Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

I've looked at it a little bit, but as someone nearing retirement, it is lacking a number of features that I would like.

There are some common tricks that I don't see how to model with ProjectionLab:

1. Do your tax-deferred 401k,403b,IRA saving in a high earning job, state, then move to a low or no income tax state to do the withdrawals in retirement.

2. Retire early so there is some time before taking social security payments to do Roth Conversions. I-ORP[0] turns this into a branch and cut linear optimization problem. User Indyhou at Bogleheads[1] has built a spreadsheet that uses a solver plugin. It may be possible to build a model in CBC[2] and compile it to WASM and run it in the browser.

3. After turning 63, watch the Roth Conversions to make sure you don't trigger IRRMA medicare surcharges.

4. Are you trying to stay under income limits for ACA subsidies? It's not quite the sharp cliff that it was, but can be important for some.

5. Are you trying to balance regular income and capital gains to take advantage of the 0% cap gains rates? You've got to plan ahead on your contributions to the taxable and tax deferred accounts for this to work. Jeremy at Go Curry Cracker has written about using this to pay $0 in US Federal Income taxes[3].

6. Paying full rate for health insurance will likely get you over the 7.5% limit for tax deductions.

7. Social Security claiming strategies can be complex for married couples.

A feature that would be useful during accumulation is life insurance planning for the death of a spouse.

The death of a spouse can throw a wrench in some of the strategies since the single tax bracket is much smaller. Tax law changes can also upset highly optimized strategies. So any highly optimized strategy should also have a monte carlo simulation around a spouse dying and tax law changes to understand what disruptions are possible and maybe accept a non-optimal strategy that is better in these adverse cases.

[0] https://i-orp.com

[1] https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=365518

[2] https://github.com/coin-or/Cbc

[3] https://www.gocurrycracker.com/go-curry-cracker-2020-taxes/

Did you see the help center / FAQ? I added that last week, so it doesn't have an immense amount of content, but there are a few things that might be helpful. For things like growth rates, I have more-info popups in a variety of places to provide some context on what's happened historically and what the defaults are. But overall I think you're right that adding more resources over time would be a great idea. I've always wanted there to be more educational content as you step through the onboarding process and build a plan... just need to find the time to draft it up and/or link to it in the best way.

For optimization, I could see that getting a little bit tricky, since for now I want to steer clear of anything that could be misconstrued as formal financial advice. Definitely understand where you're coming from though, and there may be some opportunities to add different kinds of optimizers (e.g. a button that runs the permutations for drawdown order and stops on the one with the best outcome).

Makes sense, sometimes I find weird UX friction comes when you needed a feature, and didn't plan it in initially.

For the memeish stuff, it was under the example personas. While its fine to include some of these (ie: FIRE, looking for part-time), it'd be nice to have some examples for the middle of the road. A lot of what you mention isn't even on the mind of a lot of early career folks.

Something like "young professional, focused on building financial stability" or "trying to create more disposable income". Something that would have the same mass appeal as "has a defined-benefit pension, planning for standard retirement age" does to the older demographic.

Having the money showed in today's dollars by default was tripping me up for a bit. The 401k provider my employer uses shows "future dollars" by default, so you have to mentally recognize that the buying power of 10M "35 years from now dollars" is not what $10M would do for you today.

Not helping my "11 months till 30" anxiety/depression. I don't know why it's messing with me so much. The internet loves to make is seem like your 20s are where it's all at but I spent it building a career rather than partying or dating... Leaving the "young adult" phase and just entering "adult". Also mega pissed that I started doing better in 2019 (international travel, lots of time spent with friends) and then the pandemic came and turned the world on its head and trapped me at home for the last bit of my 20s.

Good call, I'll try to balance out those descriptions a bit. Doing the whole onboarding, current finances, progress points, and plan creation process 10 times, evidently I converged on too many common themes haha.