Love the idea, enjoyed the interface, but I feel my time was wasted when I only found out the US focus several clicks into the flow. Speaking as someone not from the US, I do wish more websites didn't just assume that all their traffic was coming from the US. You could alleviate this by having a flag on the home page saying "This is really more for Americans only".
Thanks for the feedback. I would love to add better generalization for international use; so far it's just been out of scope for a solo dev to account for all the intricate tax rules that differ from country to country. If you have further suggestions though on additional features that might help to start bridging that gap, feel free to shoot an email to projectifi.io@gmail.com!
I'm not even asking for generalisation, I appreciate you're a solo dev. Just be kinder to non US users by warning them before they are several clicks into your flow!
You can also just check browser locale, show a warning if != US as early setup step. Offer to take their email and tell them when more countries are added (and capture all the traffic to reactivate later).
Maybe I am mistaken about this, but I think the "browser locale" shows the preferred languages, not where the user lives. As such it would be the wrong information to use for this. For example, I am German and live in Germany, but my browser locale is en-US.
And on the other side, one could live in the US but have a different locale configured.
The locale can be used to have a quick guess, but it absolutely must not block using the product.
As a former American expat, I felt this deeply. A lot of the online financial analysis tools, like Mint, looked cool. But since they had a US focus and I was not in the US I couldn't take advantage of any of them. And once GDPR came into effect I was effectively locked out of any of them.
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.
Great point! Currency selector coming soon. Would you recommend demoting the theme selection to like a last step in the onboarding process? Or not showing it at all during onboarding and leaving it for users to find on their own?
Introduce features to users as they continue to use the tool. They don't need to know everything as soon as they start using it, and you want to have the ability to introduce new features later on anyways!
Tough crowd. I think this looks great. I've been managing these sorts of calculations manually, and I think there's definitely a market for better tools in the financial planning space. (I agree with removing the theme selector though.)
I had trouble finding a good FI planning and simulation tool that could model things in enough detail to finally ditch my spreadsheets... so I built one.
Would love it if any of you want to try it out. It does not involve linking any accounts and almost all the functionality is free. And if anyone wants to become a beta tester for the few premium features, you can use coupon code BETA-6001 for 60% off :)
Having "choose your theme" as almost the first question felt very out of place. Like, someone is really proud of those themes, more than any other part of the site :) I'd just leave that out completely, the default theme is fine and you can change it from the menu anyway. Everything else was really slick, but I didn't understand any of the goals (not in the US).
I had the same experience and even tinkered around with building this myself!
IMO the biggest problem with existing calculators, and yours, is that you have to make some pretty strong assumptions about the future. How will rental & housing prices grow? What returns will I get on my investments? Depending on the numbers you put in you will get very different results, and most people are not good at predicting these!
I think the real value here will be to find a way to reduce the number of knobs that users have to specify in some way, with either expert estimates for these variables, or joint distributions of these variables so that users can explore scenarios like "stock market crash" without having to figure out how that could impact every variable.
You're right about those user estimates and various knobs having a potentially huge effect on results. When I introduce a Monte Carlo simulation mode, I hope to be able to offer better insights into how distributions around some of these variables will impact likelihood of success. I'll also continue to look for opportunities to create smart defaults and/or links to resources that can be used to help calibrate estimates based on historical data, locality, etc. Thanks for the comment!
I've always wanted to build a tool like this, but never went around to it. I am a FIRE nerd, and have used and tried many FI tools. I am an active YNABer and I was looking for a tool for longterm planning. This looked interesting enough that I actually went ahead and got the premium plan for a year. Thanks for the coupon code. It came out at roughly $12/year, which I think is a great value to the kind of insights you can get. To create something like this on my own would take months, if not years. I also like the fact that I am not linking this to any of my real accounts.
I love the website, (it actually helps a lot). I think there should be some way to print out the plans, to be used in real-life planning. Also, it would be nice if there was some sort of disclaimer on how the financial data we input is used, because that stuff can be sensitive, and could peer people off.
I think you should make it a little more obvious that you start off without creating an account, because I was a little off put at first that it looks like Personal Capital, Mint, etc where you have to provide a bunch of personal info before even seeing anything.
Anyways very interesting graphs and stuff, I'd be interested if once you have the monte carlo simulations up if there was like a demo mode to just show what it did for a test person to show the value of what it could do for me.
Any thoughts on the best way to make this more obvious to new users? Just some copy on the front page saying you can test without an account? Or perhaps focus on the fact that there will be a "sandbox" where you can test everything right away with canned data(?)
For me personally it's fine as it is - I was simply positively surprised to see that I got to play around with it without creating an account first.
I suppose you could get more users that have a lower interest in the product to try it by adding either one or your solutions. Those that have a higher interest off the bat will click "Getting started" anyways (and expect to get an "Open account" dialogue).
Thanks! Do you mean like a feature tour video on the home page, or something more like quick "templates" you could choose from that would pre-populate everything with sample data?
I personally would like the second (like the data doesn't need to be realistic or anything but I would want to see what the scenarios are like that are being run), but a walk thru would work too.
The good: the interface is very slick, nice work, you obviously put a lot of work into this tool.
The bad: I was immediately turned off that I was presented with an up-sell to premium on the very first on-boarding step and it was for a color theme... Not only that, but I couldn't find any information on what the pricing was until significantly further into using the tool, another major turn off.
The ugly: Not being transparent about premium up front feels deceptive and makes me very weary of giving you any of my data.
Good points. A lot of people have been really tearing into the color theme selector on here, so it looks like that will be getting demoted out of the onboarding experience haha. As for premium, I'll make the feature breakdown of Free vs Premium available from the home page so that communication is clearer from the start. Thanks for your thoughts!
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 it, that's the industry model now and it's how you can get comped for your time investment, gain passive income, control IP, etc.
Unfortunately, those cost models will get no comp from me in any way. Having more data rights and ownership for a week or so free trial version where you can later shift to a pay model in which your data is still owned entirely by you during the entire course of the application usage would make more sense for people like me who still want privacy. I'm probably not the target market for something like this though and the number of people like me seem to be on the decline, so there's that.
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 ownage is dubious). Yes, uFincs is a web app, but we take the extra step to do client-side encryption so that the only financial data being stored in our database is a jumble of base64; I don't want to touch your actual financial data with a 10-foot pole.
Of course, like some other people in this thread have mentioned, having a completely client-side app is also pretty important. Well, we have exactly that: https://ufincs.com/noaccount. You can use uFincs right away, without any account, and the app works completely client-side, completely offline. You can even export your data and then re-import it later if you so prefer!
Of course, the tech that enables this 'no account' option is also what makes the logged-in app work offline-first, so I think it's pretty cool :)
And if anyone asks "Well, why a web app at all then?", it's because I wanted a web app. Yes, I do enjoy accessing my finances on all my devices, thank you very much. But we do have plans to build out standalone desktop/mobile apps in the future.
