231–240 of 240 posts
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Great point on the accordion; last thing I want to do is add anxiety! If you hover your mouse over the section you're reading, the countdown should stop... but perhaps I should get rid of the auto-advance altogether?
Oh gotcha, I didn’t try it on desktop, I was on my mobile device which preventing a hover.
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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…
Sounds like you know yourself well - which is a great start. I believe in you.
Cool, can you share how long it took you to build this?
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I think a "simple" mode is a great idea and worth considering as the default mode until the user gets comfortable enough understanding the results and then wants to drill-down and provide more details to get more refined results. Taxes would be a good thing to tuck out-of-the-way until the user is ready to wade into it. So too, specifying dividend rate separate from return rate (think I saw this, could be mis-remembe…
What's your take on the utility of researching and implementing feature-sets like what fsflyer was asking for? e.g. optimization techniques and tricks based on current country-specific tax codes, such as carefully timed roth conversions, ACA subsidies, social security claiming strategies, etc. Are you more in the camp that hyper-optimized strategies based on the tax codes of today may not be worth the effort to devel…
That said, you have to decide who your target user base is - if it's the hardcore optimizer FIRE folks, then yes, building in the capability to at least play those kind of what-if scenarios and maybe do optimizations will probably be important for that user base.
There is another group of folks just looking for a path to lower-case FI, maybe with early retirement, and not treating FIRE as the end goal but rather as a means to an end, that want to follow a not-so-complicated path that will give them that FI but not spend all their time obsessing the numbers. This excellent post Life On Fire – What's Next For Me, You and Us[0] by Vicki Robin of _Your_Money_or_Your_Life_ fame sheds some light on this other group:
"AT THE SAME TIME, I SOON REALIZED THAT FIRE IS ACTUALLY NOT MY TRIBE. We applied the same methodology to money but it seems for different ends. For me, FI has simply been the freedom to pursue a higher purpose – to grow spiritually, to learn, to create and to serve. While I’ve met a lot of people reaching for relevance in their lives, not just independence, it’s not what people obsess about. They obsess about taxes and investments. There are probably tens of thousands more in my frame, but of necessity investing the majoring of their time and attention into the “getting out” part of the journey."
If you target that group, then I suspect they'll be looking for less in the way of these advanced capabilities to optimize their finances and more in the way of what your app already provides.
I could see some middle ground for offering tools to help make decisions for specific questions / scenarios. I started to sketch out an example of what this might look like for "Should I do a Roth Conversion?" and it might look something like this:
- It would ask for estimated federal and state income tax rates (0% for some states), pre- and post-conversion.
- It would calculate estimated RMDs for different percentages of the projected Traditional IRA balance representing varying Roth conversion percentages (0%, 25%, 50%, 100%), that would be useful and there are a bunch of such RMD calculators out there.
- It could estimate the delta on estimated taxes due to estimated RMD and total the additional taxes due to RMDs up to your life expectancy age (assumes tax your fed and state tax rates stay the same, kind of a wildcard)
- It could estimate how much on average and in aggregate you'd pay in taxes if you converted 25%, 50%, 100% and of your traditional IRA to a Roth over N many years starting at age A (N and A user changeable)
- It could estimate your balances remaining at your life expectancy age broken down by account type ($X in taxable accounts, $Y in tax-deferred, $Z in tax-free) if you converted 0%, 25%, 50%, 100%.
I think that would have to be good enough, though I suppose you could add all sorts of bells and whistles in terms of charts and visualizations to make it easier to understand the data. The data provided would be helpful to make decisions based on various personal judgment calls and preferences: the importance of the highest possible tax-free balance in your estate to be passed along tax-free to beneficiaries; the importance of minimizing overall taxes paid over the various scenarios; your interest in either paying more taxes now or more taxes later; your comfort in doing the conversion on your own; your willingness to pay a professional to do the conversion for you if you don't feel comfortable doing it on your own; your willingness to move from a state with high income tax to a state that has no income tax which would maybe change the numbers enough to make it more reasonable to do a conversion given your other preferences. Those personal preferences would be tough to factor into an optimization calculation, though I suppose a questionnaire to capture preferences like the above (eg "on a scale from 1-3, how important is ...) could be used with a rule-based algorithm to guide the user to a scenario that fits their preferences best.
Whew, sorry for the long-winded example.
[0] https://yourmoneyoryourlife.com/life-on-fire/
EDIT: to improve the bullet formatting, first time trying "bullets" in HN comment!
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What's your take on the utility of researching and implementing feature-sets like what fsflyer was asking for? e.g. optimization techniques and tricks based on current country-specific tax codes, such as carefully timed roth conversions, ACA subsidies, social security claiming strategies, etc. Are you more in the camp that hyper-optimized strategies based on the tax codes of today may not be worth the effort to devel…
I get why someone might be interested in those kinds of things, you see these tactics often discussed by more sophisticated FIRE folks and bogleheads. Personally, while I do geek out a bit on this stuff because I like to look at data and crunch numbers as much as the next nerd, many of these are micro-optimizations that take up way more time than they're worth (at least in my specific case, purely anecdotal). That sa…
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I installed the PWA but was still using the browser. Will give it a try. What made it surprising is that usually diagrams and tables display horribly on phone in most apps. This app is centered around those and works well, which is literally amazing.
Thanks; glad you like it! I think there's still some room for improvement in the mobile version. To me it definitely doesn't feel like a "mobile first" experience... but it is serviceable at least.
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Thanks; glad you like it! I think there's still some room for improvement in the mobile version. To me it definitely doesn't feel like a "mobile first" experience... but it is serviceable at least.
hi! I've been using your software more actively, what's the best way to provide feedback? I thought you could appreciate input on things as a "pair of fresh eyes"
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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…
I tend to agree. There's some value in having a real person to talk to, but it really depends on the person. PC people are generally just going to walking you through whatever the algorithm is implementing anyway, and... I just didn't see enough value in it. That said, I've lost plenty trying 'my own thing' on single stocks, but ... I pretty much knew it was a gamble. Majority of value is in a handful of basic ETFs a…
I agree 100%. I think it is a good idea to pay for at least one hour of financial advice per year. Do not buy any products recommended if they receive a direct or indirect commission. An outsider who studies the financial situation of others for a living will usually have helpful advice, even if limited to: "This is good." or "Have you considered...?"
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> I can see how it might be difficult to build and sustain a real startup around this kind of product Yes, I think the most important difference is that, as far as I can tell, you're looking for a bit of side income rather than trying to jump start a whole company.
What direction did that startup take their product out of curiosity? Did they ditch the projection/forecasting element altogether or still keep a vestige of it?
Basically they had a few B2C customers who had a more pressing problem than forecasting, and the company provides an API for other companies to solve that problem for consumers as a feature.