Great work! This might be unpopular among the HN crowd, but I think you can monetize this further by bundling this with an advising service.
This idea of FIRE has been spreading beyond techies/Internet nerds and into other highly paid professionals like doctors. [0]. The main difference is that non-programmer professionals generally don't get a thrill out of min/max-ing financial projections.
Such people might be willing to pay a few hundred dollars a year for someone to generate this kind of analysis with them and simply execute on it each year. Similar to how people pay for CPAs. My employer actually pays Goldman Sachs to provide a similar service for its employees (no commission, fiduciary advisors) but their tools suck compared to this.
To an extent, I was hoping to support use cases like this with the Pro version I rolled out recently. But perhaps I'm currently more out of the loop than you envision, in the sense that I'm not actively pairing people with advisors and it's just a product that advisors can use if they want. What do you imagine a more "bundled" offering might look like?
You’re not too far away. A simple next step is to directly connect me with an advisor who uses ProjectionLab. I bet financial planning is a competitive market and advisors would be willing to use your tool as a unique selling point, or even pay you for the leads you supply.
Another bundling is to help users execute on their projections, similar to how https://www.helloplaybook.com does with tax advantaged investing.
More generally, I think there is an opportunity to market the product not as a tool (“ProjectionLab builds the best financial projections”) but as a solution to a problem (“ProjectionLab lets you retire early/plan to pay down your debt/buy a house”).
I know you’re doing this as a side project and maybe what I’m suggesting is too startup-y. Best of luck either way, it’s a really great product.
To add, the non tech crowd doesn't really know or have the time to learn about investing. They just need someone to manage their finances. The advisory profession is alive mostly because of this. Instead of acting as a lead gen to advisors, perhaps you could add more value by doing some sort of filtering or match making based on user's data, totally at the discretion of the investor/user. This will be incredibly helpful. You could become some sort of a scaled arbitrage between investors and advisors - a huge gap that exists today.
Sounds like an interesting model. I wonder if it would come with any regulatory hurdles in addition to the technical work plus efforts to make inroads with enough advisors... and then I wonder if there's a way to advertise that kind of optional product offering without immediately turning off the contingent of privacy-focused DIYers that the tool currently resonates with.
If you decide to offer advisory services on your own, then yes there might be some regulatory hurdles. You are not going down that route. Match making should still be fine, am not sure.
Agreed about turning off existing users, but you can carefully orchestrate this to help users find appropriate advisors as a completely opt-in service. I think you can find a scalable monetization model in match making. Not sure what your plans are, but yeah unlikely you'll be able to pull it off in solo mode.
Thanks! I have loads of ideas for new features and things that will be fun to build; but I should probably at least take a breath sometime soon and contemplate all the possible paths. If you or others have any words of wisdom to share, I always enjoy hearing from other perspectives.
Yep highly encourage to take a breath, at some regular cadence and contemplate on all possible paths. I don't know how to be effective at this though. You need some notion of feature management to accomplish this.
I am looking to build a similar tool for engineers who are switching jobs and have multiple job offers. Essentially a financial projection of options 1, 2 and 3 taking into account inflation, location and salary growth.
Happy to brainstorm and collaborate if you are up for it.
Personal Capital actively prompt to try to set up a meeting pretty much every time you log in. They're hoping that you'll sign up for some active management stuff, or do they have a robo-investing option (I can't remember.)
At a certain net-worth, they'll start calling you on a regular basis trying to get you to do the same.
It's all pretty annoying. Perhaps do that, and after a 6 months of so of calls and prompts, then offer to stop calling / prompting for $10 a month.
> some active management stuff, or do they have a robo-investing option (I can't remember.)
IIRC it's robo-investing. I got a pitch from them, and it was mostly "high expense ratio funds are bad, we put you in low cost funds with expense ratio of < .10% to save you money".
"OK... but your expense fee is .90% of funds under management - this puts me at approximately 1%/year in fees."
"But we're actively rebalancing 2x per year and we do tax loss harvesting".
I was close to giving them a small $ to manage/test with, but backed out.
"But we're actively rebalancing 2x per year and we do tax loss harvesting".
What if all of your funds are up for the period? There is no tax loss harvesting to be done(!), but you are still paying 100bps per year. To me: "tax loss harvesting" is akin to "tax write-offs" -- see Seinfeld TV episode. The money is still spent / lost. Taxes are an after thought...