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?
Yep, I agree, it's a pretty big upcharge. That's precisely why our 'free tier' is the 'no account' option (https://ufincs.com/noaccount). I'm not kidding when I say it's the full version of uFincs; the only (real) difference is that you don't have an account to sync to. And if you make sure to never log out (or take the time to export/import your data every time), then you can basically simulate having an account. It's just a free tier of 'inconvenience' rather than 'features' or some such.
But yeah, there's definitely some pricing psychology at play there. Thanks for taking the time to leave some feedback!
I wonder if the "most private" way to do this would be to distribute as a jupyter notebook or some sort of local bundle/distro to run as a local webapp?
Well, uFincs is a PWA, so you could 'install' it that way. We send a little in-app notification whenever a new update is pushed, so you could theoretically just ignore those and never update to keep using that one version of uFincs forever (assuming your browser never decides to update it otherwise).
But yeah, in terms of more standalone distribution and sandboxing, that's where the future desktop/mobile apps would be more appropriate. Of course, they'd be Electron-esque, but that would at least fulfill my end-goals of being privacy-first, offline-first, and providing 'long-term' software.
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 in our database, it gets encrypted using the user's key.
Finally, if you only ever use the 'no account' option (https://ufincs.com/noaccount), then all your data is only ever stored in-browser; it never gets saved to our database because you don't even have an account to save it to! Feel free to monitor the network requests to prove it for yourself (or even turn off your network connection).
Hmm, that's a good question to add to the Security doc!
Not quite. See, we make use of a scheme called envelope encryption. That means we have two separate keys: one to encrypt your data (the 'data encryption key' or DEK) and one to encrypt the DEK (the 'key encryption key' or KEK). We use the KEK to encrypt your DEK to get something called the 'EDEK' (or 'encrypted data encryption key'). The EDEK is what we store in our database.
Something that never changes after you sign up is your DEK. This is completely random and not dependent on your password.
What is dependent on your password is your KEK. So when you change your password, all that actually changes is your KEK. With your new KEK, we just re-encrypt your DEK to get a new EDEK, and we store that new EDEK in our database. Again, the Security doc (https://ufincs.com/policies/security) outlines the basic process.
So no, all your data isn't passed back to the browser to be decrypted and re-encrypted when you change your password, but thanks for the question!
⇒ when users change their password, you have access to the DEK (you decrypt it and then encrypt it with the new KEK)
“one to encrypt your data (the 'data encryption key' or DEK)”
⇒ when users change their password, you could decrypt their data.
I think this boils down to “you don’t store user passwords, but when users change their password, they must trust you to not look at your data or store the KEK”.
The 'error', as you put it, is that the password change process (i.e. the changing of the KEK and the re-encryption of the DEK into the EDEK) all happens client-side (except for the part where we verify your old password against the hashed version in the database, for obvious reasons).
'We' have 'access' to your DEK at all times — if you define 'we' as the 'client-facing portion of the app'. All of the encryption/decryption, key management, etc happens on the client-side (i.e. in-browser). Remember, as part of signing in to the app, the EDEK is transmitted from our servers and decrypted client-side so that the client can then use that DEK to decrypt your data.
If we instead redefine 'we' to be the backend servers, database, or even myself personally, then 'we' never have access to your keys nor data.
The fact is, there's nothing special about the password change process itself. It's essentially the same as the sign-up process. Nothing is especially exposed during the password change process that isn't exposed during the sign-up process (again, the DEK is present on the client-side the moment you sign up or sign in, although the KEK is slightly more ephemeral than that).
However, I do understand the implication you're making here, and here's the darker side of it: 'we' (uFincs) could change the client-facing portion of the app to steal your DEK (or your password, or even your data) and send it off elsewhere. This is... just true of any piece of software. It just so happens that, since web apps can be arbitrarily updated, it's a lot easier for us to act maliciously if we so chose (although, at least with web apps, inspecting network requests is quite easy).
So indeed, there is an element of trust here. You trust that I (or the entity known as 'uFincs') won't change the code in such a way that the security of the app is compromised. You also have to trust that we have such security measures in place that make it harder for some third-party malicious actor to forcefully change the operation of the app.
uFincs is not a trust-less system. Unfortunately, due to the nature of web apps (or even most apps for that matter), it simply cannot be. Anytime the code can be updated (and can't be audited), there is effectively zero security (for those who are particularly security-conscious). So if your (the general 'your') financial data is so sensitive that any chance of a leak would be utterly catastrophic, then don't even think of using uFincs.
But I like to think that putting these measures in place (particularly, using client-side encryption, not connecting to banks, not using any in-app analytics beyond our own, etc) is at least a step better — in terms of security and privacy — than what most other services do. And I like to think that, even if it's not perfect, it was still worth doing. Otherwise, I wouldn't have 'wasted' 2+ years of my life building uFincs :)
Thanks. I never would have thought “we encrypt” to mean “your browser encrypts”.
I think a few pictures showing how passwords and data flow between the user’s browser and the backend when you do various things would make your technical description easier to understand.
Lacking that, using phrases such as “our code, running in your browser” rather than that ambiguous “we”, would have made things clearer for me, too.
This looks like exactly something i've been after! I used to use an iOS app but really missed becuase able to access it on windows....but the pricing just seems way too high. Its more expensive than a photoshop sub...
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.
ufincs looks very cool! During my December holiday, I was thinking of making a web-based platform that had a more modern UI than GNUcash, and it looks like you built it already!
Just curious, what's your tech stack, how long have you been working on it, and how many users do you have?
That's exactly what uFincs is, a modern version of GnuCash! I had the exact same thoughts as you did :)
The simple tech stack breakdown is that the client-side is React + Redux + TypeScript + Sass. Of note, I use redux-saga, which has been an absolute boon for some of the more complex flows.
Design system is completely custom.
Backend API is Node + Feathers. Database is Postgres.
Marketing site is served separately from the app and is React + NextJS + Tailwind CSS.
I intend to write up a more complete breakdown of the tech stack sometime in the future.
In terms of how long it's taken to get this far, longer than I'd like to admit... there was a version '0.1' that was built as a capstone project over the course of 2019, then the redesigned version (uFincs as it exists now) that's been ongoing since the start of 2020.
And the user situation can look... misleading. I only 'officially' launched last week, so for the longest time the only user has been le-moi (and some friends that did testing), but I actually did just acquire my first paying customer yesterday!
It definitely isn't. At least, not yet. I've been thinking through different ways we could handle that aspect, but I don't have any concrete plans to open-source uFincs at the moment.
Assuming you had a perfect plug-in/extension system where I could write some JavaScript to create my own behaviors, that might do 80% of what people are looking for in the open source question.
