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Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance

projectifi.io

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

#191

Post by liuhenry »

fragileone wrote: post #176
cddotdotslash wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely a reason. It's a service and many people (myself included) don't want to download a desktop app to use it. He's not asking for your SSN or your address. If you want to use a burner email and a VPN or enter fake data to try it out, you can. This hardline approach of "every service should be an open source desktop app that I can run with zero telemetry from my cabin in the woods with no internet" so…

> He's not asking for your SSN or your address. They're asking for even worse - all your historical financial data. Why would you want to give some random guy on the internet that?

I'm trying to understand the concern but most of my worry around "historical financial data" would be actual transaction-level information, not rough summary figures to estimate a financial plan.

I just played around with the site myself and I didn't see anywhere that it imports data, plus the tagline on the homepage says "never ask to link your financial accounts"?

Isn't this essentially the same risk profile as like FIREcalc [1], or the NYT Rent or Buy calculator [2], or some portfolio analysis tool [3], are you saying that those shouldn't be online calculators either?

[1] https://firecalc.com

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...

[3] https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com

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

#192

Post by dang »

scubakid wrote: post #41
Semaphor wrote: post #30

This was also posted 9 days ago [0], when OP created their account, with 3 other also freshly created accounts (with no other activity on them) praising it. Make of that what you wish. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26862841

Fair point. I've been a long-time HN reader but never made an account before. After working hard building the app, I was excited to create my first post to share it, and mentioned to my friends I had posted it to HN. Evidently a few of them decided to create accounts to show support. If this was any kind of breach of HN etiquette, my sincere apologies -- that certainly was not the intent.

Both the site guidelines and the FAQ explain that this is not allowed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

The HN community considers it spamming and guards its integrity rather zealously.

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

#193

Post by sgtnoodle »

g_sch wrote: post #82

One thing I've always struggled with in these "financial planning" products is how to make the numbers make sense on a gut level. My problem is that, after doing some level of "taking charge of my finances" to make a savings/investment plan, it still feels like I'm treading water and barely making any progress toward my goals. Yet when I plug my numbers into any financial planning app (including this one), they inevi…

My entirely speculative guess is that the discrepancy is in human behavior that's not modeled. The tools assume the money is invested in a timely manner, but in reality folk procrastinate and their saving spend arbitrary months / years sitting around in low interest rate accounts.

My first 5 years of full time employment with a salary, I was making enough to live comfortably and contribute to a 401K, and finances and investing aren't inherently interesting to me, so I didn't really think too much about the money accumulating in my savings account. The money definitely lost value over those 5 years because of inflation. I finally figured out how to put money into ETFs, and 5 years later that same amount of money has at least doubled in value. A lot of that probably has to do with the economy being crazy, but I suspect I missed out on a lot of compound growth not investing those savings initially. That is to say, my savings over time didn't look like a "PERT" plot until I took concrete steps (and the associated risks) to invest in the market.

Not to say that sitting on money or being slow to invest in higher growth accounts is good or bad. There's risk and everyone has their own personal risk tolerance, and diversification is important. If all you have is $5000, dumping it all into the stock market would seem pretty risky and perhaps foolish. That $5000 sitting in a checking or savings account is losing value over time rather than growing, though.

I suppose that could be another example of it being easier to live frugally when you have money, i.e. buying a $100 pair vs. $20 pair of work boots. On the other hand, many folk with very little savings still seem to find a way to buy luxuries like iphones and vacations. In addition to luck, personal discipline and sacrifice must factor in to some degree when it comes to achieving a financial goal.

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

#194

Post by Svenstaro »

devinsit wrote: post #98
Frost1x wrote: post #9

Looks interesting, but based on the privacy policy terms of data usage, transferability, and so forth, I can't in good faith test with real financial data: https://projectifi.io/privacy-policy.html Everytime I see a tool that shouldn't need to be hosted remotely as a service and could reasonably be deployed to the client where they have more control over their data (not as a service), it's a non-starter for me. I get…

I agree. The trend of handing over all your data ( especially your financial data) to some nebulous service isn't exactly my favourite. Which is why I built https://ufincs.com , a nebulous service where you hand over all your financial data! Yes, that was a joke. In reality, uFincs is more of a stop-gap between what you seek (native app where you own the data) and what the status quo is (web-based app where your data…

That looks very cool and I like the security concept. Any chance you're going to open-source it?

