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

projectionlab.com

31–40 of 294 posts

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

#32
This looks amazing, thanks for sharing it.

I'm interested in a few angles that are leading me to look at your self-hosted option - is there any customizability that is possible?

For example being in Canada, the basic features will work great, but some of the other types of accounts or programs will be different. It would be nice to be able to set it up in the software, and failing that, see if learning how the backend works with a self-host license will allow addition of different items.

I was just thinking about something like this last week - financial literacy can have an outsized impact on anyone's life, and being able to generate so many scenarios can make a huge difference in visualizing things so clearly for the formula of one's own life.

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

#33
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for checking it out! That UI is the product of more than a few sleepless nights.

Are you using Angular for the UI?

I'm using Vue.js, Vuetify, Chart.js, Firebase, Paddle, and GCP.

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

#34

Would love to see some integration of insurance and risk modeling (e.g. techniques to minimize downside risk, healthcare insurance, ACA subsidy interaction, P&C/home insurance, auto insurance risk) included as a feature — that's been incredibly hard for me personally in my own risk spreadsheets! DM me if you are interested in some of the actuarial data on some of these and how I model it...

Is there a certain kind of UI you envision for more first-class support for insurance modeling? Curious to hear your take on the best way to integrate that into the current setup.

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

#35

Oh hey, it's you again! 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 I…

Thanks so much! I use PL for all my own planning too of course, and keeping it around is very much the plan. Is there a particular direction in which you'd like to see me build from here? The public roadmap is overflowing with ideas at this point, and I'm curious how folks would rack and stack them.

I like that this is a solo-dev project, but there's probably loke, a good chunk of people who like this tool likely have built some kind of spreadsheet or other thing to get close to it and likely know exactly what they would like to see for certain things.

Having the abilty to perhaps build our own models and keep them to ourselves, or maybe have them available to share might not be a bad idea.

I'm not sure if this is reporting, or setting up a sequence or frequency of payments, etc. Depends on the backend I suppose.

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

#36
"ProjectionLab has no link to your real financial accounts and the data you enter stays in your browser unless you choose otherwise. "

I don't see why this would be a positive? I'd love an alternative to Personal Capital (since it got bought out), but without a direct connection to my banks/creditcards/etc, that connection just ends up being less secure.

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

#37

"ProjectionLab has no link to your real financial accounts and the data you enter stays in your browser unless you choose otherwise. " I don't see why this would be a positive? I'd love an alternative to Personal Capital (since it got bought out), but without a direct connection to my banks/creditcards/etc, that connection just ends up being less secure.

They're going to get this comment regardless of the direction they take so it doesn't matter.

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

#38
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks so much! I use PL for all my own planning too of course, and keeping it around is very much the plan. Is there a particular direction in which you'd like to see me build from here? The public roadmap is overflowing with ideas at this point, and I'm curious how folks would rack and stack them.

I like that this is a solo-dev project, but there's probably loke, a good chunk of people who like this tool likely have built some kind of spreadsheet or other thing to get close to it and likely know exactly what they would like to see for certain things. Having the abilty to perhaps build our own models and keep them to ourselves, or maybe have them available to share might not be a bad idea. I'm not sure if this…

Having a little trouble parsing the specific feature ideas here. It seems like one of them may be an ability to share a read-only view of your plans... but on the other(s) I might need a little more detail.

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

#39
post #32

This looks amazing, thanks for sharing it. I'm interested in a few angles that are leading me to look at your self-hosted option - is there any customizability that is possible? For example being in Canada, the basic features will work great, but some of the other types of accounts or programs will be different. It would be nice to be able to set it up in the software, and failing that, see if learning how the backen…

Most of the account and cash-flow priority types have customization options that can be used to do things like adjust liquidity/withdrawal rules and dial things in based on your circumstances. And if there are some specific areas where you'd like to see even more of that, just let me know.

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

#40
post #37

"ProjectionLab has no link to your real financial accounts and the data you enter stays in your browser unless you choose otherwise. " I don't see why this would be a positive? I'd love an alternative to Personal Capital (since it got bought out), but without a direct connection to my banks/creditcards/etc, that connection just ends up being less secure.

They're going to get this comment regardless of the direction they take so it doesn't matter.

True. I wonder what the use case for this is exactly. Maybe a strictly offline platform for techies?
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