Very few people I know understand and appreciate double entry bookkeeping for finances. I learned about it recently from beancount [1] and it was a revelation. I don't go overboard with detailed transactions and keep it high level with around 5 accounts salary/mortgage/cc/investments etc.
I now personally keep my raw data (monthly income/expense/balances) in a spreadsheet. I have 1 html file with js embedded that does my homegrown calculations (works great on a phone). Spreadsheet is updated monthly. I add data from my monthly bank statements (same day I pay my credit card bills so I don't forget). Run the calculations whenever I need to (so far has been very rare).
My takeaway: discipline around personal finances is more important than what tool, services or process I use.
Looking at my income/expense/balances and mapping to what happened last month, looking at trends is valuable. For me that comes from piggybacking on the critical routine/ritual of paying my bills.
The importance of this cannot be overstated. I used to use Mint when I was in college, but got sick of them pushing credit cards on me, and the uncomfortable feeling of giving a service full access to my bank account. I tried tracking all my expenses in a spreadsheet for a year, which worked fine, but wasn't the most flexible system (or rather, it very quickly became a UX monstrosity).
Now I use hledger, which has been fantastic. I back up the file to a shared drive that's sync'ed to my phone, so every time I get a message from the bank or pay with cash, I can immediately note it down (this would have been much less workable before I found the "cone" app) and track my spending across dozens of accounts.
There are some improvements that could be made as to the visualization of data, which I might write a quick webapp for, but in terms of simplicity, robustness, and ease of use, plaintext is definitely the way to go.
Thanks for the feedback! I've thought about maybe creating a version which is wrapped up as an Electron app and runs natively and with no google analytics, etc. Does it sound like that might alleviate some of your concerns?
I guess I should also add that with the current web version, you can opt out of sending telemetry data via cookie preferences, and with the Premium version you choose whether or not you want your data persisted or not. (there is also a button to remove all your data at a later date if desired). Perhaps something else that might be helpful to add is an import/export button so you can save and load data locally(?)
> I guess I should also add that with the current web version, you can opt out of sending telemetry data via cookie preferences, and with the Premium version you choose whether or not you want your data persisted or not.
Rather than ameliorate concerns about privacy, this intensifies them. This is the approach I would expect from a megacorporation hellbent on mining my private data to death while pointing to the by-sheer-coincidence-hidden option to opt out of telemetry. And the choice to pay for the ability to not be data-mined to death.
These are the design choices I expect from a product team that regards privacy as something to be defeated and evaded. It's the sort of thing I would expect from Facebook.
Perhaps a privacy-centered approach might be worth considering? What might the user experience look like if behavior was not tracked until the user explicitly consented to just specifically that? What if the ability to upload your data was a premium option, with the local-only privacy-preserving experience the default? What data do you need to let people do incredibly personal calculations, as opposed to what data do you want?
Oops, it seems my attempt to add clarity on the current implementation only added more confusion. Sorry about that. Let me try to break down the status quo in more detail.
1. User arrives on the site, no google analytics activated unless user accepts cookie settings (which includes option to accept some types and not others).
2. User onboards and creates a plan for free, experiments with app -- no plan data or results are transmitted. Everything done client-side in JavaScript and goes away on page refresh.
3. User decides to upgrade to premium. If they do, the app asks if they would like to enable persistent data. If they enable this feature, only then is plan data saved.
I think part of the disconnect is communicating what the app actually does vs. what the terms permit it to do in the future.
It sounds like you've put genuine thought into this, and your privacy policy is very readable, but it suffers from the generic "WTFPL" clauses.
For example, you clearly specify who the third-parties are and what data is shared, which again is commendable. But it's combined with "we may use your data for [any] other purposes", "we may sell and may have sold [extremely personal PII]", and so on.
Are you doing this? Doesn't seem like it. Could you? Apparently, and that's part of the concern.
Currently just google analytics dashboards showing things like navigation within the app and where users are dropping off during the onboarding process.
I would really be interested in that approach as well. I don't necessarily need my data synced to the cloud. A way to import and export data for backups would be nice.
I just created an account but did not feel comfortable uploading data, having already associated my account with my identity via Gmail. Would love to run something locally.
You should be able to use the app without making an account. And plan data is not synced to the cloud unless you upgrade to premium and also explicitly enable that feature.
Do you pay for desktop software though? Such tools could be built for desktops-first with no data ever leaving the machine, but people will scoff at paying for them...
You might want to reconsider the name -- it looks way too similar to Google's Project Fi. Or at least the logo, which looks like cell phone reception bars, which even further reminds me of Project Fi.
No. After long years of trying to fix my financial life, I am sure of one thing that apps do not help. Simplifying it with a simple excel sheet is way more efficient because it is much more simple, realistic and more flexible too. Simple math, you make X, spend Y. If there is a new expense, add a new line in excel and finished. I tried many of these apps in the past. Excel wins every time. (For me.)
How is data hoarding evil? Data lets us improve things, know what services need to be made, connect everything better. There's potential for abuse as in anything but we don't call cough syrup evil.
People thought that data is the new oil, but it turns out it's not. Data is the new uranium. Powerful, yet toxic and irradiates everything in proximity. You most emphatically do not keep large piles of it if you can help it, and if you do, you silo and audit the sh*t out of that to control access and prevent theft because the potential for abuse is very high.
I love the oil vs. uranium analogy. Uranium can be powerful and useful, but risky to hold, difficult to protect, and probably more of a liability than an asset.
This is exactly why I like to use this analogy as well. Being all naïve and starry-eyed about the potential of data without considering the fallout from its use belongs to the pre-GDPR stone age of technology.
Hoarding of any type is a disorder, just like how addiction used to (still is) be considered a moral defect.
Cough syrup not being evil -used as intended to alleviate symptoms but not cure OR chugged like a panacea ambrosia delivered by the gods- is such a weird analogy to write as the burden of use falls on the individual rather than the collector.
How dare people prescribed highly addictive advertised as nonaddictive cocaine start taking it spoonful up the butthole~
Kicking the tires, here's a quick piece of product feedback:
It seems like the "Stacked Financial Breakdown" chart actually _adds_ your level of debt on as just another stacked layer, as if it were an asset.
I don't think that makes much sense - with this representation, if next year I take on $1M of debt to buy $1M in assets, then my financial breakdown curve jumps by $2M.
Ideally you'd subtract off debt so that you could easily read off net worth from the chart, but that's not easily compatible with a stacked-chart representation (I don't know how you'd visually represent "negative stacks").
I'd suggest instead you just take debt off that chart, which would make you at least able to read off "total assets under management" from it.
