Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

#141

Post by aidenn0 » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 4:09 AM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #94

astrange wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, a lot of higher earners are concentrated in California and New York, which have fairly high taxes; in New York or San Francisco a single person making $105k would take home about $75k (slightly less in SF, slightly more in NY) or about £3k more. That's income taxes; states aren't that different when you actually count "taxes" ie property, sales, income, and whatever else is left over. Texas is theoreti…

> Texas is theoretically a little worse for the middle class because property taxes are much higher. It's better if you're rich though. I know they are higher in relative terms, but are they higher in absolute terms? I live in a single-family house in SoCal and pay over $12k/year in property taxes. [edit] absolute relative

Too late to edit, but I found this[1] from 2019 which multiplies the effective tax rate by the median price (multiplying a mean by a median is questionable, but I don't have a better proposal) which puts CA as more expensive than TX.

Also the most expensive states by this metric are almost all in the Northeast, which matches my intuition.

1: https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-highest-and-lowest...

Re: Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

#142

Post by scubakid » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 4:13 AM UTC

nabaraz wrote: post #139

scubakid wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not actively working on this at the moment, but I'd definitely entertain the idea and be happy to help think through if there's a reasonable way to do it. What's your biggest motivation for wanting a self-hosted version?

i) Connect to bank accounts automatically and pull the balances and transactions. ii) Owning my data. Currently, I have my own tool that gets balances from credit cards and some bank accounts. I save all the data in a random xyt format which I export/import to my web tool/app. I am looking to replace this tool with something but without giving my data.

FWIW, data already stays client-side by default. If you upgrade and enable saving, you can choose from localStorage only, cloud sync (i.e. not what you want haha), or manually importing/exporting JSON files. That being said, totally understand the desire to have a version you host in your environment under your absolute control.

How do you envision i) working in a self-hosted version? Something you wanted to code up on your own? And does that imply you'd expect the self-hosted version to be easily editable, e.g. the actual source code?

Re: Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

#143

Post by themacguffinman » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 4:14 AM UTC

b20000 wrote: post #126

sthatipamala wrote: post #71

Great work! This might be unpopular among the HN crowd, but I think you can monetize this further by bundling this with an advising service. This idea of FIRE has been spreading beyond techies/Internet nerds and into other highly paid professionals like doctors. [0]. The main difference is that non-programmer professionals generally don't get a thrill out of min/max-ing financial projections. Such people might be wil…

the problem is that the type of advisors you are talking about only care about selling products and making commissions, they actually don't care about helping people make the right decisions. the same goes for CPAs - the moment they see that your tax situation becomes too complicated or a potential liability or they can't make a good profit (read: cookie cutter tax situation which can be handled by fresh grads but ca…

I've heard of fee-only financial advisors. They don't make commissions or skim percentage points off your portfolio, so their incentives should be more directly aligned to yours.

Re: Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

#144

Post by sailfast » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 4:15 AM UTC

b20000 wrote: post #126

sthatipamala wrote: post #71

Great work! This might be unpopular among the HN crowd, but I think you can monetize this further by bundling this with an advising service. This idea of FIRE has been spreading beyond techies/Internet nerds and into other highly paid professionals like doctors. [0]. The main difference is that non-programmer professionals generally don't get a thrill out of min/max-ing financial projections. Such people might be wil…

the problem is that the type of advisors you are talking about only care about selling products and making commissions, they actually don't care about helping people make the right decisions. the same goes for CPAs - the moment they see that your tax situation becomes too complicated or a potential liability or they can't make a good profit (read: cookie cutter tax situation which can be handled by fresh grads but ca…

I work with a local independent advisor, and while they do make money on commissions they've never advised me to go a direction that doesn't work just to buy a product, and their advice is worth every penny in fees that I pay on the money they manage (which is not most of my retirement dollars, just a small chunk, per their advice to keep it in low-fee funds.) In general I'd say find somebody you trust. Try to work local if you can.

Anyway, my advisor works via a larger "network" company that provides their white-label tools to run monte carlo sims, etc and game out retirement. None of them are this accessible / slick. Definitely something to this.

Re: Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

#145

Post by _drkh » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 4:17 AM UTC

Solid app - I echo others statements on this and am seriously considering switching to this from a spreadsheet for the long term; I tried a similar thing for my own finances (spreadsheet -> own app), but it was _far too tedious_ trying to get all the various financial bits worked out, so this is a huge savings in time. Also, the plan together feature seems to be a solid feature overall so far, and it's really helping my partner with financial anxiety be able to even _look_ at our finances without breaking down so far.

