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

I've been tracking finances for years, can I add historical information so I can see timelines or is it all just from today forward like so many other trackers?

Seems to be a discoverability issue.

Some feedback:

- I filled in a bunch of data. I closed the window. I then went back to the website, it tells me that it has recovered my previous session, and it gives me the option to either "Remove data" or "Upgrade now". I want to use the recovered session. I guess that's not allowed? It's really jarring to put it on the user to actively click a button that deletes the data that they have painstakingly entered just a few minutes before. Psychologically, it feels like an AH move: "I have your data, but you can't get it." TBH, it would be better to pretend the data wasn't recovered at all. If you really don't want a user to recover their data without paying, I suggest that you put an expiration timer on it: you can recover without paying if you do so within, say, a day, but not after that.

- It's unclear what's expected when entering RSU grants.

- 401k can have a before-tax and an after-tax part. Due to mega-backdoor Roth 401k conversion, I expect a major part of my 401k withdrawals to be tax-free. Is there a way to model that?

- Cash flow: the destination of excess money is not very clear. I can see how excess money is going into savings, but it's not obvious how to tune this. You can say that RSU grants are going to a certain investment account, but that's not how things work in the real world: cash comes in from various sources into a single put (the checking account). Investments are made based on allocation. E.g. Every month, $XXXX goes to an investment account from that checking account. I don't think you can set things up this way?

- Is there a way to way to model a rental investment, where expenses (property tax, insurance, interest, etc.) can be subtracted from rental income and only the difference is added as taxable income?

- After retirement, I see my effective tax rate going up quickly, peaking out at 60%. I have no idea where that's coming from. If that needs debugging, I can, unfortunately, not share the data because I couldn't recover it. ;-)

- For me, the future projections are way lower than other retirement calculators. I find it hard to judge where the discrepancy is coming from, but I assume that the effective tax rate thing is a major contributor. There might just be too many knobs to play with and I probably have some things set up incorrectly.

- Personally, I would no pay $9/month for this. It's a very nice tool, but retirement planning is not a monthly on-going thing, and I already have way too many recurring services that I don't use a whole lot. For me, it would make more sense to be able to enter my info and save it under an account, have limited free functionality, and offer a way to pay for more. Ideally, in a non-recurring way. E.g. I'd be totally fine paying $10 for a day planning. And I might use that once per year. That's obviously much less than paying $9 per month, but at least you'd get something instead of nothing at all? I have no idea how this would change conversion and how many people are in my boat.

You can add historical progress points. Just with the caveat that those currently capture a slightly higher-level rollup than account-level data. In the future I plan to convert the progress point system into more of a "snapshot" system.

Is there any way to trial the self hosted version? I'm rather interested, partially as someone who doesn't like the idea of putting such data "in the cloud." (For products with less sensitive data I would try the monthly subscription first.) I'm assuming not, and that the self hosted is probably a small percentage of your customer base. But worth asking!