That's a good point. My initial thought process with it was to stack the datasets so that everything underneath debt contributes to your net worth, with debt at the top "weighing it down" so to speak. You can also click the debt checkbox in the legend to hide that dataset from the plot. Still, your point stands that the stacked chart doesn't quite visualize the negative effect that debt has on net worth. Do you prefer the "Net Worth Over Time" plot?
I think that approach of having debt on top would only work if you made the "sum of all assets" line somehow highlighted; thicker, bolder, etc. But I think that approach is still going to result in an unintuitive chart. (And I think that's fairly important, since this chart is the biggest part of the default view in your app.)
My main product design point here is that in a stacked chart like this, you want the summed line to have _some_ meaning - since the summed level is the most prominent feature of this type of graphic.
Here, as you're summing assets together with debt, it makes the sum meaningless - which is a flag that this visualisation isn't suited to the data you're putting into it. I think the simplest fix to this (without coming up with some new more complex visualisation) is just to lop off the debt. In your current product model, that might mean just making it unticked by default.
Assuming you were evolving this product longer term, I'd reckon it'll be important at some stage to visualise both positive and negative quantities. Maybe something like a two-side stacked chart? https://www.anychart.com/products/anychart/gallery/Column_Ch...
Thanks for the suggestion! I could certainly show debt as negative, similar to that stacked column chart. Do you think that would be more intuitive? Or would people get confused and think they have "negative debt" or something?
This is really well done. First, I've been using the same Excel spreadsheet since 1992 to create a one-panel view of financial modeling and you've captured everything I've put into it over the years. Second, there is a lot of state information in this website, I'm impressed: its nontrivial to get right. That said, I didn't fuzz it, but I'm sure you've got it down.
Lastly I like how it eases the user in: it asks basics, then funnels to specifics. That makes it less intimidating.
Sorry to be "that guy" but I've been using my Excel for ~30 years and it has been solid so I doubt I would use this, but I think it might be a great starting point for youngin's who haven't thought about this yet.
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.
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.
The comment that was being replied to didn't say that he'd posted more than once. The one to which OP was replying said that the article had been posted earlier, but not by whom.
Have you any proof? By the same justification, I could claim that you're a competitor, and trying to make things difficult for OP. Say you're not? Well, you are.
The explanation [0] they gave makes it a non-issue for me, but it’s very relevant mentioning in general, even more so for an app that asks for your financial data.
Thank you for digging into this! Private finance data like this, submitted to a server, makes me uneasy. This isn't some calendar app or a game. The reputation of the site should be beyond reproach.
My suggestion: have the users start with the big hitters (house, income, savings) and then add more and more. Users could see the model change as they go and the onboarding process itself would become informative as they see the effect of their various assets, 401Ks, asset sales plans, etc.
You also really need monte carlo simulation to elevate this far above 'pretty version of my excel spreadsheet' into 'powerful financial planning tool' category.
Lastly, there is one always overlooked part of retirement planning which is that spending plans should not be set-in-stone. For example, if you plug "spend X per year" into a monte-cargo retirement calculator to get a 95% chance of not running out of money you will need to have a lot. But, if you are willing to adopt a spending policy of 'spend X per year unless there is a stock market crash, in which case spend .75X for three years' you will need a lot less. If you are willing to modulate your spending in response to events you can be comfortable with a lot less.
These are excellent suggestions, thanks for the thoughtful feedback. For onboarding, I initially tried a version of what you suggested, but in usability tests many felt there was too much on the screen. Perhaps now it is too minimal though -- I'll think about how to find a better middle ground.
You're spot-on about the need for Monte Carlo simulations. A robust Monte Carlo mode with a variety of variables you can control is the next development priority.
And great point on flexible expense plans. I'll consider how to build some (hopefully) intuitive UI widgets to allow for that in the Monte Carlo mode.
I really like tool, but dislike a lot of the dark patterns. I love how fast and intuitive it is. I also like having all the info on one page to look at. The dashboard is great. I like most of it, so I won't speak for the good and will focus on the constructive criticism part.
* Not being able to save progress after you enter all of it is devious, but really turned me off. I don't just dislike it. It might be the one thing to permanently turn me off from the tool. I just spent 20 minutes adding all my info, and now you want to hold me hostage, unless I get a subscription? How dare you. (hyperbole, but I'm feeling sassy)
* Why should I care about the theme so soon ?
* No, I am not paying for a financial management tool until I have at least tried it out for 3 months.
* If everything else is absolutes, I would keep 401k as absolute too. (Also just call it 401k)
* On the same note, is my employer matching 50% of my contributions or 50% of my income ?
* It makes no sense to make the landing page the 'what is projectfi' blog page instead of the 'Official plan' page
* It makes no sense to open 'where you are today' instead of 'official plan' when I click on my account
* I won't pay $30/year even if I liked it. The tool is a one-and-done sort of thing, and I would be more down for an upfront price. I might pay $30 to buy it up front if I get to use it 1 year for free and see if I like it. I would accept a shorter timeline for other apps, but sadly my financial information just doesn't change fast enough and I would need 1 year before I recognize if I find it useful enough.
* If I am using it long term, I don't want to rely on someone's server staying up. Can you offer this as a client-side app ?
* Feature request - Export to Excel
________
OP, I hope you don't take this harshly.
I genuinely like the tool ,and the only reason I agreed to write such a huge review of it is because I'd like to see it get good. Best of luck, you might just get me as a customer if it was a purely offline app with excel exports with a one-time fee.
I felt foolish after filling out a bunch of data only to not be able to save it. I'm active in the FIRE community and I really, really enjoyed the app, but it left a very bad taste in my mouth.
Yea I almost spent a bunch of time but after a few screens I thought about saving. I noticed “unsaved” and clicked in. Alas, a premium feature! Felt sad there’s not at least a freemium version you can save, and clicked out.
What’s the point of a “free” financial planning tool that needs 20 min of input that you can’t save? Too much friction! At least give me a fully featured trial, or can track 1 goal, etc
Gave it a quick spin, it looks potentially useful. The mortgage calculator seems way off though; I put in some toy numbers ($1m 30yr fixed mortgage @ 3%, copying in values from the external calculator that's linked) and it's computing the payoff in about 5-6 years instead of 30. Ideally you could enter the mortgage terms like period, APR, and have the calculator back in to the mortgage payment, since the monthly payment is more of an output rather than an input in mortgage planning calculations.
Mortgage details are likely to be the dominant term for homeowners, so seems like this one would be important to fix. Plus mortgage interest compounding calculations are pretty opaque to most people, so it would help with explaining different structures (e.g. ARM vs. fixed vs interest-only, what portion of your payment is going to principal vs. interest over time, etc.).
It seems to automatically select "pay off ASAP" (probably a bug). You can turn this off by resetting the monthly payment and then it seems to work as expected.
I had wealth management review recently and they used a 3rd party piece of software that was doing something similar, their entire pitch revolved around this app.
