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

I used it about a year ago and it was pretty useful in making some large decisions but the more I used it, the harder it became to use as I couldn't duplicate and mutate easily without breaking my prior work, or basically without a version control system. I'm probably at a point where I would look at it again but today I would like it if actually worked with my day to day transactions as well, reconciling with all my checking accounts. Also multi-currency support would be very useful.

Thanks, I think this idea is worth looking into!

This is fantastic, smooth and really very polished. It clearly covers a lot of stuff and you’ve really got a lot covered so great work. I’ve not sat down and tried to fill out all my details as I’m worried I’ll lose all my details and have to start again. But this kind of stuff I find really interesting and most online are really bad/basic.

Main concerns are around price tbh (I’m a cheap bastard) and I think $14 a month is steep for something I’d use loads one evening and then probably use once every quarter after that.

I think the persistent storage is the key thing to make someone want to pay and the way it’s presented feels wrong to me. If I revisit the site you basically say ‘hey I’ve got all your data stored, sign up to premium and you can have it back without entering it all’ to me that comes across a bit of a ransom. I think that’s fine I’d say a couple of days/weeks have passed. But I think if you Accidentally closed the tab or it timed out it might put people off.

I think the real money maker here is likely financial planners who can pay a large fee and share/use it with their clients over zoom or whatever. Or perhaps some kind of insights/ yearly/monthly forecast summaries for a fee.

All in all amazing job, I hope it’s a great success.

Thanks for trying it out! I agree the recovery dialog needs some improvement. Ideally I'd like a way to let people back in for a limited time if they accidentally close their browser. Couldn't think of a sufficiently tamper-resistant implementation with the current architecture.. but as another commenter pointed out, maybe that's still net better(?)

Sounds like your notional usage pattern fits with how I use the tool as well, i.e. more like monthly/quarterly. If a discount or extended trial of the annual plan would be helpful, always happy to set those up as mentioned on the pricing page.

Hey - this looks like a great project. Congratulations for getting to this point.

I'm UK Based. I'm looking for a consumer facing replacement for (https://www.timeline.co/) which is buggy and not really meant for non Financial Advisors.

Kicking the tyres of this I'm running into an issue - not sure if this is a forum for bug reports/issues - if you'd prefer it elsewhere (discord?) I'm happy to do that. I've entered my data but my plan is cratering into bankruptcy long before it should.

There are various questions I have about this but for starters, looking at the 'Cashflow' tab it seems that the two 'Assets' (property) that I entered (Fully Owned) seem to be automatically incurring yearly recurring fees. I already accounted for the various charges associated with these properties in my yearly expenses (1 catchall of 'general') but it seems that these assets rather than contributing to my NW are detracting from it by causing yearly expenses in the region of ~3.5% of the value of the asset.

We don't have 'property taxes' in the UK, but this aside I seem to be unable to edit these properties in any way (when I entered them I was able to set estimated yearly appreciation of the asset value - but no way to edit the tax on them at the point on entry and no way to edit anything else relating to them within the 'Assets' tab of 'Current Finances').

Happy to help any debugging and contribute as this looks like a really solid project.