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

projectionlab.com

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

#101

Post by chromatin »

scubakid wrote: post #38
j45 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> share a read-only view of your plans

I think this is because you are conflating "model" and "plan"; whereas the conventional use of plan probably means model, when playing in your Sandbox it looks as if "plan" is model+data.

The grandparent poster is describing sharing models.

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

#102

Post by scubakid »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #86
scubakid wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for playing around with the new version! And sounds like it's a good thing I rebranded to ProjectionLab -- that first 'i' in ProjectiFi was way too easy to miss ;) Is there a certain direction you'd like to see me take the tool from here?

One thing I'd like to see is a better way to estimate the cost of kids, and specifically per-child. If I could just click a button and have the average cost for a child for my country added from a certain year, that would be awesome.

That's a neat idea! when I estimate future expenses, typically I'll do independent analysis and then bring my final numbers into PL. But I think you're right that there's an opportunity to include some country/region benchmarks or perhaps integrate APIs to pull them on-demand. Do you happen to know of any data providers that might be straightforward to integrate for that sort of thing?

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

#103

Post by teach »

scubakid wrote: post #85
screye wrote: post #81

Every few years I see this posted on HN. Every time I play with it. Every time I am delighted by it. Every time, I think I'll use it. And then I don't. To be fair, my finances are simple to a fault, so I haven't felt like using it. But, once things ramp up, this will be the first tool I subscribe to. It's a great tool. I recommend.

Anything you feel the tool is missing that might make it more compelling? Personally I use it more on a monthly or even quarterly basis to consider new decisions, update stuff, etc. That fits with the usage pattern I initially imagined for a long-term planning app, but I'm always open to other ideas. P.S. I started working on PL in 2021, so we're not quite in "every few years" territory yet ;)

I hadn't messed around with this when you posted previously but today I did.

I tried to forecast buying a house, but it seems to have defaulted to 0% APR for Infinity. I don't know anything about buying houses; that's why I'm using a tool like this in the first place!

I poked around and was finally able to open a screen to enter values for a bunch of things but I don't know what's reasonable.

It kinda feels like your onboarding wizard is too good -- it creates the illusion that I can use your site even if I don't really know anything about anything, but then trying to forecast expects me to know a lot more.

I know that's not very actionable feedback, but that's what has put me off actually paying for a subscription so far.

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

#104

Post by ot1138 »

Funny how the same things get done over and over again.

I went down this road in 2016. Spent about a year on an incredibly sophisticated retirement planner, with customizable scenarios. It was personally very useful so I started down the commercialization path.

I found that a bunch of people had tried this with a direct-to-consumer model and it ended up being small potatoes every time. All of the companies who had achieved any scale at all were doing so through partnerships with banks or financial planners.

In the end, I decided it wasn't something I wanted to spend years of my life with. I found OnTrajectory, which was a "good enough" solution at the time (and still is).

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

#105

Post by tarwin »

Looks super awesome. I was worried about where the data was stored, but it looks like you've already answered that.

Have you looked at adding Google Drive sync? I've done it myself (on a project you've just inspired me to post about on HN) and is a super easy way for people to sync their own data without having to do any kind of setup.

It seems you should be able to do this with other online storage using OAuth but I haven't found anything else that works frontend only.

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

#106

Post by mitchel0022 »

Looks a bit expensive but they again you're targeting finance nuts so maybe not.

As a Canadian it looks like you're missing the FHSA as well, though it is relatively new.

Any plans to allow adding stocks to accounts? So I could add that I hold 1000 shares of XEQT in my TFSA and it would update the value automatically? At the very least a flat interest option would be nice for savings accounts.

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

#107

Post by scubakid »

teach wrote: post #103
scubakid wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything you feel the tool is missing that might make it more compelling? Personally I use it more on a monthly or even quarterly basis to consider new decisions, update stuff, etc. That fits with the usage pattern I initially imagined for a long-term planning app, but I'm always open to other ideas. P.S. I started working on PL in 2021, so we're not quite in "every few years" territory yet ;)

I hadn't messed around with this when you posted previously but today I did. I tried to forecast buying a house, but it seems to have defaulted to 0% APR for Infinity. I don't know anything about buying houses; that's why I'm using a tool like this in the first place! I poked around and was finally able to open a screen to enter values for a bunch of things but I don't know what's reasonable. It kinda feels like your…

You make a good point that adding more educational scaffolding would be helpful. I try to include some sensible defaults where I can (e.g. assuming houses are going to have some maintenance/insurance/tax costs associated with them), but yeah in some places existing knowledge or independent research comes in handy.

Are there sections in the app that jump out to you as good places to inject more educational content? As you point out, one of the input fields when you add as house and choose "financed" is APR. Maybe that could link to a dedicated page with common rates based on a few parameters like credit score, or perhaps even a separate tool dedicated to estimating that sort of thing?

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

#108

Post by pov »

I find the pricing structure a little odd. I think it's expensive for individuals (selfishly, as this is the group I would be in), and it seems way cheap to me for advisors. I'm admittedly not in the financial world, but I would think the value-add for advisors would make this a no-brainer.

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

#109

Post by scubakid »

ot1138 wrote: post #104

Funny how the same things get done over and over again. I went down this road in 2016. Spent about a year on an incredibly sophisticated retirement planner, with customizable scenarios. It was personally very useful so I started down the commercialization path. I found that a bunch of people had tried this with a direct-to-consumer model and it ended up being small potatoes every time. All of the companies who had ac…

If you like, feel free to share a link to your tool if it's still active -- I'd be curious to check it out.

In a way, my hope was that "small potatoes" for a large company might still translate into "sustainable lifestyle business" for an indie/solo dev.

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

#110

Post by scubakid »

tarwin wrote: post #105

Looks super awesome. I was worried about where the data was stored, but it looks like you've already answered that. Have you looked at adding Google Drive sync? I've done it myself (on a project you've just inspired me to post about on HN) and is a super easy way for people to sync their own data without having to do any kind of setup. It seems you should be able to do this with other online storage using OAuth but I…

Google drive sync didn't occur to me, but I'll check it out! Could be a nice option to add to the storage method suite if they have APIs that would be easy to integrate.
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