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?
Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
221–230 of 294 posts
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about $5 for a one week unlock, so I can make quarterly adjustments as necessary? Or, say, $10 for a week during Q1 of the year so I can plan out my taxes for the upcoming year? (While I’m not paying the info is read-only, tempting me to play with it for $5/week.)
Currently you can do $14 for a month of access at a time. Does that scratch this itch? Or is there something about having access for even smaller windows of time that appeals to you? The read-only idea outside of those windows is an interesting idea. I don't have a mechanism for that at the moment, but I'll consider it if some other folks express interest in this kind of plan.
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Alright Debbie.
What about getting units of work to start working right now, instead of hoping some big company will make people’s money “grow” into the future?
Invest in local economy. Invest in people. Folks thinking about retirement backwards.
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about $5 for a one week unlock, so I can make quarterly adjustments as necessary? Or, say, $10 for a week during Q1 of the year so I can plan out my taxes for the upcoming year? (While I’m not paying the info is read-only, tempting me to play with it for $5/week.)
Currently you can do $14 for a month of access at a time. Does that scratch this itch? Or is there something about having access for even smaller windows of time that appeals to you? The read-only idea outside of those windows is an interesting idea. I don't have a mechanism for that at the moment, but I'll consider it if some other folks express interest in this kind of plan.
For the rest of the year I'm just checking in from time to time to see how I'm tracking against the plan, so a free read-only mode would be ideal.
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 clar…
I like the tool & UI & feature tour though. :)
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 univer…
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alright Debbie.
I know it’s a depressing thought—but considering that money can be thought of as a “unit of work”, and so many people are tying it up in stocks of large companies, miles away—praying they won’t get hit by a car before that special day. What about getting units of work to start working right now, instead of hoping some big company will make people’s money “grow” into the future? Invest in local economy. Invest in peop…
You for shit have no idea how bad elder care is in America
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
#228Every few years I see this posted on HN. Every time I play with it. Every time I am delighted by it. Every time, I think I'll use it. And then I don't. To be fair, my finances are simple to a fault, so I haven't felt like using it. But, once things ramp up, this will be the first tool I subscribe to. It's a great tool. I recommend.
Once you see the power of these things and combine them, taking the right decisions actually becomes quite simple.
For example, if you take a 7% average long-term return, as a rule of thumb, your money doubles every 10 years. (1.07^10 = 2, more or less). That means if you save $1k at 25yo, in 40 years you'd have 4 doublings, or 16k, at age 65. That's a pretty powerful multiplier. And 7% is roughly the long-term inflation-adjusted (real) return on the S&P500 (no guarantees it holds, of course).
Many companies will 100% match your retirement investments. So if you put in 1k at age 25, a 100% match will mean your employer puts in 1k as well. Combined with the above, the $16k would become $32k.
Now, if you instead took the $1k as salary, you'd have paid income tax at the marginal rate, a 30% marginal rate is quite common. i.e. the $1k in salary would've netted you $700 in spending at age 25. By instead putting it in your 401k, it'd grow out to $32k in the above example at age 65, or 45 as much. If you moved at that age to a state with no income tax (there's 8), you'd net it all. For every $1 you put in, you'd have gained $45.
That's such a crazy multiplier, and note it's already inflation-adjusted. For 1 unit of work/time, you gained 45 units of work/time. Take such a multiplier in the context of retirement: 40 hours (= 1 week) of work would allow you 45 weeks (almost a year) of earlier retirement.
These simple fundamentals explain why starting early on personal finance is helpful. But it also explains why it's completely unnecessary to spend decades looking at a graph/UI of all of this unfolding, once a week, and updating the planning.
In fact, the only thing I really did after a lot of personal finance education, was to set-up some automated contributions to investment / retirement accounts from my salary. Every few years I reconsider the balance between 'pleasure today' vs 'pleasure one day' (i.e. retirement), and rebalance how much of my income I spend, and how much I allocate to these automatic contributions. It takes about 30 minutes a year to make these arrangements, and with that the vast majority of my personal finance arrangements are made. That's why additional tooling isn't really necessary. Of course at some point some analysis will be useful before pulling the trigger on retirement, and some analysis/advise is useful around major decisions like a house purchase, or selling your company. But for the most part, financial planning tools are just really unnecessary because the fundamentals for an ordinary person to arrange are so, so simple: allocate a portion of your income towards tax-optimised investment/retirement accounts, and set-up automatic payments.
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
You make a good point that adding more educational scaffolding would be helpful. I try to include some sensible defaults where I can (e.g. assuming houses are going to have some maintenance/insurance/tax costs associated with them), but yeah in some places existing knowledge or independent research comes in handy. Are there sections in the app that jump out to you as good places to inject more educational content? As…
I use New Retirement and one of my biggest complaints about that app is that it expects you to provide the optimistic/pessimistic rate of return for each of your investment accounts. I would love to have a tool that provides some guidance on setting those numbers, based on historical returns and the asset classes in the account. I can see value in having similar guidance for things like mortgage interest rates. Maint…
This one is pretty nice to mimic. You have to Ctrl+F for 'projection method' and then switch it to Historic Cycles, or Monte Carlo Simulation:
https://engaging-data.com/fire-calculator/
Then you'll see basically a distribution appear on the graph with the median (50%), but also the 25% & 75%, and the 10% & 90% likely return scenarios.
Quite useful to see what a bottom 10% ('worst-case') scenario would look like, and how it would affect your finances and your timelines.
Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator
#230Earlier 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…
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.
It has been worth every dollar! They added custom taxes with auto import for various countries and they have been clearing out suggestions over the years.
I'm very proud of this HN solo founder. Borderline jealous that they were able to have the discipline and commitment to continue doing this.