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

#195

Post by ketralnis »

Just a point of feedback on the UI. When I switch between the "official" and the alternative plans, you reset all of the UI elements like which graph is active and the time period and what UI elements have been collapsed or hidden and which year's breakdown is currently visible. That makes it very difficult to quickly switch between them to visually see what the actual changes are which is the only reason I'd set up multiple plans. I'm sure you put a lot of work into the animations but those also detract from this. For the same reason I'd also like to be able to pin the left sidebar (whether collapsed or uncollapsed doesn't matter, but in any case not jumping around every time I click something)

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

#196

Post by alfonsodev »

frabjoused wrote: post #87

I would suggest the first step of onboarding should not be the selection of your theme. This is already a long onboarding process and every additional step will lose you users. When you build something you're technically proud of, it makes sense you'd like to show it off, but you have to evaluate its relative importance to your public.

I didn't mind the number of steps, at least is not asking for creating a user before trying. But I'd replace the theme selection with currency selection, much more relevant.

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

#197

Post by devinsit »

Svenstaro wrote: post #194
devinsit wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. The trend of handing over all your data ( especially your financial data) to some nebulous service isn't exactly my favourite. Which is why I built https://ufincs.com , a nebulous service where you hand over all your financial data! Yes, that was a joke. In reality, uFincs is more of a stop-gap between what you seek (native app where you own the data) and what the status quo is (web-based app where your data…

That looks very cool and I like the security concept. Any chance you're going to open-source it?

As I replied down below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26972907), I don't have any concrete plans to open-source it at the moment. However, I know this is a pretty big sticking point for some people, so I have been working through some plans on how we could do it.

In particular (but again, no promises), I want to start by open-sourcing the custom Redux middleware that we use to handle data encryption. I feel like that's one of the most important parts to open-source (ya know, since it's the foundation of uFincs' security), but it's a matter of getting everything in order.

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

#198

Post by false-mirror »

devinsit wrote: post #98
Frost1x wrote: post #9

Looks interesting, but based on the privacy policy terms of data usage, transferability, and so forth, I can't in good faith test with real financial data: https://projectifi.io/privacy-policy.html Everytime I see a tool that shouldn't need to be hosted remotely as a service and could reasonably be deployed to the client where they have more control over their data (not as a service), it's a non-starter for me. I get…

I agree. The trend of handing over all your data ( especially your financial data) to some nebulous service isn't exactly my favourite. Which is why I built https://ufincs.com , a nebulous service where you hand over all your financial data! Yes, that was a joke. In reality, uFincs is more of a stop-gap between what you seek (native app where you own the data) and what the status quo is (web-based app where your data…

That is a huge "living paycheck to paycheck" upcharge!

I get the incentive, but considering how financial planning can be most vital to folks with spotty income, I'd strongly encourage you to bring the price of the monthly plan down. Or perhaps a bare-bones "free" tier folks can use between paid months?

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

#199

Post by Someone »

devinsit wrote: post #188
gowld wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could store the data in the user's cloud (or local) storage, so you don't have a copy of the data. Having an "encrypted" copy of the data, with a key controlled by you (unless there's some browser API for encrypting using the user's key?) is a lot shorter than a "ten foot pole"

That's the thing, the key isn't controlled by me. The key is derived from your account password. If you want some more technical details, feel free to check out https://ufincs.com/policies/security . tl;dr Yes, that browser API is called WebCrypto. As for storage, all data is kept in-browser in local storage (specifically, IndexedDB), until it gets saved to our database. And before it leaves the browser to be saved i…

So, when you change your password, all data flows back to your browser to be decrypted, then gets re-encrypted, and sent back?

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

#200

Post by goatcode »

dang wrote: post #192
scubakid wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point. I've been a long-time HN reader but never made an account before. After working hard building the app, I was excited to create my first post to share it, and mentioned to my friends I had posted it to HN. Evidently a few of them decided to create accounts to show support. If this was any kind of breach of HN etiquette, my sincere apologies -- that certainly was not the intent.

Both the site guidelines and the FAQ explain that this is not allowed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html The HN community considers it spamming and guards its integrity rather zealously.

Making an account to post something and coincidentally having friends who on their own decided to make accounts to comment is against the rules?
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