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

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

#211

Post by scubakid »

extr wrote: post #205
ot1138 wrote: post #104

Funny how the same things get done over and over again. I went down this road in 2016. Spent about a year on an incredibly sophisticated retirement planner, with customizable scenarios. It was personally very useful so I started down the commercialization path. I found that a bunch of people had tried this with a direct-to-consumer model and it ended up being small potatoes every time. All of the companies who had ac…

IMO personal financial planning is somewhat of a unique task in that understanding the process to arrive at an "output" is a lot more valuable than the output itself. I've noticed that despite so many apps being available, I nonetheless prefer to track my finances in a hideously complex Excel spreadsheet. I don't just want to plug things in and have it spit out a result, I want to be able to intuit the full space of…

I know the feeling. The precursor to PL was a hideously complex spreadsheet of my own. You're probably a better spreadsheet wrangler than me, b/c in my case all the formulas eventually got so out-of-hand that it became cumbersome for me to maintain and really trust that thing.

When I was initially casting about for alternate tools that might be a step up from that spreadsheet, I found myself frustrated when I ran into anything opaque or where methodology / assumptions weren't clear. With PL, I've made an effort to expose as many of those as I can directly to the user (while packaged into a UI that tries not to overwhelm), but I'm sure at the end of the day it's always going to be a reflection of the parameters and decision space I had in mind when designing it.

If you ever check it out and run into areas where you feel the model needs more clarity, definitely let me know.

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

#212

Post by scubakid »

drsim wrote: post #210

How are you maintaining the tax rules? I considered building something similar to your tool and found this, which would decouple that hairy task: https://openfisca.org/en/ Also, plans to add Danish tax? A stretch I know for our small country.

So far research and crowdsourcing from the community, but I'd like to get something more automated in place.

If you happen to be well-acquainted with the Danish tax system, one option would be to set up custom brackets/rates/config in Plan Settings > Tax. If you do take a stab at that, let me know how it goes -- if you send over an export with the config, I could probably get that added as a formal template.

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

#213

Post by scubakid »

bosky101 wrote: post #208

feedback: bounced after the sandbox demo, because I did not find a currency selector.

If you do the normal walkthrough, currency selector is on the first page.

And it can also be accessed any time via the About You screen (either via Current Finances or the account menu in the upper right).

Is there another location you'd put it instead? Or just not a fan of the information architecture overall?

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

#214

Post by SanderNL »

gregoryl wrote: post #206
999900000999 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does this cost so much and why don't you offer a monthly subscription. If you just add a 10$ a month option most people will just shrug it off even if they never touch the site again. But you start at 108 for the year. That's charge back territory. If I just forget about this after the free trial but see a 108$ mystery charge I'm asking questions.

Why not more? Is there another product that does this as well, for less?

Well, no, therefore this should cost infinite dollar per year.

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

#215

Post by scubakid »

chillbill wrote: post #198
scubakid wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A complicating factor is that there are at least 2 different tours for different sections of the interface (e.g. high-level dashboards vs plan interface). Do you think it would be better to infer from one tour dismissal that a user never wants to see another tour for anything else?

I would say just write a tutorial page (or pages) or a record a video to show usage. Those tours really are useless.

I've had some less tech savvy users say they appreciated them. Demo videos might be a good alternative though... until other folks roll up and ask for a UI tour to show them where the demo video collection is :P

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

#216

Post by newswasboring »

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…

> 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?

Yup. It's a manipulative dark pattern. It makes the path of least resistance automatic spending of money rather than making a decision.

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

#217

Post by scubakid »

ahahahahah wrote: post #199
scubakid wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is account linking the primary thing you'd like to see? Or is there another kind of data as well? I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the back-and-forth in the public roadmap and also the discord related to account linking. Whether or not I should actually try to tackle that (and in what way) is a somewhat contentious topic within the PL community.

Pretty much just account linking to get the balances for all my investment accounts and for mortgage (honestly don't care much about checking/savings/credit) and to keep them automatically updated. Don't really care about anything around transactions or finer grained budgeting. like, i imagine there's people that really want that, but it feels like a different (huge) project. I guess I find I get some small value fro…

What's your experience been like using account linking in other tools? From what I hear, most of the aggregator services still have frequent enough issues that just taking 10-15 mins to plug your numbers in manually to a tool like PL once a month is sometimes less overall effort than trying to identify and debug why x, y, z accounts aren't syncing right this week.

If there's a good solution out there that just universally works though, and wouldn't be a giant support/maintenance tar pit for a solo dev to take on, definitely point me in that direction :)

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

#218

Post by firewolf34 »

newswasboring wrote: post #216
scubakid wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? Yup. It's a manipulative dark pattern. It makes the path of least resistance automatic spending of money rather than making a decision.

Paddle literally just nabbed me for a $40 subscription for another app just a few days ago. I am attempting to get it cancelled through their support, I never even got an email warning me of it at all. If they don't agree to cancel, considering I haven't even launched said app in months, I will dispute it w/ my CC. Madness.

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

#219

Post by wiradikusuma »

Hi Kyle, congrats for launching! I hope you're monitoring HN discussion. If you do, some questions:

1. Is this auto-saved? When I'm about to close it, Chrome warns me about losing data.

2. I think it does auto-save, but when I return, I'm blocked by a pop up with 2 buttons: Upgrade or Remove Data. OK... how do I resume?

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

#220

Post by quickthrower2 »

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…

That's the past. The future is a shoebox sized tent in a nondescript city. He is maxing out the 401 so when he retires, he can afford rent.
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