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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

#151

Post by scubakid »

aperrien wrote: post #134
scubakid wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PL assumes contribution limits increase over time to match inflation, so if you switch to visualizing results in actual currency (as opposed to today's currency), and you choose to contribute the max, you should see those nominal contributions increasing over time.

How can I alter the 401k match rate?

Employer Contribution is one of the inputs in the 401k cash-flow priority form, and you can use the More Options ellipsis to the right of that input to choose from several ways to model it.

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

#152

Post by bobboies »

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…

Counting the days to pass before reaching that dangling carrot is a disease. The reality is, for richer or poorer, we all retire when we die.

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

#153

Post by scubakid »

saint_yossarian wrote: post #147
scubakid wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hmmm getting NXDOMAIN for that at the moment. But I do see results for it on google. Someone give the intern access to DNS settings?

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

#154

Post by scubakid »

karaterobot wrote: post #149

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?

Where is $592 coming from? That doesn't sound right to me for Premium, esp. since the Lifetime option doesn't even have a trial phase. Which plan, billing frequency, and currency are you looking at?

On the trial topic, I'm using Paddle for subscriptions/billing, and when you add a free trial stage to a product in Paddle, they do charge after the trial ends. For anyone who forgets to cancel in time, I'm happy to issue a refund.

I also offer general discounts and extended trials on request (per the pricing page).

But if there's still a concern, the easiest way to try out the basic features without worrying about any of this is to just hop into the sandbox, which you don't even need to create an account for.

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

#155

Post by geph2021 »

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…

wow! That's a level of personal financial analysis that I've never contemplated doing. It's fantastic that someone has built such a great tool for others, and you get so much value from it.

For me personally, I fail to understand the point of doing this level of analysis, at lest for some of the things you listed that seem highly hypothetical and uncertain (e.g. raises, IPOs, even future mortgage rates). I guess that's the nature of any financial forecasting, but this just seems like it's taken to a level that I would not find helpful. Take for example the kind of mortgage to choose, a decision that all home buyers face and can be daunting (there's so much mortgage/lender lingo that is foreign to most people). The "right" answer is to go with a shorter-term, variable rate, because on average you'll pay less interest than longer-term/fixed rates. But that's also the wrong answer for some people who don't want, or can't handle variability in their biggest monthly expense. Layering those factors into an overall retirement calculator/projector just seems like overkill and over complicated for that decision. MHO...

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

#156

Post by parthianshotgun »

contingencies wrote: post #57

A 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 zo…

Let them eat spreadsheets

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

#158

Post by scubakid »

leoqa wrote: post #157

Thanks for making this. I’ve been a subscriber for awhile now and have advocated it’s usage to coworkers, family and even a Chase financial planner who had a lamer version that took minutes to rerun.

Wow thanks! Maybe you were one of the OG people who inspired me to keep working on it :D

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

#160

Post by goods37 »

Love this tool! Just signed up for premium.

Question/feedback: is there a way to configure things such that I just pay the correct amount in taxes every year? There's a very detailed part of the plan where I outline that I want to use the US tax bracket strategy, but it's odd to me that I then I have to guess how much taxes to withhold for each income stream. An option where I just always withhold the correct amount per-income stream would be awesome.

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