What you really need to have is a demo setup so I can just play with the output without having to input any data.
Also concerned about sharing this much personal detail with a start-up so I would not use it unfortunately as it is (at least with real data)
Thanks for the feedback! In the near future I'm hoping to add templates you can choose from to optionally skip the onboarding process and play with an example simulation pre-populated with some interesting data. Based on this and some other commentary on here, I'll boost the priority of that feature.
Maybe I missed it in the text/instructions, as I was going pretty fast just trying to "see what it is" and typing a bunch of things in, but it asked me about Debt, so I put in a mortgage. Then it asked me about a house, and when I said it wasn't paid off, it wanted mortgage details. I already added that under debt.
(Also Delete is disabled on that debt, so I cannot go back and change that.)
EDIT: OK I started over and see that it specifies that Debt is "not associated with a specific asset."
Later Debt seems to become "Expenses" which is a little confusing. Not big complaints, just trying to make sense of it.
Similar confusion with the plan, where it asked for a payment amount for the mortgage, but then wanted it again as a payoff plan? This was even though I unchecked Pay Off As Soon As Possible? What's going on here? It's confusing.
Also it seems like excess salary is going into cash savings, not taxable investments OR tax-advantages accounts. That is severely limiting growth in the projections. <-- No I was partially wrong, it's just that it has my mortgage payment in twice as I mentioned previously due to the confusing wizard. So my expenses were way higher and the investment amount was reduced. But even removing that my "Cash" at the end of the period of income is massive; it should be putting "cash" into investments.
This app wants you to sign in and change the color scheme before using. This is not good UX, it should be more like https://www.firecalc.com/ where you just type some numbers and hit "go". Not everything needs a google/fb/clever login.
There is no reason at all for this to be server-hosted. I have of course done this for myself a very long time ago creating an effectively identical feature set using spreadsheets and even put them onto Microsoft's sharing pages (no idea what happened to them, it was such a long time ago).
I'm not saying this isn't a better solution than Excel. You work with what's available at the time. But there is nothing at all about the size of the data or complexity of the calculations that requires it to be centrally hosted. This is financial data and you're not a bank with reporting and privacy requirements being audited by state charter associations and federal law enforcement. No reason for people to trust you with this data. Make this an executable someone can put on their own machine. Don't require a network connection. Don't send telemetry.
Like Frost1x, though, maybe I'm just a minority and you don't need my business. Ultimately, do what the market will tolerate, I guess.
Let me just say that I'm glad people like you and Frost1x are here, fighting the good fight. Ten years ago, I still though the "make an app on the web" thing was a fad that would go away soon, and the pendulum would swing back to native apps. That hasn't happened, and if anything, the practice of just putting it on the web has become the default, which is a little scary.
The web site looks great, and I sincerely appreciate the courage and vulnerability it takes to throw one's project to the "Show HN wolves," but I have to agree that this needs to be a native application (that I can demonstrably run with the network plug disconnected) for me to touch it with real financial information. It also needs to be "better than old-school desktop Quicken" for its use case, in order to un-sticky me from that application and migrate my 20+ years of data from it.
> That hasn't happened, and if anything, the practice of just putting it on the web has become the default, which is a little scary.
The problem is that everyone making something like this wants to have at least seven zeros in their bank account when they cash out after 5-10 years - selling licenses to a desktop app doesn't get you that.
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 often found on HN is clearly not the opinion of the majority of internet users.
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?
Again, unless you provide some _other_ piece of data (full real name, email, etc) connecting that data back to you, I fail to see the harm. Regardless, no one is forcing you to use the site, or even provide real numbers. If anonymously providing your salary and savings data worries you then don't use it.
How is installing an executable on my machine and then entering my financial info any less sketchy than entering my data into a website? The average user would still have to take it on faith that the data isn't going anywhere, and as an industry we have spent the last 20 years telling people not to download unknown software onto their systems. I think it would be a complete own-goal for the builder of this to switch to that model.
But the default expectations are very different. The default expectation for a web hosted application is that all your private stuff is stored in a database with dubious security, and if your data is stolen as a result the only consequences are a 'whoops, my bad' (at most!) from the company.
The big problem is: installing a dubious (not saying this is dubious, but lets say anything not from a MNC) program on your computer might lead to a hostile takeover of your computer. But a web-based solution means your data is in somebodies else hand. So one has to pick ones poison...
I’d like to see everything as a web app (a secure sandbox everyone already has installed in their computer), but running with service workers and using indexeddb for persistence. Best of both worlds: you can access everything offline, the data stays local, and the app can’t infect your computer (absent a browser exploit that’d be bad news regardless)
For me I break it down as such: If it's supposed to be "social", I'll use the web based app (ie: twitter, etc). If it is personal (ie: banking), unless it is my actual bank, I want that on my machine.
By doing all of the computation of user data clientside, and making all of the persistence in localstorage.
It’s very doable, especially with small data.
Unfortunately, you have to take projects’ words that they do this on good faith as an end user. You’d need to GET the app bundle, and then firewall the tab / disable your network interface to be certain that no data is leaking out. It’s not so easy to control this as an end user these days, and web apps can be quite sneaky.
Maybe we’ll see some innovation in this space from browsers in the future, where an app can identify itself as local only and then be sandboxed by the browser.
> Maybe we’ll see some innovation in this space from browsers in the future, where an app can identify itself as local only and then be sandboxed by the browser.
That would be a really cool 'HTML5' API — let the page do:
document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', () => {
// some bootstrap
document.goOffline();
});
Which could prompt the user — "this web page wants to disable its own internet access. Do you want to continue? (Refresh the page to reload from server)[OK/Cancel]" — and then it can do longer use the internet & has its own storage which gets wiped before it's allowed back online.
Would allow all the benefits to devs of doing things in the browser (if that's their choice), & end-users could trust that it was truly offline.
I Agree very much with the general idea. One addition, though:
> Unfortunately, you have to take projects’ words that they do this on good faith as an end user
The same is true for applications running natively. Of course, those can be firewalled from any outgoing and incoming network traffic more easily. And they don’t feel like and don’t default to using a network connection all the time. But still, they could.
It might just be easier to partner with a respected company or companies that people trust with their money/data already. The biggest one that comes to mind that also seems a bit behind on the visualizations and sleek UI that this has would be Vanguard.
Any thoughts on the comments under the Frost1x post? (e.g. Electron app version, and/or import/export or local storage options for web premium users). Certainly local storage is very doable -- I didn't anticipate how hotly requested that might be. I'll also note that all calculations are actually already client-side.
