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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

#111

Post by fishtoaster »

scubakid wrote: post #13
fishtoaster wrote: post #9

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 can't really think of much to add, honestly!

Iirc the last time I was using it heavily, the only issue I was having trouble with was modeling drawdowns of existing funds. It kept drawing down my wife's account to build up mine. It didn't affect the overall outcome (we had the same dollar amount together regardless), but it was a little annoying and made it harder to figure out which account was actually running low. That said, it's extremely possible that I was just doing something wrong and just hadn't configured it correctly. Whenever I get back to it, I'll work up a minimal repro case and ask about it in the discord. :)

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

#112

Post by scubakid »

mitchel0022 wrote: post #106

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.

Good point on FHSA! For savings accounts, you should be able to go into the Growth section of the account form in the plan interface and edit what the account yields.

It would be great to get your thoughts on tickers/tracking in the item on the public roadmap about account linking. Some good back-and-forth on there, and I'm still not settled on which approach to take.

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

#113

Post by scubakid »

pov wrote: post #108

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.

If a few people are starting to complain about pricing, then maybe I'm finally in the right ballpark now haha. I do also offer general discounts on request (form on pricing page).

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

#114

Post by matanrubin »

Amazing product, well done! I see that you support some country-specific stuff. What's your plan for adding more countries? Clearly you adding them one by one, and tracking the various rules and regulations of each one, isn't scalable. Is there a way for the community to help adding (and updating) country-specific stuff? I'm personally interested in adding Israeli stuff and I'm willing to contribute my free time to that end.

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

#115

Post by chris_st »

Something that would be cool would to do Traditional IRA to Roth conversion planning; a friend has put together software to estimate that, and due to taxes, found that he could save significant amounts of money by converting earlier than I would have expected.

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

#116

Post by robertlagrant »

scubakid wrote: post #100
robertlagrant wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being from the UK, having a plugin layer able to differentiate US from UK implications on finances would be extremely useful. But also as a fellow developer I hate to recommend a level of refactoring that might break you!

have you seen the UK tax template (plan settings > tax) and account types? curious what additional controls / differentiation you'd like to see.

Ah - no :-) I just read the feature list and didn't dig deeper. Just assumed it was going to be US-only. Impressive if not. How do you keep up?

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

#117

Post by modeless »

Hey, are you interested in a faster way of doing Monte Carlo simulations using the GPU? Demo here: https://james.darpinian.com/money/

It runs a million scenarios in a few milliseconds which is fast enough to update the results (the percentage at the bottom) in real time as you drag sliders. It's several orders of magnitude faster than other Monte Carlo retirement simulators; so fast that it may not even feel like it's doing anything. But it really does run a million scenarios instantly.

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

#118

Post by scubakid »

matanrubin wrote: post #114

Amazing product, well done! I see that you support some country-specific stuff. What's your plan for adding more countries? Clearly you adding them one by one, and tracking the various rules and regulations of each one, isn't scalable. Is there a way for the community to help adding (and updating) country-specific stuff? I'm personally interested in adding Israeli stuff and I'm willing to contribute my free time to t…

My aim is to make the tax config UI increasingly flexible over time to allow modeling a wider variety of countries. And since you can export your data to JSON via the account menu (upper right) > Export, you and others in the community may be able to get a sense for what the data model looks like and propose tweaks/changes to the international tax templates.

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

#119

Post by scubakid »

chris_st wrote: post #115

Something that would be cool would to do Traditional IRA to Roth conversion planning; a friend has put together software to estimate that, and due to taxes, found that he could save significant amounts of money by converting earlier than I would have expected.

If you open up the account form for your Traditional IRA (plan interface, left section), there's a subsection for Roth Conversions :)

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

#120

Post by orangepurple »

modeless wrote: post #117

Hey, are you interested in a faster way of doing Monte Carlo simulations using the GPU? Demo here: https://james.darpinian.com/money/ It runs a million scenarios in a few milliseconds which is fast enough to update the results (the percentage at the bottom) in real time as you drag sliders. It's several orders of magnitude faster than other Monte Carlo retirement simulators; so fast that it may not even feel like it'…

I don't trust your random number generator. It takes some effort to get extreme speeds out of them.
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