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Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

projectionlab.com

151–160 of 240 posts

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

#151

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 se…

Anything you think I should do to make that today's dollars vs actual dollars distinction more clear? Oh, and paragraph 2 hit me hard. The countdown to 30 is... happening.

I honestly like the default as today's dollars, but I honestly only noticed the distinction by poking around. Maybe putting the option in the first few setup cards?

Overall, awesome tool though!

Made me a bit sad to realize that even with a tech salary, most bay area houses are out of reach of a single income family unless you're an L5 at Google or a similarly paying company.

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

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

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

#153

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 se…

The internet is wrong. Nothing happens when you cross the barrier. Do what makes you fulfilled and live without regrets. Nothing worse than wasting the limited time we have worrying about things we cannot change. (talking to myself now haha)

I would absolutely love to tell my brain to stop thinking about "should haves" because there is literally nothing you can do about it. But here I am :)

I "should have" never allowed myself to become obese in college. I "should have" lost the weight in my early 20s. I "should have" focused on fitness during the pandemic. But that's the past. Yesterday would have been a better choice but tomorrow is a worse choice than today ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Got in a funk a few months ago and decided to make some changes. 5 months later I'm down 30 pounds. Fell off the bandwagon after Christmas but I'm pulling myself back onto it. Transferring offices to be near my friends, many of whom are fitness and health nuts who have all told me they're going to drag me kicking and screaming into the wonderful world of actually taking care of myself.

Who knows, maybe I'll actually feel better in my 30s than my 20s as a result. Not that I feel bad now. Even though I'm a 6'4 blob I can still go out and take a 6 mile hike without any pain or trouble.

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

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything you think I should do to make that today's dollars vs actual dollars distinction more clear? Oh, and paragraph 2 hit me hard. The countdown to 30 is... happening.

I honestly like the default as today's dollars, but I honestly only noticed the distinction by poking around. Maybe putting the option in the first few setup cards? Overall, awesome tool though! Made me a bit sad to realize that even with a tech salary, most bay area houses are out of reach of a single income family unless you're an L5 at Google or a similarly paying company.

I'm always hesitant to add more steps to the onboarding process, but you might be right that todays/actual currency is worth it to call out as early as possible. It's definitely a source of confusion for some, despite my efforts to put the selector in a discoverable place.

And yikes, happy to be east coast for now =)

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, data already stays client-side by default. If you upgrade and enable saving, you can choose from localStorage only, cloud sync (i.e. not what you want haha), or manually importing/exporting JSON files. That being said, totally understand the desire to have a version you host in your environment under your absolute control. How do you envision i) working in a self-hosted version? Something you wanted to code up…

Correct. My current setup -> My web server connects to bank accounts every 6 hours and creates a xyt file which is encrypted and synced. I take that file and load my web tool to get the visualization, simulation etc. My ideal solution is something similar. Great work with projectionlab nonetheless. I have tracked the progress since it was called project fi or something.

Thanks! And if you want to chat further about what the possibilities might be for supporting a self-hosted option, feel free to email or message me on discord: https://discord.com/invite/dZQ5DDEmT7

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet is wrong. Nothing happens when you cross the barrier. Do what makes you fulfilled and live without regrets. Nothing worse than wasting the limited time we have worrying about things we cannot change. (talking to myself now haha)

I would absolutely love to tell my brain to stop thinking about "should haves" because there is literally nothing you can do about it. But here I am :) I "should have" never allowed myself to become obese in college. I "should have" lost the weight in my early 20s. I "should have" focused on fitness during the pandemic. But that's the past. Yesterday would have been a better choice but tomorrow is a worse choice than…

Could be me justifying my own tendency to ruminate haha, but occasionally "should haves" can be productive if you learn something that improves your mental model of the world. Either way, glad to hear you're prioritizing your health! The hard work pays dividends :)

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet is wrong. Nothing happens when you cross the barrier. Do what makes you fulfilled and live without regrets. Nothing worse than wasting the limited time we have worrying about things we cannot change. (talking to myself now haha)

I would absolutely love to tell my brain to stop thinking about "should haves" because there is literally nothing you can do about it. But here I am :) I "should have" never allowed myself to become obese in college. I "should have" lost the weight in my early 20s. I "should have" focused on fitness during the pandemic. But that's the past. Yesterday would have been a better choice but tomorrow is a worse choice than…

At thirty, you will feel like nothing has changed (and be disappointed about that). At 32 you will feel strangely young again. At 36, you will feel 40, and at 40 you'll be thinking about retirement.

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

#158
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Tech salaries seem to be becoming increasingly bimodal: you can get $600k/year as a staff SWE at amazon/google/facebook if you get competing offers.

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

#159

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 se…

Your prime years are whatever you make them, it’s borderline depressing when people think their best years are behind them when they possibly have 6-7 more decades to live.

That's a bit of a stretch. Stats suggest it's more like 5 decades for a reasonably healthy American 30yo white male today.

Then consider that in your final decade or so, your options are extremely limited because of severe mental and physical decline. 1 in 9 adults will spend one or two of their final decades in a long goodbye due to Alzheimer's alone.

But the decline starts earlier, mental speed is high until age 60. This will affect your job and career prospects, and even if it doesn't for you, employers (esp. in tech) think it will and discriminate based on age anyway (roughly ~45yo based on some articles I've read). If you're a blue collar worker, a career of hard physical labor starts to hit a wall. If you're a woman, fertility starts declining (and childbirth health risks dramatically increase) fairly early (~30) and dating desirability follows rapidly.

Those are just the terminal issues, psychologically your life path more or less calcifies as you age. There's no age cutoff but, for example, it's said that the longer you stay in corporate work, the more likely you'll stay there and the less likely you'll succeed at entrepreneurship. I'd speculate there's maybe one or two more major life pivots in a 30yo.

Most of these factors don't exactly make life unbearable, but after a fairly "young" age (around 30 I suspect) a lot of doors start closing and it only accelerates from there. Depending on what "prime" or "best" means to you in terms of life goals, realistically you have much less than 6-7 decades to exploit them. I generally disagree with this attitude of oh don't worry you have plenty of time, life is much shorter than you think.

Nevertheless, once your doors are shut, there's little use in ruminating over the missed opportunity.

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

#160
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Tech salaries seem to be becoming increasingly bimodal: you can get $600k/year as a staff SWE at amazon/google/facebook if you get competing offers.

For sure, seems bimodal or even trimodal from what I've read. I don't suppose those tier 1's ever accept fully built SaaS projects in lieu of the usual interview gauntlet? ;)
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