I like the impression of your tool, but I share Frost1x’s reluctance. However, I was pleasantly surprised to read this up front:
> Free planning and projection tools that will never ask to link your financial accounts
If it were followed up by convincing me that my data is stored in LocalStorage and doesn’t leave my browser, I’d be sold :). I know I’d still have to trust you that you’re actually implementing what you claim, but I think I’d be willing to. After all, the same would be true for an application running natively: those, too, can submit my data “to the internet.”
For me personally, having an Electron app would not make much of a difference. Do I run your code in my Firefox or in a separate process? I’m still running your code on my machine. Maybe browser-based even has some advantage because it is sandboxed filesystem-wise. Not sure whether this holds true for Electron.
Import/export as CSV or whatever format would also be a huge plus for me.
As a last point, I’m not sure I understand the status quo: you are saying all caluclations are done client-side – but the results are stored server-side?
Thanks! A LocalStorage only option seems very doable. With all the interest expressed here, I'll add that to the roadmap. As for the status quo, without Premium no plan data is stored server-side. With Premium, plan data is stored server-side only if the user chooses to enable that feature. Calculations/projections are always made client-side and the results are not stored server-side.
I started out using excel and quicken but at some point ended up using beancount, fava and python. There are so many variables like some investments are tax free, others are tax deferred, some are exempt from state but not federal taxes, etc. I didn't dive in too deep to the app, I agree with other comments here that it would be nice if he had some demo accounts with a few different scenarios, like single, family, different ages, incomes and investments to showcase how the modeling works.
So I have a Google Sheet that basically does this and I tested this out and got some similar numbers as my sheet, so some things seem to be working well! This is also a great UI!
I was pretty impressed with the depth of detail as well, and one thing this seems to have better tooling for than my manual sheet is for tax treatment and long term tracking there
Two bugs/issues I found:
1. I couldn't tell if inflation was applied in future years at all. Despite selecting an increase in income and inflation matched expenses, neither seemed to be reflected when I selected the future year.
2. Setting 401K by percentage caused lots of issues as it allowed me to go over the IRS limit. I just wanted to set it by amount and be done with it! Would be good to have options to allocate savings like that as well as by percentage.
Honestly, this is really intriguing for me as I've covered a lot of these cases and as a developer I've thought about the UI/UX for this but basically have always thought that the edge cases were so vast that it would be hard to get users while also making sa reasonable UX. Truly, using this changed my mind and this seems like something that could be possible. I'm not sure what your team size is and I have limited time, but I'd be interested in talking and seeing if there's any way to contribute / help here! Feel free to contact me @gmail or via my bio's website contact form if you're at all interested in that!
For #1 is it possible that you haven't yet factored in that values in the simulation are adjusted to be in today's dollars? i.e. expenses that match inflation exactly would show as the same value each year.
For #2, I'd be happy to help troubleshoot if you want to send a message to projectifi.io@gmail.com. There is existing logic that should be capping your 401k contributions at the IRS limit. But if you have a scenario where this isn't behaving correctly, I'll gladly look into it.
Thanks for the comments! And currently "team size" is one haha. At the moment I don't have plans to bring on additional staff and deal with the business complications that adds, but I really appreciate the thoughtful commentary and if you'd like to have any more discussion feel free to email any time.
Looks fantastic. I entered some close to real numbers and found the flow fairly easy. I specifically like the edge-case prompts ("you didn't enter mortgage/rent, are you sure?"). In that case I just entered an average monthly total expenses, but I like the checks. The graphs at the end are nice. Something like a toast for "congrats your goals are probably going to happen" might be good.
I'd love to see some kind of pre-populated sample account to play around in. My willingness to test out an app has an inverse relationship to the number of forms that app asks me to complete to view its functionality. In this case, i felt like there were quite a few forms that I needed to fill out to get to the charts.
Beyond that feedback, I think this looks really interesting and would love to see where it goes.
Does this model consider the disparities in costs, rates, and growth potential as dictated by race? I say this not to be divisive but because revelations about such disparities over the past few years are a real and substantial concern, such that spending, borrowing, employment, and other such decisions might be altered to account for these realities.
This is really excellent work! I love the UI and the data points feel very complete but not overly detailed (it took me only about 15 minutes to enter everything and get to the projection charts).
Contrary to many other commenters here, I don't mind that this is a hosted service. In fact, I _don't_ want to download an application for this. If users are concerned they can just use a burner email address.
Just as a heads-up, this privacy policy is not legal in the EU because it doesn't fulfill even the primary requirements (say what you process, for what purpose, stored for how long), but also this huge template (28 minutes estimated reading time) is not helpful to anyone -- it's just an enumeration of every possible method of data tracking -- so I'm not sure why you would even use this when it's not legal anyway. It's more helpful for users to just write a short, custom notice with a bit of required boilerplate at the bottom (e.g. 'you have the right to complain go your local authority' needs to be in each of them), then it's both informative and legal.
Edit: somehow ctrl+f privacy gave me 0 hits (maybe I started typing before the page loaded fully? Not sure, but I did look), just noticed when actually starting to read the comments that something similar is also the top comment, sorry for being (at least partially) redundant.
Lol, my impression is that OP did exactly that – copied a template privacy policy. They probably don't have a budget for a lawyer to write them a privacy policy, much less a EU-compliant one. If this was a big player in the space, sure, maybe they should have a better policy. But for a homegrown tool like this that's just launching? It makes sense they're using off-the-shelf stuff.
Obviously there isn't an original word in this (see the word 'template' in my comment), and indeed it makes sense to not spend a lot of time on this when you're just starting out. That's exactly why I'd recommend to just write what you actually do instead of finding huge text that isn't actually fulfilling the law. Writing up what data you process takes the time of writing a blog post where you barely have to research anything because the subject you're reporting on is yourself. Or just don't have a privacy policy (effectively the same as having one that isn't legal and doesn't say anything): saves you even more time as well as the reader.
For "Financial Goals", allow me to opt set a fixed number, not just a percentage of income (i.e, if I want to max out my 401k).
When inputting investments, instead of having a field for the sum of the different categories, have line items, so I can add my copy/paste my 401k, IRA, etc into the website without having to add them up myself.
I agree, having a general % vs absolute value switch for entry boxes would be nice. I think about my 401K contributions in terms of dollars, and this forced percentages, ostensibly because many employers work that way and there's a focus on salary. Would be nice to just plug in, "My goal is $10000 per year" or whatever the goal is.
Thanks for the input! Within financial goals, if you're looking to max out your 401k, you could always put in a high percentage and it should stop contributions within the sim if it reaches the IRS limit. But you do have a great point -- it would be more useful to have additional input options there such as fixed amounts.
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 inevitably not only tell me that I'm going to be a millionaire when I retire, but also that I'll have tons of money within just a couple years. This usually makes me reflexively dismiss their conclusions.
I realize that part of the problem is that it's hard for my brain to extrapolate a few months of observations into a decades-long trendline, but I really would love to see a product that helps my brain bridge the gap between my own perception and the big money chart.