Beat them all: Put all of your money is an ETF that tracks S&P 500 index. iShares IVV and Vanguard VOO are excellent. Expenses are less than 5bps per year! After 3/5/10 years, you are nearly guaranteed (statistically) to be ahead of the investment advisor when including expenses.
I tend to agree. There's some value in having a real person to talk to, but it really depends on the person. PC people are generally just going to walking you through whatever the algorithm is implementing anyway, and... I just didn't see enough value in it. That said, I've lost plenty trying 'my own thing' on single stocks, but ... I pretty much knew it was a gamble. Majority of value is in a handful of basic ETFs and mutual funds with low expense ratios (< .10% overall, IIRC), so... there's not too much advantage in having someone else do the same thing for me (or really, for most people, imo).
You wrote: <<There's some value in having a real person to talk to, but it really depends on the person.>>
I agree 100%. I think it is a good idea to pay for at least one hour of financial advice per year. Do not buy any products recommended if they receive a direct or indirect commission. An outsider who studies the financial situation of others for a living will usually have helpful advice, even if limited to: "This is good." or "Have you considered...?"
the problem is that the type of advisors you are talking about only care about selling products and making commissions, they actually don't care about helping people make the right decisions.
the same goes for CPAs - the moment they see that your tax situation becomes too complicated or a potential liability or they can't make a good profit (read: cookie cutter tax situation which can be handled by fresh grads but can be invoiced at partner rate) they tell you to go elsewhere.
I work with a local independent advisor, and while they do make money on commissions they've never advised me to go a direction that doesn't work just to buy a product, and their advice is worth every penny in fees that I pay on the money they manage (which is not most of my retirement dollars, just a small chunk, per their advice to keep it in low-fee funds.) In general I'd say find somebody you trust. Try to work local if you can.
Anyway, my advisor works via a larger "network" company that provides their white-label tools to run monte carlo sims, etc and game out retirement. None of them are this accessible / slick. Definitely something to this.
Any thoughts on the path you might take to approach that? As a solo dev building this as a side project currently, I don't exactly have a huge existing network of connections in the advisory space.
I've heard of fee-only financial advisors. They don't make commissions or skim percentage points off your portfolio, so their incentives should be more directly aligned to yours.
Any data yet on how that model tends to play out over the long-run in the average case? Off the cuff it does sound like incentives could be better aligned though.
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'd need to upgrade to pro for every feature, but it seems like I need to upgrade to save my plan. I ended up not paying because I don't have enough time right now to fully evaluate this, but I might look back later. It would have been great if I could have entered my email and saved my plan without paying, and then had to later pay to access it. This gives you the benefit of getting my email address, and then sending me an email to access my plan so that I've got a second touchpoint to your product when I check my email in the future.
Looking forward to using this more in depth in the future!
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 rigging up a mechanic like that with the current stack. Losing data sucks, and I should take more steps to reduce the chances of that happening to anyone in the onboarding funnel.
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.
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.
Thanks a bunch! Mentioned this below, but as a YNAB user, if you find yourself looking for more options on things like cash-flow priorities, you can check out the early access version here where I just added a few for v3.0.1: https://projectifi-201a2--dev-xsmyy9im.web.app
I just put in some numbers and wow. Unless I'm missing something incredible my findings are kinda depressing.
The top 5% salary in the UK is £81,000 -> after tax is £54,817. £4568 a month. Say you spend £2k a month. That's £2568 for investments per month. Using the calc, it seems you would be able to retire at age 50.
I quickly checked the US salary percentiles and the top 5th percentile of £81,000 in the UK is equal to the top 15th in the US. Thats 3x ceiling you could climb through not to mention taxes in the US are much much better?
This is complicated. Taxes in the US are different. For example, a lot of higher earners are concentrated in California and New York, which have fairly high taxes; in New York or San Francisco a single person making $105k would take home about $75k (slightly less in SF, slightly more in NY) or about £3k more. I would suspect (but do not know) that the UK government pension and health-care is at least slightly better than the US version.
On top of that, people of a given income level spend more in the US (either because things are actually more expensive, or people in the US are more spendthrift; probably a bit of both), so if you come to spend like a typical American[1] your savings won't necessarily be higher in the US. Bay area rent, in particular is insane (rent alone would be more than the £2k a month you proposed for expenses, though $105k/year in the bay area would be a very low salary for a bay-area tech worker).
