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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

#141

Post by scubakid »

ripberge wrote: post #133

Very cool. Is there an easy way to easily toggle on/off various scenarios like "pay for private school for my children" to see how that affects wealth? I didn't see a way to do this without copying a whole plan. My financial advisor does this with emaplan or blackmountain (or something) and I don't have access to this feature. It's very annoying and an incredibly important part of financial planning.

If you have that modeled as an expense, you can click that expense's icon in your plan to toggle it on and off. Same for other things like income items, real assets, accounts, and cash-flow priorities.

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

#142

Post by scubakid »

secabeen wrote: post #138

Very cool. Some of the assumptions really throw your plan out of whack, but digging around I eventually fixed it. An option to limit property tax increases would be nice, to reflect Prop 13 in California. The default estimate of 1.25% of my home value was blowing my entire projection out of the water given the 100+% increase we've seen in values over the last decade. Also, a default tax rate of 30% is misleading, as…

Good point, I believe there's an item on the public roadmap you might like to upvote for adding more property tax options (e.g. to help with modeling cases like California's handling).

Ideally you'd probably want to be using the "Estimate for me" setting in Plan Settings > Tax rather than using a fixed rate. But for those just playing around with the free sandbox that doesn't include tax estimation, would you suggest a different default default fixed rate?

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

#143

Post by OJFord »

scubakid wrote: post #29
OJFord wrote: post #23

Immediate 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'…

When you launch the sandbox you have to select some kind of template (the implications I think aren't completely clear at that stage, I understand better now). If you're in the UK, there are two options, described as (from memory) 'early career with a pension and some savings' and 'mid-career with a defined benefit pension'.

It just doesn't really make sense as a coupling, if I'm early career with a DB pension or mid-career with DC it's not clear which is the better pick or how much it matters. As far as I can tell having selected one and played with it just briefly, it doesn't matter at all because all it does is set some numbers you can change anyway, there's no built-in knowledge/logic of specific country pension schemes or tax treatments?

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

#145

Post by scubakid »

brooodie wrote: post #132
scubakid wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! And luckily I think I know what this is :) Sounds like you may just need to pay a visit to the Expenses subsection of the House form within the plan interface (Real Assets section beneath the primary chart in the Plan tab). If you've modeled those externally instead, then you can probably just zero-out the default assumptions for maintenance, insurance, property tax, etc.

Thanks for the quick reply - I just found it myself (this comment helped: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36853067 ) Given it's come up twice maybe a UI tweak or prompt might be useful here but I'm loathed to give you any advice to you - this is superb work. Once I have more of a play I'll come back with any further thoughts. Thanks again

Agreed. That question comes up often enough that I should really find a way to draw more attention to those embedded expenses during the plan creation process. That said, too many dialogs and "hey, look at this" indicators can become obtrusive after a certain point though, so it's always a balancing act.

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

#146

Post by scubakid »

OJFord wrote: post #143
scubakid wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

When you launch the sandbox you have to select some kind of template (the implications I think aren't completely clear at that stage, I understand better now). If you're in the UK, there are two options, described as (from memory) 'early career with a pension and some savings' and 'mid-career with a defined benefit pension'. It just doesn't really make sense as a coupling, if I'm early career with a DB pension or mid…

My intent with the sandbox was just to make it easy for folks to quickly hop into the tool and get a sense for what you can do with it, without the friction of needing to go through the full onboarding process and dig up a bunch of numbers to plug in... the idea being that if you want to give it a real try with a more tailored scenario, you'd typically start over and do the normal onboarding flow.

Does that help clarify? And/or do you feel like a different approach for the sandbox would have been better?

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

#147

Post by saint_yossarian »

scubakid wrote: post #102
mcjiggerlog wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Check out numbeo.com, it's a crowd-sourced database of cost-of-living data.

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

#149

Post by karaterobot »

Went to sign up for the free trial, and noticed you use that super cool dark pattern where it doesn't cost me anything today, but after a week you'll charge me $592 unless I remember to cancel the trial. No, thank you. Seems like an interesting product, and I'd love to see if it makes my life easier, but what the heck is with automatically charging trial members for a lifetime membership after a week?

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

#150

Post by scubakid »

mcemilg wrote: post #98

I liked it, highly detailed and wanted to try. I created a plan and it showed me that I am going to bankrupt in two years :). Seems like it is not suitable for economically unstable countries like Turkey. Many factors that can affect your financial plan are out of your control here. Inflation is changing every month, nothing can be predictable, salary is draining even if you promoted in your job. You need stronger me…

Yikes, are there any kind of levers available to someone in an environment like that? Or is it just... as grim as it sounds?
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