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.
Yes. And these tools will always provide significantly inacurate forecasts, I think, because 1/ it is hard for humans to predict their spending habits, since spending often increase proportionally to income, and not just inflation. 2/ most people have a very different path ahead of them, along with so many unknowns in the equation.
That's probably why people serious about their money consult a professional, who has hopefully historical data at hand and in his head, who produces a forecast, each year, that is very tailored to the person, the person's personality, habits, job industry and many other important factors that a financial planer coded with if and else, avg and linear projection etc can't match. Maybe machine learning can get decent results of training properly on very good data sets.
And about most planners showing we will be millionaire in a few years, I'm tempted to say it's for the exact same reason demo data and screenshots for a CRM or analytics system always tend to display over optimist income/sales.
I had to create a small simulator[0] a few months ago to figure out my personal finances for my first job and to figure out how early I could move out without acquiring debt. I wanted to compare different options so I could weigh the impact of my decisions on how much money I could save.
I like the idea of plans but they feel a bit bulky to use and you can't compare them. If you could directly compare plans against each other I think I would find it more useful. Also making them faster to create could be nice. I can change all the defaults in the actual view so why force me to go through the pages?
I do like the stacked breakdown of each plan and the behind the scenes calculation of taxes, investing and inflation.
This is a fantastic tool but honestly my favorite part is that I can try what seems like most of the features without ever having to create an account and providing personally identifiable info that will inevitably lead to yet another mailing list for me to ignore. So thank you for having faith in your users!
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)
Looks nice on the surface. One request for the promo site part of things:
One thing I _always_ look for in a SAAS is a "pricing" page, because prices are all over the map on these sorts of things and I want to know if I think the price is reasonable before I jump in.
The thing I find most difficult about retirement planning is that assumptions about market returns and inflation always seems to overwhelm all other factors by a large margin. I typically assume a 4% inflation-adjusted return for planning purposes (7% average return minus 3% inflation), but half a percentage point in either direction could leave me broke shortly after retirement or wealthy beyond all need.
I guess partly this is just because I'm still 30+ years from retirement, but does anyone have any advice on how to account for the incredibly wide range of possible outcomes based entirely on factors that are impossible to accurately predict?
Erring on the side of caution and conservative estimation is usually a good thing. And within the next few weeks, I hope to be implementing a Monte Carlo simulation mode which should help to account for the fact that many of these variables really follow their own distributions. Hopefully this will help make it clearer what the chances of success are given a broader range of scenarios, events like market crashes or longer downturns, etc.
Similar situation, but the way I figure it, it's best to err somewhat on the side of caution. Aim to save more than you expect to need, so that a bad return is still enough.
The thing to remember is that if you are somehow wealthy beyond need, you can just retire. You don't have to keep working if you're financially stable earlier than expected.
I just played around with a little and I really like it! The onboarding flow and entire look and feel of the app is really smooth and modern, while also remaining simple. It makes me want to use it more! I recently signed up for a free trial of a similar online financial planning service at Charles Schwab and it was awful and clunky. Maybe you can sell this to them? ;-) I will keep using. I'm not as concerned about handing over my data since it's not linked anywhere so even if breached or sold, no one would really know that it's accurate. I guess the worst that can happen is that I will get slightly more targeted financial deals.
Thanks! And agreed on many of the big players having surprisingly clunky interfaces. As a solo developer, no clue on the viability/likelihood of partnering or selling to one of them... but who knows I guess :)
This looks interesting but I think it is still a little bespoke. A feature request would be to add an anticipated pension, since that has a major effect on how much you need to put into a retirement savings account.
Yep, I know the word, and agree it's not uncommon.
My point was that user to whom I replied seems to be using it in a generally negative way.
> looks interesting but I think it is still a little bespoke
As if "bespoke" is the opposite of "interesting" or othwerwise a counterpoint to a good review. As I understand the word "bespoke", it carries no negative nor positive charge - just means "made individually to order", which seems irrelevant to this app.
I think the parent was trying to express that the app seemed designed for a specific demographic, and didn't generalize as well as it could. (And they therefore suggested a feature that would help it function well for a broader audience.)
Great job, I wish you the best! I'm sure you'll get lots of feedback about issues and will work to fix them. But overall the polish, simplicity, power, and uniqueness are an amazing start!
1. It would be helpful to be able to visualize how property tax is effecting the reduction in other assets.
2. It would be nice to be able to use arrows to move the retirement age up and down and watch the scenario change. Currently having to click on the box, edit the age, and then click out is cumbersome.
3. It would be nice to be able to easily click on and off the income/expenses/other/goals in the bottom so that there would be a quick way to see how each of them (or combinations of them together) effects the scenario.
Thanks a bunch! Duly noted on 1 and 2. For 3, you should already be able to hover over each event icon and click it to "hide" or "show" the event; i.e. temporarily take it out of the simulation.
Just out of curiousity, Would you become really a happy person when you become so much focused on financials, investments, growth, independence etc I wonder.
I personally have a good income. But I do not invest at all. I hate it. I just spend whatever I think is possible and needed for a happy today. And so far money is something I barely have to think about. I see so much people around me busy with cryptos. Busy with stock markets. And they always talk and dream about the future. Live a life today I always tell them.
There are lots of ways to live your live, and achieve some happiness, either now, ongoing, or merely in the future.
It sounds like you found one method that creates some measure of happiness for you, right now. Will anything in your future change the variables so that you have to adapt? What will your options be then?
Now, your premise here is "so much focused" or to reword, "intently focused" on growing wealth for the purposes of financial independence. If you start with that premise, there might a a corresponding decrease or minimization of competing focuses, including "what makes you happy in the present."
If you shift the premise a bit to more of a Pareto Principle approach of "do at least the 20% you need to plan for your future, and get 80% of the benefit", you might see things a little differently. Extremes don't make for good arguments, but they can be illustrative. If you feel like you have to spend "everything" you have, and invest "nothing" then any break in your income stream will instantly crush everything that you currently use to make you happy. If, on the other hand, you find that you can be really quite happy while spending 75% and investing the other 25%, you might find that over time, you've been happy all along, and you've gained a resilience to changing life circumstances as well, and increased your options for what you are required to do, and what you can choose to do.
As for just "investing" or "not investing", the common wisdom is that simple savings will tend to lose value when adjusted for inflation. You do not need to become "busy with cryptos" to invest, though. You can simply think long-term, buy broad total market index funds, and stop thinking about those investments almost instantly. It does not take focus. You don't have to go all the way down the rabbit hole to intently focus on what you might consider absolutely optimizing your investments. It's quite unlikely to pay off, so take a simpler path.
