybe a more reasonable request rather than supporting ledger is to just support a general purpose plaintext import. The above `--total-data` command for example just gives me:

    2018-06-01 10000
    2018-07-01 11000
    ...

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

#82

Post by scubakid »

mjsir911 wrote: post #81
scubakid wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could be an interesting suggestion to add on changemap. Can't say I'm familiar with the site yet, but what would your vision for a good workflow look like if the right integration was in place?

Looking over the app in-depth, I see a lot that could be done depending on how much you want to do ;-) - The initial import can be done pretty easily, `ledger bal` reports my current balances, so for example I can do `ledger bal Assets` and it will report back totals on my `Assets: `, `Assets:Retirement:401k`, `Assets:Retirement:Roth 401k`, etc. - You could potentially get a very in-depth "progress points" import wit…

Makes sense to me! In fact, if you were feeling super motivated, it probably wouldn't be hard to do a JSON export of your ProjectionLab data to see what that format looks like and start putting together a script to transform from one representation to the other.

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

#83

Post by teagoat »

scubakid wrote: post #75
sthatipamala wrote: post #71

Great work! This might be unpopular among the HN crowd, but I think you can monetize this further by bundling this with an advising service. This idea of FIRE has been spreading beyond techies/Internet nerds and into other highly paid professionals like doctors. [0]. The main difference is that non-programmer professionals generally don't get a thrill out of min/max-ing financial projections. Such people might be wil…

To an extent, I was hoping to support use cases like this with the Pro version I rolled out recently. But perhaps I'm currently more out of the loop than you envision, in the sense that I'm not actively pairing people with advisors and it's just a product that advisors can use if they want. What do you imagine a more "bundled" offering might look like?

Personal Capital actively prompt to try to set up a meeting pretty much every time you log in. They're hoping that you'll sign up for some active management stuff, or do they have a robo-investing option (I can't remember.)

At a certain net-worth, they'll start calling you on a regular basis trying to get you to do the same.

It's all pretty annoying. Perhaps do that, and after a 6 months of so of calls and prompts, then offer to stop calling / prompting for $10 a month.

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

#84

Post by scubakid »

teagoat wrote: post #83
scubakid wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To an extent, I was hoping to support use cases like this with the Pro version I rolled out recently. But perhaps I'm currently more out of the loop than you envision, in the sense that I'm not actively pairing people with advisors and it's just a product that advisors can use if they want. What do you imagine a more "bundled" offering might look like?

Personal Capital actively prompt to try to set up a meeting pretty much every time you log in. They're hoping that you'll sign up for some active management stuff, or do they have a robo-investing option (I can't remember.) At a certain net-worth, they'll start calling you on a regular basis trying to get you to do the same. It's all pretty annoying. Perhaps do that, and after a 6 months of so of calls and prompts, t…

haha I think I've pretty firmly planted my flag in the territory of not annoying people with calls.

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

#85

Post by astrange »

aidenn0 wrote: post #76
bestinterest wrote: post #52

I just put in some numbers and wow. Unless I'm missing something incredible my findings are kinda depressing. The top 5% salary in the UK is £81,000 -> after tax is £54,817. £4568 a month. Say you spend £2k a month. That's £2568 for investments per month. Using the calc, it seems you would be able to retire at age 50. I quickly checked the US salary percentiles and the top 5th percentile of £81,000 in the UK is equal…

> taxes in the US are much better This is complicated. Taxes in the US are different. For example, a lot of higher earners are concentrated in California and New York, which have fairly high taxes; in New York or San Francisco a single person making $105k would take home about $75k (slightly less in SF, slightly more in NY) or about £3k more. I would suspect (but do not know) that the UK government pension and health…

> For example, a lot of higher earners are concentrated in California and New York, which have fairly high taxes; in New York or San Francisco a single person making $105k would take home about $75k (slightly less in SF, slightly more in NY) or about £3k more.

That's income taxes; states aren't that different when you actually count "taxes" ie property, sales, income, and whatever else is left over.

Texas is theoretically a little worse for the middle class because property taxes are much higher. It's better if you're rich though.

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

#86

Post by teagoat »

scubakid wrote: post #55
bestinterest wrote: post #52

I just put in some numbers and wow. Unless I'm missing something incredible my findings are kinda depressing. The top 5% salary in the UK is £81,000 -> after tax is £54,817. £4568 a month. Say you spend £2k a month. That's £2568 for investments per month. Using the calc, it seems you would be able to retire at age 50. I quickly checked the US salary percentiles and the top 5th percentile of £81,000 in the UK is equal…

It does seem like there are some pretty wild discrepancies in total comp between countries. If the distributed/remote trend continues progressing, I wonder if we'll see things start to equalize at all in our lifetimes, or if there are other geopolitical / macroeconomic / other factors that are more significant.

I would hope so. I don't think that place of birth, or ability to get a visa should determine salary.

However, personal experience and friendship group makes me think that US tech salaries have only accelerated over the last couple of years. I went looking for some data to back up the idea to tech salaries have accelerated, but https://spectrum.ieee.org/engineer-salary was the best I found, and was less dramatic than I expected.

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

#87

Post by simonmic »

mjsir911 wrote: post #81
scubakid wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could be an interesting suggestion to add on changemap. Can't say I'm familiar with the site yet, but what would your vision for a good workflow look like if the right integration was in place?

Looking over the app in-depth, I see a lot that could be done depending on how much you want to do ;-) - The initial import can be done pretty easily, `ledger bal` reports my current balances, so for example I can do `ledger bal Assets` and it will report back totals on my `Assets: `, `Assets:Retirement:401k`, `Assets:Retirement:Roth 401k`, etc. - You could potentially get a very in-depth "progress points" import wit…

How about a sensible CSV import format ? That'd be easy to generate from most tools.

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

#88

Post by scubakid »

simonmic wrote: post #87
mjsir911 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking over the app in-depth, I see a lot that could be done depending on how much you want to do ;-) - The initial import can be done pretty easily, `ledger bal` reports my current balances, so for example I can do `ledger bal Assets` and it will report back totals on my `Assets: `, `Assets:Retirement:401k`, `Assets:Retirement:Roth 401k`, etc. - You could potentially get a very in-depth "progress points" import wit…

How about a sensible CSV import format ? That'd be easy to generate from most tools.

Sure, that would be very doable.

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

#90

Post by scubakid »

mikeg8 wrote: post #72
scubakid wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! It was tricky to build in so much flexibility and customization while still keeping the overall UI feeling relatively clean.. I try to strike a good balance there, but if you feel there are areas where I haven't succeeded, definitely let me know.

I've noticed a lot of humility in your comments which is always nice, but you have truly done an incredible job design-wise. Like many users have said, it looks very professional and feels fast/snappy. I have an enormous amount of respect for you doing this solo. I would love to get to this level some day.. Keep it up!!

Thanks! Really appreciate the kind words :)
Post reply on HN