I'm yet to spend time on this, just wanted to let you know that I absolutely despise those walking tour flying dialogs. They're very annoying and quickly move my eyes from the dashboard (what I want to see) to something I couldn't care less about.
Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
51–60 of 294 posts
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
#52Some 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 jus…
Thanks for the detailed feedback! I appreciate you checking out the tool.
And sorry to hear you ran into trouble with the sandbox. It should warn about unsaved data if you try to close the tab. Did that not happen in your case? In the past, if you closed it, that was that. But a couple people slipped through the cracks and said it would have been much better if a recovery mechanism existed. So now it does haha... but maybe there's a way it can strike a better tone? FWIW I also love the idea of a time-based restore system, I just couldn't think of a good way to implement it that wouldn't be easy to tamper with (within the context of the current architecture anyway).
For RSU grants, folks usually model the amounts they expect to vest in each year. The Advanced change-over-time editor may be helpful.
For mega backdoor, would a Roth 401k cash-flow priority with custom limit be helpful? In the long-run though, I'd like to have a more formal option to make this easier.
For rental properties, this is where the Generate Income option on a House asset (real assets column) comes into play. The best experience here is if you have the premium features and set tax estimation to US mode. If you want to kick the tires on that, I do offer extended free trials and/or general discounts on top of the default trial period.
Oh right, and the effective tax rate metric is customizable. Do you currently have that set to include things like local/property taxes?
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
#53Probability of success is a common and relatively simple metric to compute and explain, but it is not a good one. If you retire at 60 and expect to live until 90, there is a big difference between running out of money at 70 vs. 85. A metric such as expected shortfall https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3674232 is better since it considers the magnitude of the shortfall.
I really like the "early retirement now" spreadsheet for that reason. (https://earlyretirementnow.com/2018/08/29/google-sheet-updat...) It allows you to plug in expected cash flows and your allocation model, and compares it to the stock market history to get a safe withdrawal rate.
Using that you can also try out alternate scenarios like "what if I converted x00k of my savings to an annuity in exchange for a predictable cash flow" and see how it affects your withdrawal rate.
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
#54I'm yet to spend time on this, just wanted to let you know that I absolutely despise those walking tour flying dialogs. They're very annoying and quickly move my eyes from the dashboard (what I want to see) to something I couldn't care less about.
Me too! haha. I only added those after a bunch of people requested them.
If you dismiss them, they don't reappear do they? They shouldn't at least...
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
#55Is 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!
Easiest way to get a feel for the self-hosted version is just to play around with the sandbox in the web app and enter fake data if you like. The planning experience is essentially the same.
If you did end up jumping for the self-hosted version though and hated it for whatever reason, I could always refund you.
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
#56Immediate feedback on the initial sandbox flow (UK perspective) - there's no reason 'mid-career UK' should be a defined benefit pension (or not) and 'early career UK' defined contribution (I assume? Since it doesn't say?). Could also be a mix, bit more likely in the case of mid-career. DB vs DC is just a function of where you work, these days the former is mostly public sector only (too many private companies with DB…
Would you prefer to see those sandbox examples configured differently? Or would you rather see a different and more nuanced kind of sandbox system where it asks you some questions first and constructs an example based on your responses? Oh and to answer your question on DB vs DC -- if you're talking about the workplace pension cash-flow priority, that would be for modeling Defined Contribution pensions. For DB, that'…
I came here to say the same thing. Defined benefit pensions are very rare these days in the UK.
Also I have to add that your sentences saying, "workplace pension cash-flow priority" and " corresponding income stream" are very confusing.
I think the figures for the UK example are not great. Living expenses, health care, and medical expenses are a lot larger than seems correct.
Also you should probably put a tool tip defining concessional vs non-concessional Australian superannuation. Also that should be in AUD rather than £
Amazing interface BTW
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
#57A vision of the future. Camera pans across a shoebox sized apartment, suspended above a nondescript city with light pollution, air traffic and highway noise. The space is furnished sparsely with generic wall art and take-out containers. Camera shifts to a middle aged, impoverished wageslave sitting alone, displaying a nervous tick, and staring in to their iMirror with an expression of concerned gravity. The camera zooms in to the lips, which begin to move: "Model me this..."
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
#58Thank you for developing and offering the self-hosting capability. I use spreadsheets for my planning at the moment but self-hosting makes this a serious option.
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
#59Thank you for developing and offering the self-hosting capability. I use spreadsheets for my planning at the moment but self-hosting makes this a serious option.
It's always been a goal to put the user in direct control of their data, so when the HN community asked for a self-hosted version last year, it felt like a natural fit.
Way back, PL actually started as one of my personal planning spreadsheets as well. I'm sure there are more talented spreadsheet creators out there than me, but I remember that mine ultimately reached a point where the complexity became so difficult to maintain (and trust) that I threw in the towel and decided to build a web app instead.
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
#60"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.
Man I loved PC when it actually worked. I think I had about 8 or 9 months of seamless integrations and then half my accounts blew up overnight with the response being "yeah we know, we're working on it" for months before I gave up. That was probably 5 years ago now.
The tricky thing about a service whose main value prop is aggregating all your account data together is that 99% of them working isn't that much better than 1% of them working. Looking at your financial dashboard is pretty useless if it can't sync one of your 401k accounts, or one of your loans is using 90-day old data.
I think this is actually a positive for the non-aggregators like ProjectionLab. If I spend 10 minutes manually updating everything when I check it once a month (or however often), I know everything is up-to-date and don't need to spot check things.