Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator

TL;DR - ProjectionLab (https://projectionlab.com) is a privacy-friendly personal finance planning tool where you can create financial plans that go beyond the standard online retirement calculators. And by popular request, it now supports self-hosting for Lifetime users!

Something I'm grateful for is that our community here on HN is the difference between PL existing and not. There was actually a time early on when I was one day away from halting work on it. I posted here on a whim, and was shocked to receive some really constructive and energizing feedback that went on to power my indie dev journey over the past two and a half years.

As a quick recap, the story started when I dove head-first down the financial independence rabbit hole. I wanted a hands-on and visual way to explore the trade-offs between different life paths. One thing led to another, and I decided to build ProjectionLab.

After last year's Show HN, I really put my nose to the grindstone, and here are some of the big developments:

- Self-hosting for Lifetime users (spin up your own private deployment, based on Docker Compose, includes support for auth/encryption)

- Cash-flow visualization for each simulated year (sankey charts)

- Tax analytics (detailed breakdowns for projected income, taxes, marginal rates, effective brackets, etc)

- Major redesign of entire app, with landing page and resources now split into separate project

- Filing separately option to improve support for international locations that don't have joint filing

- Roth Conversions and 72t (SEPP) distribution modeling

- Improvements to US tax estimation (Secure 2.0 updates, rental property tax deductions, Medicare + IRMAA, NIIT, principal residence exclusion, etc)

- Better support for planning as a couple

- More modeling options for cash-flow priorities to support different budgeting philosophies and goals

- Extra liquidity + withdrawal options, ability to fund expenses with specific accounts or route income to specific accounts

- Customization options for Monte Carlo simulations (characterization of success rates and outcome types, option to set random seed, etc)

- And a whole bunch more! (https://projectionlab.com/changelog)

The HN community has had a huge role in shaping my overall direction with PL, and I can't wait to hear what you all think of the updates and where you would like to see things go from here.

As always, PL is free to try, with no need to create an account. It does not ask to link your financial accounts, and it has a sandbox mode if you just want to hop in and see how it works.

--Kyle

Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
projectionlab.com

My thought process was that I wanted to make as much of the planning functionality as I could free to try and low-friction. I'm always open to feedback on pricing model though. Sounds like you would prefer to see a level of persistence in the free tier? If you have more thoughts on how that should work, let me know!

I discovered projectionlab (formerly projectfi) on HN a while back and have been loving it. Every other "retirement calculator" I found was a dozen text fields and a simple output graph or two - Projection Lab gave me what I really wanted, which was the ability to do much more involved modeling of various scenarios:

- What happens if I buy a house in X years?

- What happens if my old company IPOs and I get a windfall of $Y in X years?

- What happens if I change assumptions on investment returns or inflation rates?

- What happens if I retire at various different ages?

- What happens if my salary increases by 2, 5, 10, 30% each year?

- What happens if we do this kind of mortgage or that kind of mortgate?

- All of the above, but also modeling my in wife's finances?

- All of the above, but with beautiful, interactive graphs instead of my ugly spreadsheet outputs

- All of the above, but without the several formula typos that I made while building my spreadsheet

Anyway, it's amazing, I love it, and nothing else out there really seemed to compare. I found your free plan more than met my needs, but I wound up subscribing just to support it. I'm quite hoping you're able to make this successful long-term so that I can keep using it until I eventually retire. :)