Two things I noticed, one is a minor visual bug and the other is a potential win (unless I missed it entirely, in which case disregard):

- it'd be nice to have a feature to do one-off expenses with greater ease, applied to a subset or all plans right off the bat, the idea being I'd like to see the effect of a spontaneous / fun buy and its greater impact on my plans at that moment (thinking really casual FI where me being off 1-2 years isn't a major dealbreaker);

- the promo image under the `Plan Together` summary for mobile has the app layout _behind_ the device notch when it handles it correctly.

Re: Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

#146

Post by scubakid » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 4:23 AM UTC

_drkh wrote: post #145

Solid app - I echo others statements on this and am seriously considering switching to this from a spreadsheet for the long term; I tried a similar thing for my own finances (spreadsheet -> own app), but it was _far too tedious_ trying to get all the various financial bits worked out, so this is a huge savings in time. Also, the plan together feature seems to be a solid feature overall so far, and it's really helping…

Glad you're enjoying it so far! For one-off expenses, I'm assuming you've noticed that the plan interface has all the expandable columns (accounts, income, expenses, assets, etc.), and that you can create new expenses on the fly by adding them from the expenses column, setting frequency to once, and picking which year to throw it into? Or are you saying that's fine but you'd like a way to propagate specific items from one plan to another/all? If the latter, I'm planning to add something for that: https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi/task/5878-add-abi...

And thanks for the heads-up! That's what the mock-up generator I used produced and I don't have an iPhone so I wasn't 100% sure how it _should_ look haha. I'll take a note to go back and adjust.

Re: Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

#147

Post by sailfast » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 4:24 AM UTC

Teknoman117 wrote: post #108

Having the money showed in today's dollars by default was tripping me up for a bit. The 401k provider my employer uses shows "future dollars" by default, so you have to mentally recognize that the buying power of 10M "35 years from now dollars" is not what $10M would do for you today. Not helping my "11 months till 30" anxiety/depression. I don't know why it's messing with me so much. The internet loves to make is se…

The internet is wrong. Nothing happens when you cross the barrier. Do what makes you fulfilled and live without regrets. Nothing worse than wasting the limited time we have worrying about things we cannot change. (talking to myself now haha)

Re: Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

#148

Post by nabaraz » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 4:24 AM UTC

scubakid wrote: post #142

nabaraz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i) Connect to bank accounts automatically and pull the balances and transactions. ii) Owning my data. Currently, I have my own tool that gets balances from credit cards and some bank accounts. I save all the data in a random xyt format which I export/import to my web tool/app. I am looking to replace this tool with something but without giving my data.

FWIW, data already stays client-side by default. If you upgrade and enable saving, you can choose from localStorage only, cloud sync (i.e. not what you want haha), or manually importing/exporting JSON files. That being said, totally understand the desire to have a version you host in your environment under your absolute control. How do you envision i) working in a self-hosted version? Something you wanted to code up…

Correct.

My current setup -> My web server connects to bank accounts every 6 hours and creates a xyt file which is encrypted and synced. I take that file and load my web tool to get the visualization, simulation etc.

My ideal solution is something similar.

Great work with projectionlab nonetheless. I have tracked the progress since it was called project fi or something.

Re: Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

#149

Post by _drkh » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 4:27 AM UTC

scubakid wrote: post #146

_drkh wrote: post #145

Solid app - I echo others statements on this and am seriously considering switching to this from a spreadsheet for the long term; I tried a similar thing for my own finances (spreadsheet -> own app), but it was _far too tedious_ trying to get all the various financial bits worked out, so this is a huge savings in time. Also, the plan together feature seems to be a solid feature overall so far, and it's really helping…

Glad you're enjoying it so far! For one-off expenses, I'm assuming you've noticed that the plan interface has all the expandable columns (accounts, income, expenses, assets, etc.), and that you can create new expenses on the fly by adding them from the expenses column, setting frequency to once, and picking which year to throw it into? Or are you saying that's fine but you'd like a way to propagate specific items fro…

That was it, the latter feature! Thanks for letting me know that's in the works, that was the only thing I wished was available.

Re: Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

#150

Post by scubakid » Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 4:28 AM UTC

sailfast wrote: post #144

b20000 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the problem is that the type of advisors you are talking about only care about selling products and making commissions, they actually don't care about helping people make the right decisions. the same goes for CPAs - the moment they see that your tax situation becomes too complicated or a potential liability or they can't make a good profit (read: cookie cutter tax situation which can be handled by fresh grads but ca…

I work with a local independent advisor, and while they do make money on commissions they've never advised me to go a direction that doesn't work just to buy a product, and their advice is worth every penny in fees that I pay on the money they manage (which is not most of my retirement dollars, just a small chunk, per their advice to keep it in low-fee funds.) In general I'd say find somebody you trust. Try to work l…

Any thoughts on the path you might take to approach that? As a solo dev building this as a side project currently, I don't exactly have a huge existing network of connections in the advisory space.