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Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance

projectionlab.com

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

#211

Post by fsflyer »

scubakid wrote: post #203
themacguffinman wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure, maybe lifespan estimates based on current behavior could be handy. Eg are you a smoker? Are you regularly physically active? What's your race, occupation, etc? I think chronic conditions are also hard to plan for in your head, so some preset stats-based options for medical costs could be helpful. No one intuitively imagines it'll happen to them but something like 60% of 65yo+ adults managed 2 or more chroni…

I dread the idea of having to navigate the current US healthcare system in circumstances like that. One drawback that occurs to me about the idea of projecting lifespan/healthspan is that with the data you'd need, you get into PHI territory pretty quickly right?

What opensocialsecurity[0] does is sufficient for most folks. Mike has a choice of five different mortality tables.

[0] https://github.com/MikePiper/open-social-security/blob/maste...

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

#212

Post by scubakid »

themacguffinman wrote: post #208
scubakid wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dread the idea of having to navigate the current US healthcare system in circumstances like that. One drawback that occurs to me about the idea of projecting lifespan/healthspan is that with the data you'd need, you get into PHI territory pretty quickly right?

Yeah that's probably protected data. I'm not a lawyer but maybe it could still work if you don't store the health data and just use it to locally generate adjustments (or maybe just store the health parts in-browser but keep the generated financial adjustments in the cloud). The more accurate your projection model, the more personal data it'll have to factor in.

Anyone happen to know what the standard is for when something officially counts as data collection? i.e. do you always have to send things sever-side before it counts? With all the fuss about things like cookies, I wouldn't even be that surprised if a form input that went nowhere could somehow still get you in trouble.

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

#213

Post by scubakid »

fsflyer wrote: post #211
scubakid wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dread the idea of having to navigate the current US healthcare system in circumstances like that. One drawback that occurs to me about the idea of projecting lifespan/healthspan is that with the data you'd need, you get into PHI territory pretty quickly right?

What opensocialsecurity[0] does is sufficient for most folks. Mike has a choice of five different mortality tables. [0] https://github.com/MikePiper/open-social-security/blob/maste...

Letting the user pick from preset mortality tables seems like a pretty sensible approach to me. Thanks for the link; bookmarked!

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

#214

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

scubakid wrote: post #192
Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I missed the lifetime option, that's good! I'm not sure how I feel about the persisting being a premium feature yet, I have to play with the software a bit more. It might be that a tier in-between with just persisting would solve the problem, but it could just be that I haven't realized the software' s full potential. You get a lot of points for making it work well with the phone, I was really surprised.

That was indeed nontrivial haha. Did you try running it as a PWA? I've noticed there's a bit of weirdness in mobile browsers where content shifts/clips when you scroll sometimes; haven't dug into what's going on there yet, but that seems to go away when running as a PWA.

This is not the answer about the PWA, but WOW, thank you.

I put in some serious numbers and it looks great. Now I'm a bit concerned for the last 3 years of my life, lol

I will definitely want the "tax adjustment" feature, I'm very happy you provided the "lifetime" option.

Do you have a "plan" in case everything goes wrong and you don't have enough funds? I wouldn't want to lose all the planning. That being said, the software is incredibly good, I don't expect that to be a thing.

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

#215

Post by rezic »

scubakid wrote: post #59
neill wrote: post #54

This is great, I took some time to get a fairly in depth plan together. There are two things that stuck out: 1. You've got RSU's (at first it wasn't clear to me where this would be addressed, but I think it made sense once I came across it) but I don't see a dedicated strategy for dealing with ISO/NSO's. That'd be helpful for the tech community especially. 2. I spent the 10-15 minutes working on a plan knowing that I…

If you've still got your plan up, happy to give you an extended trial if you want! But overall I think you're right on both points. I've been wanting to add better support for modeling options for a while; for anyone who'd like to bump priority there, feel free to upvote this item in changemap: https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi/task/5735-better-... For #2, I'll do some thinking to gauge level of effort in ri…

I could see allowing only localstorage saving with no option for exporting or importing of data being limiting enough for me personally to have enough reason to upgrade to pro, maybe limit the number of plans you can have (if you haven't already, I haven't tested it) as well as the number of times you can actually save to localstorage.

I liked this enough where I made a model during my lunch break, then remade it when I got home, and then remade it a third time after I had accidentally pressed the "back" button on my mouse talking to someone on Discord, taking me back to the landing page and losing all my data.

After that last one I decided to at least get the free trial so I could save, but I had already planned pay for Premium so I wasn't too bothered.

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

#217

Post by scubakid »

rezic wrote: post #215
scubakid wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've still got your plan up, happy to give you an extended trial if you want! But overall I think you're right on both points. I've been wanting to add better support for modeling options for a while; for anyone who'd like to bump priority there, feel free to upvote this item in changemap: https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi/task/5735-better-... For #2, I'll do some thinking to gauge level of effort in ri…

I could see allowing only localstorage saving with no option for exporting or importing of data being limiting enough for me personally to have enough reason to upgrade to pro, maybe limit the number of plans you can have (if you haven't already, I haven't tested it) as well as the number of times you can actually save to localstorage. I liked this enough where I made a model during my lunch break, then remade it whe…

How would you recommend enforcing a limit on number of localStorage saves? If the number was held in localStorage as well, that's easily circumvented, and even if the save number was stored in Firebase and associated with the auth ID for the account, seems to me like people could probably just create a new account as needed and adjust the localStorage content to match, with a few lines of JS.

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

#218

Post by scubakid »

Rastonbury wrote: post #216

I saw this the last time, why did you change the name?

I did like the name ProjectiFi (when pronounced correctly), but I found it had too many readability issues. A lot of people missed the first "i" and thought it was Project Fi, and others would say "Project i-Fi", like some oddly named apple product.

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

#219

Post by scubakid »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #214
scubakid wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was indeed nontrivial haha. Did you try running it as a PWA? I've noticed there's a bit of weirdness in mobile browsers where content shifts/clips when you scroll sometimes; haven't dug into what's going on there yet, but that seems to go away when running as a PWA.

This is not the answer about the PWA, but WOW, thank you. I put in some serious numbers and it looks great. Now I'm a bit concerned for the last 3 years of my life, lol I will definitely want the "tax adjustment" feature, I'm very happy you provided the "lifetime" option. Do you have a "plan" in case everything goes wrong and you don't have enough funds? I wouldn't want to lose all the planning. That being said, the…

One of the nice things about being a solo dev building this as a side project is that I don't have investors I need to pay back, and so far operating costs are pretty minimal :)

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

#220

Post by scubakid »

0_zymandias wrote: post #209

Very impressive application, a smooth intuitive UI. The progressive disclosure style works well for inputting all the settings without getting overwhelmed. That said, my go-to for FIRE calculations/simulations is https://www.firecalc.com/index.php - and I don't see that changing anytime soon. The FIREcalc UI is very clunky compared to ProjectionLab but once you get used to it, IMO the options are a little more straig…

Thanks for sharing your perspective! It's always interesting to see among the flood of feature requests and suggestions that occasionally some people would prefer fewer features and more simplicity haha. Do you think there could be a place in ProjectionLab for a "simple" mode of some sort? With a reduced set of options and some notes on how the simpler assumptions differ from the standard mode? And if so, anything other than the tax config you'd want to see stripped out?
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