
Show HN: Moneyed – be your own financial adviser – built with Quart and React - pgjones
https://moneyed.co.uk/app/
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pgjones
Hi Hacker News,

I’ve reached an age now where I need to start thinking about my retirement, in
addition to buying a house, saving for a wedding, starting a family, affording
to pay for childcare, amongst other things. Frustratingly, it is really hard
to know if I’m saving enough, or even how much I should be aiming to save. The
best tools to solve my problem model cash flows and are only available through
expensive financial advisors. I’ve built Moneyed to solve my own, and many
other people’s, problem.

Moneyed, at the core, takes into account personalised financial goals and
models cash flows i.e. the growth of assets, savings rates, and spending.
Difficulties arise in the details, especially taking into account tax rules,
and building a plan that is fully optimised (i.e. one where you minimise the
amount you save whilst still being tax efficient and meeting your goals).

Moneyed also utilises Open Banking to give a full financial overview (UK
current accounts, credit cards, savings, investments, pensions), to understand
current spending, and to make it easy to know if you’re on track.

The backend of the app is built in Quart, an async version of Flask (Python),
and utilises React for the frontend. The site also uses Quart for the backend
but uses Svelte for the frontend. I’m the author of Quart, so it is an obvious
choice for me. As for the frontend, React works really well for the app given
the complexity, but I find it too heavy for the site. Fortunately Svelte
exists, which I think is perfect for the site.

To build an optimised financial plan, we’re implementing SciPy’s minimize
function as it enables us to model both linear and non-linear constraints and
is relatively quick to solve (provided the initial first guess is good). We’re
planning on leveraging more data science techniques: building a recommender
engine to help people decide where to save/invest and cohort analysis to give
for social validation and insights.

As for our go-to-market, we’re targeting young professionals working in tech
as part of their employer’s benefits and wellbeing strategy as this enables us
to create a “trigger” to get people thinking about their financial future.

