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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

#161

Post by throwanem »

scubakid wrote: post #154
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…

"Pro" has a 7-day trial and this below the CTA:

> Billed annually for $540 + tax.

The dollar amount doesn't quite line up, but it's close. Unless there's very clear confirmation before pulling the trigger on the trial, I would agree this feels on the shady side - at that price point after a 7-day trial, and without a lot of messaging at every stage, I would expect to see an elevated rate of chargebacks.

If it helps, this is via the "Upgrade" option when the app is trying to recover a sandbox session from localStorage; I haven't navigated to the pricing page any other way.

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

#162

Post by scubakid »

goods37 wrote: post #160

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…

If you'd like to see an option to withhold exact taxes automatically (to avoid owing extra with your tax return or getting a refund in the following year), there's an item on the public roadmap that you can upvote.

FWIW though, I expect implementing exact withholding may be a bit more complicated than you'd imagine because of how complex the interactions with the cash-flow priority system can get. To know how your tax brackets align with a particular income source, you need the complete picture of everything else that happens in that year, including every applicable deduction, contributions to any tax-advantaged accounts, any dividends taxable as ordinary income, etc. That's why it is currently assessed at the end of the year (like how it typically works in the US), when all of that information is known and finalized.

My intuition is that it may be difficult for the sim to know everything that's going to happen ahead of time when you consider that cash-flow priorities are often set up to operate on excess cash-flow, rather than predefined amounts per year... so those cash-flow priorities need to know how much is left over to work with, but whatever you contribute to things like pretax retirement accounts would actually end up affecting your taxable income, and thus also affecting what is left over after exact withholding, and around and around that cycle goes... Unless I'm missing something, it seems challenging to ensure that all possible cash-flow priority configurations would be solvable with that approach.

That being said, I agree exact withholding would be a really nice switch to be able to toggle on and off. I just haven't quite wrapped my head around the best way to go about it yet.

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

#163

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

ProjectiFi seemed promising enough that I was willing to support it with the purchase of a lifetime membership about two years ago (almost to the day, according to my password manager) when I saw the “Show HN”. Seeing the rebrand had me worried about shenanigans like this new thing is suddenly under a different license because it’s a different product or some such nonsense.

Very pleased that my account still displays that lifetime badge! Just wanted to drop a comment expressing my appreciation that the “lifetime” remains honored. Especially considering that said purchase was at a pretty steep discount in comparison to the current price.

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

#164

Post by scubakid »

throwanem wrote: post #161
scubakid wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Pro" has a 7-day trial and this below the CTA: > Billed annually for $540 + tax. The dollar amount doesn't quite line up, but it's close. Unless there's very clear confirmation before pulling the trigger on the trial, I would agree this feels on the shady side - at that price point after a 7-day trial, and without a lot of messaging at every stage, I would expect to see an elevated rate of chargebacks. If it helps,…

The checkout experience in PL is just standard Paddle checkout, so I imagine the feedback about charging after the free trial applies to everyone who uses Paddle?

I tend to think the Paddle checkout flow is clear enough on how their free trial period works, and I don't recall anyone else taking issue with that in the past.

But if the sentiment is shared that Paddle's checkout copy needs improvement, I can certainly pass that along to the Paddle team.

Was the OP here talking about Premium or Pro though? b/c I'm still wondering where that $592 came from.

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

#165

Post by scubakid »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #163

ProjectiFi seemed promising enough that I was willing to support it with the purchase of a lifetime membership about two years ago (almost to the day, according to my password manager) when I saw the “Show HN”. Seeing the rebrand had me worried about shenanigans like this new thing is suddenly under a different license because it’s a different product or some such nonsense. Very pleased that my account still displays…

Of course! All the early adopters like you have really meant a lot to me, and it's the least I can do to honor your original pricing :)

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

#166

Post by zomgwat »

scubakid wrote: post #164
throwanem wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Pro" has a 7-day trial and this below the CTA: > Billed annually for $540 + tax. The dollar amount doesn't quite line up, but it's close. Unless there's very clear confirmation before pulling the trigger on the trial, I would agree this feels on the shady side - at that price point after a 7-day trial, and without a lot of messaging at every stage, I would expect to see an elevated rate of chargebacks. If it helps,…

The checkout experience in PL is just standard Paddle checkout, so I imagine the feedback about charging after the free trial applies to everyone who uses Paddle? I tend to think the Paddle checkout flow is clear enough on how their free trial period works, and I don't recall anyone else taking issue with that in the past. But if the sentiment is shared that Paddle's checkout copy needs improvement, I can certainly p…

My guess is that the difference is the tax on a annual Pro subscription.

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

#167

Post by speg »

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?

That’s odd.. I just signed up for the trial and got this:

> We won’t charge you during the free trial. Once it ends, your subscription will renew at $15.82 unless you cancel

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

#168

Post by speg »

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…

Haha, looks like I’m going bankrupt a few years after retirement :(

Or I hope it’s just a bug… the cash flow chart lists “House” with something that looks like my mortgage amount. But then, it also lists mortgage payment separately. Is it double counting it?

Edit: oooh, the house as its own expenses within its asset. Like taxes and maintenance. This makes more sense…

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

#169

Post by tfsh »

This is awesome! I spent weeks looking for something like this a year back and am very interested!

I have some feature requests, if I know you've at least considered these (and are/are not planning them), it would definetly persuade me to pay for the product: - Is there an API or some way to programatically upload a snapshot of my banking data, I don't care if the API is cumbersome, as long as there's way for me to interface with this from some custom scripts. (I'm envisioning a cron-job running on a VPS which polls my bank account using the Open Banking standard and uploads a snapshot to Projection Lab).

- I'd love a dedicated section for "Jobs". By this I mean a way to set what my current salary is, but also when I expect to be promoted and how much of an increase that promotion should be. This way I can model a successful career trajectory without having to create a bunch of jobs for each promotion (I guess the frontend could just delegate to doing this in the backend).

- I work at FAANG and I believe it's quite common to recieve vested stock RSU units that vest over n years and are then reissued, being able to model that would be super useful... and finally a real killer feature would be visualising actual stock prices and manually set growth expectations

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

#170

Post by scubakid »

tfsh wrote: post #169

This is awesome! I spent weeks looking for something like this a year back and am very interested! I have some feature requests, if I know you've at least considered these (and are/are not planning them), it would definetly persuade me to pay for the product: - Is there an API or some way to programatically upload a snapshot of my banking data, I don't care if the API is cumbersome, as long as there's way for me to i…

Thanks! I think a good cross-section is already doable :)

There isn't a formal API yet, but there are several methods I've exposed on the early access channel to facilitate community plugin development, including the ability to programmatically update objects within PL. Here's an example thread on the discord where a community member has been leveraging those methods to build a Chrome extension that can pull balances in from YNAB: https://discord.com/channels/869222901054857216/112400124222...

For modeling career trajectory, have you seen the Advanced change-over-time editor yet? That can be super useful for mapping out a series of advancements within a single overall job. It can also come in handy for modeling how RSUs vest over the years, and between that editor and the "Recurrence" feature, you should be able to model some fairly sophisticated patterns.

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