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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

#201

Post by scubakid »

bronco21016 wrote: post #200
scubakid wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happy you like it so far! Have you seen the Advanced editor I added recently to control precisely how things like investment returns, accounts, income, and expenses change over time? When you open up the full dialog for that, I bet that control point table would be a perfect place to add support for CSV import of income (or whatever other variable) by year.

I did! When I get some time to get everything setup this weekend that where I'll fill in my data. Unfortunately, I have 31 years to go :S so it will take time to manually enter. But a quick import of CSV on the left hand side where the points are added would be perfect!

Sounds good; feel free to add that feature idea to changemap if you want! Or I can take a note to do it when I get a chance.

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

#202

Post by mym1990 »

themacguffinman wrote: post #159
mym1990 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While all of these statistics are valid in their own right, I don't think it makes sense to take them and use them to extrapolate the rest of your life, especially in such a doom and gloom way.

My attitude is certainly not of the 'oh don't worry you have plenty of time' because we really don't have that much time. But if the view is that in an 80 or so year life span, you got to get in 8-10 golden years as a healthy American, oof, that is pretty tough, and I probably won't change that mindset.

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

#203

Post by scubakid »

themacguffinman wrote: post #172
scubakid wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This condensed several of my own musings into one well-reasoned comment. Do you think there's anything ProjectionLab could/should try to do with the concept of health-span?

Not sure, maybe lifespan estimates based on current behavior could be handy. Eg are you a smoker? Are you regularly physically active? What's your race, occupation, etc? I think chronic conditions are also hard to plan for in your head, so some preset stats-based options for medical costs could be helpful. No one intuitively imagines it'll happen to them but something like 60% of 65yo+ adults managed 2 or more chroni…

I dread the idea of having to navigate the current US healthcare system in circumstances like that.

One drawback that occurs to me about the idea of projecting lifespan/healthspan is that with the data you'd need, you get into PHI territory pretty quickly right?

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

#204

Post by scubakid »

mym1990 wrote: post #202
themacguffinman wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While all of these statistics are valid in their own right, I don't think it makes sense to take them and use them to extrapolate the rest of your life, especially in such a doom and gloom way. My attitude is certainly not of the 'oh don't worry you have plenty of time' because we really don't have that much time. But if the view is that in an 80 or so year life span, you got to get in 8-10 golden years as a healthy…

It's true, broad stats aren't great predictors of individual outcomes. Or at least that's what I like to tell myself haha, though at times I worry it's tough to distinguish from "yeah, but it won't happen to me."

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

#205

Post by scubakid »

themacguffinman wrote: post #143
b20000 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

I've heard of fee-only financial advisors. They don't make commissions or skim percentage points off your portfolio, so their incentives should be more directly aligned to yours.

Any data yet on how that model tends to play out over the long-run in the average case? Off the cuff it does sound like incentives could be better aligned though.

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

#208

Post by themacguffinman »

scubakid wrote: post #203
themacguffinman wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure, maybe lifespan estimates based on current behavior could be handy. Eg are you a smoker? Are you regularly physically active? What's your race, occupation, etc? I think chronic conditions are also hard to plan for in your head, so some preset stats-based options for medical costs could be helpful. No one intuitively imagines it'll happen to them but something like 60% of 65yo+ adults managed 2 or more chroni…

I dread the idea of having to navigate the current US healthcare system in circumstances like that. One drawback that occurs to me about the idea of projecting lifespan/healthspan is that with the data you'd need, you get into PHI territory pretty quickly right?

Yeah that's probably protected data. I'm not a lawyer but maybe it could still work if you don't store the health data and just use it to locally generate adjustments (or maybe just store the health parts in-browser but keep the generated financial adjustments in the cloud). The more accurate your projection model, the more personal data it'll have to factor in.

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

#209

Post by 0_zymandias »

Very impressive application, a smooth intuitive UI. The progressive disclosure style works well for inputting all the settings without getting overwhelmed.

That said, my go-to for FIRE calculations/simulations is https://www.firecalc.com/index.php - and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

The FIREcalc UI is very clunky compared to ProjectionLab but once you get used to it, IMO the options are a little more straightforward to understand and set. And FIREcalc is free and makes it easy to "save" your settings for future tuning/revisiting by generating a link with URL query parameters containing your setting values - I'm good with that approach.

ProjectionLab does provide more granularity for specifying investment accounts that are taxable vs tax-deferred vs tax-free, which allows it to factor in the effect of taxes in the projections. But I wonder if that's a level of complexity that's better left out of the calculations.

Effective tax rate (and yeah verily, taxes) - so damn complicated at least in the US. It will vary considerably over time even during your post-FIRE journey, depending on: your income (of course); your deductions/credits; changes in tax rates and codes; on the state(s) you live in (and how the state taxes social security, HSA earnings); etc, etc and so on and so forth.

Also many folks setup their asset allocation across all the various types of accounts to be as tax efficient as possible (https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Tax-efficient_fund_placement), and AFAICT there's no way to reflect that in ProjectionLab currently.

All that's a long way of saying that I appreciate that FIREcalc doesn't try to factor in taxes. It's easier to get my head around just allocating a certain amount for taxes in the yearly spending number, maybe based on my tax history or some coarse tax estimation calculator, maybe using an expected case and worst case tax amount in the yearly spending number and then running the FIREcalc simulations and comparing - without trying to account for the effect of taxes in a more granular way, given the inherent squishiness of taxes. YMMV of course.

Anyways, nice work on ProjectionLab, I can see where it would be a valuable tool for those who are trying to get a handle on their current finances and FIRE goals and may be a little less comfortable using tools like FIREcalc or home-grown spreadsheets (I geek out on this stuff so naturally I use both!).

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

#210

Post by Smithalicious »

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…

Are you implying that investing is something specific to "the tech crowd"?
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