Well that strategy works, till it doesn't. There is a difference between being rich and being wealthy, and that is sustainability of wealth. You can live your life and still contribute to long term wealth growth. What if you need to pay for some big unexpected expense, like your pet getting sick or you getting in an accident? Without proper financial backbone, even one of those type of incidents can throw you off and take you down the rabbit hole of catching up with debt.
"It's Not What You Make that Matters; It's What You Save." - Somebody
You have the right attitude. No, I don't believe anyone gets really into growing their money because they're satisfied with their life. It's a coping mechanism.
However we live in a world where you need to invest at least a little bit. If you can spend 15 minutes at the start of each new job setting up your 401k to 15-20% of your salary, in a target-date fund, you will never have to think about investing ever again.
Im less concerned about data provacy for this one for whatever reason, but im having issues with it saving really off numbers. like ive input a 400$/ month payment in and its showing in a plan as like $4800 / month and this is with nearly all the data. its got me paying out like 380,000$ this year alone...? i dont even have a fraction of that debt anywhere.... what even.... is going on here... it says im underwater by like 200k+ . my net worth is -40k for sure, but def not -200k.
I'd love to see a little more flexibility in putting some kinds of numbers in, especially as someone not great with understanding financial data. For instance, I'm currently plugging numbers in about my mortgage. I know how much I currently pay per year in homeowner's insurance, but ProjectFi is asking me for the annual rate. I divided what I'm paying per year by the current estimated market value and got 0.3%... but I'm sure that's not accurate.
I had a similar problem with the mortgage insurance. I had to bring out my calculator to calculate the % it was asking for. Who pays mortgage insurance as a percentage of their mortgage? I think this should be a dollar amount, with inflation added.
very cool app, appreciate that i could click through without making an account!
two features i'd like to see off the top of my head
* i know privacy is important for a lot of folks -- but it would be cool if graphs / plans were shareable. I'm interested what the rest of you are up to :)
* action items for how to steer your current plan to a "better" plan. The app is currently like a hand-held map that shows me the lay of the land, but I want google maps which recommends ideal routes.
I'd pay for a self-hosted version of this, although I'm in Canada and it would require a bunch of different integrations and tax calculations. I imagine there are plenty of folks like me in the states.
Heck, I'd pay for a secure little RPi in a box running this software.
I can't give my financial passwords to anyone else at all - most of my accounts specifically disclaim any responsibility for losses if I give my passwords out.
One feature request: spouses / joint incomes. Obviously my financial picture looks very different if I include my partner's income and assets than if I just include my own, but my partner is a different age than me, so if I just add it up and act like I'm one person who makes our combined household income, it's not going to be quite accurate.
Good point, and thanks for the comment! I agree having a married filing jointly mode would be helpful. If time allows, I hope to implement something for that in the near future.
Love it, subscribed with the 60% off. Fantastic & beautiful tool, can't wait to see how much it grows.
I second multiple currencies, I'm in NZ and would love the tax and stuff to work itself automatically but appreciate the enourmous overheads for doing that.
Found a bug: changing the "Maximum Value" field for a house affects all other houses.
it wasn't clear to me that 'debt' was not the same as 'mortgage'. I entered 'debt', then a couple steps later, the 'asset' of house had a 'mortage' box below. this also doesn't account for second mortgages, but you're likely aware of this.
Hmm I'll have to think about what can be done to make it more clear to users that things like mortgages are modeled as part of one "financed asset". Maybe some better cues can be added in the onboarding process..
even just something like "don't include a mortgage or vehicle payments here" on the debt screen. give more example ("cc debt, student loan, etc"). "unsecured debt" vs "secured debt", with examples, I guess??
Currently the gold standard for this kind of FI simulation is OnTrajectory. There’s a learning curve but it’s so much more comprehensive than any spreadsheet you could build. I consult it every time I make a big decision.
Get in touch with your email and I can provide a referral link.
Love the idea, I toyed with the idea of building something like this.
When talking to friends, I realised that even smart and relatively wealthy people have zero planning skills and freak out about the idea of "planning your life in the next decades".
Haha you're probably not wrong. Still, it's a tool I felt I needed for my own life planning purposes; and if others happen to enjoy it too, that's a nice bonus.
I briefly tried this out. I prefer Personal Capital because it gives you a probability of meeting a retirement goal. I can see though how this would be a little nicer to use if you don't want to link your accounts as encouraged by Personal Capital.
Pretty cool app, but how can i use this to plan my fiances better? I do not have much background in finance and there was some things i did not understand how to fill in, would it be possible to include some video tutorial on how to do a good planning?
oh! I just did the onboarding again and I just realized that the yearly maintenances were in %! I had set it to a few thousand percents thinking it was $!
That's why the value of my home was making me broke...
I think this tool needs to provide a quick way of pre-filling a reasonable set of monthly expenses. I entered some stuff quickly and the projection seems to be too good to be true, so I don't trust the data it projects.
Good point. Currently it's tailored more towards the US, but I'm hoping to find time to add features for other locations. That said, the idea of supporting every tax system out there is probably a bridge too far, but simple things like being able to switch currencies seems quite doable.
Is there a way to specify the % of income that is allocated to cash holdings vs. investments? The modeller seems to assume that I will keep all future income as cash, which seems unrealistic.
The way it currently works, the simulation uses income in a given year to cash-flow expenses for that year, and the rest is allocated according to the items you configure in the Financial Goals section. As a simple example, you could define a desired emergency fund of $20k as priority #1, then maximized taxable investments as priority #2... which would mean in any given year, money left over after expenses goes to (A) topping off the emergency fund if needed, then (B) to taxable investments. Does that help add some clarity?
Nifty calculator! I wish it was a bit easier to max out two 401ks (e.g. for a married couple). Otherwise, it's very slick and gives a similar result to my personal projections.
I wish this was offline, this stuff is a little too personal to have hooked to identifying information. This looks great for those who don't have issues with that though.
This thing appears to be broken. You just get to a certain point after entering some basic info and it just stops. There’s nothing to indicate what next steps should be.
This feels like Mint.com all over again. I do not feel comfortable sharing personal banking data with a hosted platform. We all know what happened when Mint sold out to Intuit!
Not sure about your personal experience but it was only a matter of time until I started receiving promotional offers from various credit card companies based on my spending habits via snail mail. I could directly tie them to Mint.com becuase I was shown the exact same offers on their portal. What other proof do you need?
Nothing makes me more annoyed than when simulations like this make assumptions which don't make any sense. For example.
>"Note: currently, ProjectiFi taxes inheritance as ordinary income for simplicity and to maintain a conservative estimation strategy. More nuanced options that more closely mirror current inheritance tax liability scenarios are coming soon."
This is an absolutely ridiculous assumption. Federal inheritance/estate taxes in the US don't start until $11 million. If you can't figure that out your app is not ready to publish.
