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Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

projectionlab.com

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

#121

Post by SmellTheGlove »

scubakid wrote: post #117
SmellTheGlove wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just turned 40. When I turned 30 I thought my 20s were pretty amazing and I was sad to leave that behind. But 10 years later I can tell you 30s are definitely your prime years. You’ve got some shit figured out and maybe you’re a real adult, you have a few more dollars than you did before, you probably have a better understanding of what you want in life. 30s are about going and doing that. By not mortgaging your fu…

what if that's when kids enter into the equation? ◑.◑

If you want kids, sure. I have one, she was born when I was 30 and it’s been great.

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

#122

Post by fundad »

scubakid wrote: post #48
morelandjs wrote: post #43

Congrats! If you decide you want to monetize this, truebill sold to rocket mortgage for something like a billion dollars. I could see your features supplementing their current product nicely.

I wonder what metrics drive acquisitions like that the most... I would imagine they might look more for products with a huge userbase, stickiness/gamification, or a demonstrably high virality factor, no?

Lawyer lawyer lawyer. If not now then before you talk to anyone, especially us, about valuations or any of your business. In fact just don’t reveal any metrics or $ amounts to anyone other than a lawyer. refer anyone interested to your lawyer.

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

#123

Post by scubakid »

fundad wrote: post #122
scubakid wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what metrics drive acquisitions like that the most... I would imagine they might look more for products with a huge userbase, stickiness/gamification, or a demonstrably high virality factor, no?

Lawyer lawyer lawyer. If not now then before you talk to anyone, especially us, about valuations or any of your business. In fact just don’t reveal any metrics or $ amounts to anyone other than a lawyer. refer anyone interested to your lawyer.

Sage advice.

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

#124

Post by trutannus »

scubakid wrote: post #110
trutannus wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 profess…

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.

I've got to say, I love how responsive you are. Its clear you want to make your product better, it's really great.

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

#125

Post by deepGem »

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?

To add, the non tech crowd doesn't really know or have the time to learn about investing. They just need someone to manage their finances. The advisory profession is alive mostly because of this. Instead of acting as a lead gen to advisors, perhaps you could add more value by doing some sort of filtering or match making based on user's data, totally at the discretion of the investor/user. This will be incredibly helpful. You could become some sort of a scaled arbitrage between investors and advisors - a huge gap that exists today.

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

#126

Post by b20000 »

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…

the problem is that the type of advisors you are talking about only care about selling products and making commissions, they actually don't care about helping people make the right decisions.

the same goes for CPAs - the moment they see that your tax situation becomes too complicated or a potential liability or they can't make a good profit (read: cookie cutter tax situation which can be handled by fresh grads but can be invoiced at partner rate) they tell you to go elsewhere.

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

#127

Post by ljoshua »

aidenn0 wrote: post #94
astrange wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 theoreti…

> Texas is theoretically a little worse for the middle class because property taxes are much higher. It's better if you're rich though. I know they are higher in relative terms, but are they higher in absolute terms? I live in a single-family house in SoCal and pay over $12k/year in property taxes. [edit] absolute relative

I'm in Texas, and as always, it depends.

Average property tax rate for the Houston area is 2.31%. There's lots of things that come into the equation (homestead caps, exemptions, etc.), but for an average priced home of, say $350,000 you'll be owing ~$8,000 in property taxes.

The trickiest part is that your property values are reassessed every year, so for a long time our tax bill has just gone up, whether your income has or not.

I'll still take Texas economics over California economics, but everywhere has its tax pros and cons.

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

#128

Post by scubakid »

deepGem wrote: post #125
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?

To add, the non tech crowd doesn't really know or have the time to learn about investing. They just need someone to manage their finances. The advisory profession is alive mostly because of this. Instead of acting as a lead gen to advisors, perhaps you could add more value by doing some sort of filtering or match making based on user's data, totally at the discretion of the investor/user. This will be incredibly help…

Sounds like an interesting model. I wonder if it would come with any regulatory hurdles in addition to the technical work plus efforts to make inroads with enough advisors... and then I wonder if there's a way to advertise that kind of optional product offering without immediately turning off the contingent of privacy-focused DIYers that the tool currently resonates with.

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

#129

Post by throwaway2037 »

mgkimsal wrote: post #120
teagoat wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> some active management stuff, or do they have a robo-investing option (I can't remember.) IIRC it's robo-investing. I got a pitch from them, and it was mostly "high expense ratio funds are bad, we put you in low cost funds with expense ratio of "OK... but your expense fee is .90% of funds under management - this puts me at approximately 1%/year in fees." "But we're actively rebalancing 2x per year and we do tax los…

Run away when you see some bullsh-t like this:

  "But we're actively rebalancing 2x per year and we do tax loss harvesting".
What if all of your funds are up for the period? There is no tax loss harvesting to be done(!), but you are still paying 100bps per year. To me: "tax loss harvesting" is akin to "tax write-offs" -- see Seinfeld TV episode. The money is still spent / lost. Taxes are an after thought...

Beat them all: Put all of your money is an ETF that tracks S&P 500 index. iShares IVV and Vanguard VOO are excellent. Expenses are less than 5bps per year! After 3/5/10 years, you are nearly guaranteed (statistically) to be ahead of the investment advisor when including expenses.

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

#130

Post by astrange »

aidenn0 wrote: post #94
astrange wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 theoreti…

> Texas is theoretically a little worse for the middle class because property taxes are much higher. It's better if you're rich though. I know they are higher in relative terms, but are they higher in absolute terms? I live in a single-family house in SoCal and pay over $12k/year in property taxes. [edit] absolute relative

California is complicated because Prop 13 means it's totally different depending on how long you've lived there. Ideally property tax would be higher and income lower… well ideally it'd be an LVT which doesn't tax building improvements.
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