Now, you can do better. I have a friend who works as a DBA in a very inexpensive part of the country; he makes more than the $105k per year. In fact his yearly salary is higher than what he paid for his house. When remote became normal during COVID a lot of people moved to cheaper parts of the country while keeping their high salaries. Also, everything else being equal, a higher top-line will always provide more opportunities for savings
1: Before you dismiss this completely, there are real social costs to spending less than your peer group. IMO they are worth it, but they should be factored into any planning you do.
> For example, a lot of higher earners are concentrated in California and New York, which have fairly high taxes; in New York or San Francisco a single person making $105k would take home about $75k (slightly less in SF, slightly more in NY) or about £3k more.
That's income taxes; states aren't that different when you actually count "taxes" ie property, sales, income, and whatever else is left over.
Texas is theoretically a little worse for the middle class because property taxes are much higher. It's better if you're rich though.
> Texas is theoretically a little worse for the middle class because property taxes are much higher. It's better if you're rich though.
I know they are higher in relative terms, but are they higher in absolute terms? I live in a single-family house in SoCal and pay over $12k/year in property taxes.
Average property tax rate for the Houston area is 2.31%. There's lots of things that come into the equation (homestead caps, exemptions, etc.), but for an average priced home of, say $350,000 you'll be owing ~$8,000 in property taxes.
The trickiest part is that your property values are reassessed every year, so for a long time our tax bill has just gone up, whether your income has or not.
I'll still take Texas economics over California economics, but everywhere has its tax pros and cons.
> The trickiest part is that your property values are reassessed every year, so for a long time our tax bill has just gone up, whether your income has or not.
I kind of wish it was that way here; the previous owner of the house I am in was paying $1400 per year in taxes, after purchasing it (pre-covid price boom) we pay $12000 in taxes (note the extra zero). I get people not wanting to be priced out of their housing by taxes, but:
1. If your property actually went up by a large fraction in value, so did your equity, and if you have a mortgage, then the equity goes up faster than the value due to leverage.
2. MIN(2%, inflation) is an absurdly low cap. Since it is applied annually, even if inflation averages 2% per year, the property tax increase will lag inflation.
Ultimately when far more people want to live in a place than there is housing, bad things happen, and Prop 13 and rent control just try to shift the advantage from "has lots of money" to "got there first" with lots of annoying second-order effects.
Too late to edit, but I found this[1] from 2019 which multiplies the effective tax rate by the median price (multiplying a mean by a median is questionable, but I don't have a better proposal) which puts CA as more expensive than TX.
Also the most expensive states by this metric are almost all in the Northeast, which matches my intuition.
California is complicated because Prop 13 means it's totally different depending on how long you've lived there. Ideally property tax would be higher and income lower… well ideally it'd be an LVT which doesn't tax building improvements.
I don't know that LVT would make much of a difference; the majority of the value where I live is tied up in the right to have a building of a particular type on the property; not sure if that would count as "Land Value" or not.
My previous residence in particular was "interesting" because under the now-current zoning rules it would only be allowed to be 1/2 the square-footage, but as long as it stays as the current floor-plan it's grandfathered in. If you make it illegal to improve the usage of a property, then an LVT has no effect!
It does seem like there are some pretty wild discrepancies in total comp between countries. If the distributed/remote trend continues progressing, I wonder if we'll see things start to equalize at all in our lifetimes, or if there are other geopolitical / macroeconomic / other factors that are more significant.
It should up to a point. A lot of high paying tech jobs are in regulated industries that sometimes have hard restrictions on who they're allowed to employ. For example, I know someone who works at Oracle Cloud and works on projects for the US DoD. For these projects Oracle is required to employ US citizens, perform background checks, and in some cases ensure those workers have clearance to work with classified information.
I suspect there are other high paying jobs/markets with similar restrictions. It'll be interesting to see how the dust settles over the next few years as geographical location within a country and without impacts the labor market.
I would hope so. I don't think that place of birth, or ability to get a visa should determine salary.
However, personal experience and friendship group makes me think that US tech salaries have only accelerated over the last couple of years. I went looking for some data to back up the idea to tech salaries have accelerated, but https://spectrum.ieee.org/engineer-salary was the best I found, and was less dramatic than I expected.
For sure, seems bimodal or even trimodal from what I've read. I don't suppose those tier 1's ever accept fully built SaaS projects in lieu of the usual interview gauntlet? ;)
This is absolutely awesome. I really appreciate how snappy it feels. I wouldn't mind if it was supported by something like (tasteful) personal capital or credit card affiliate links.
Otherwise, it's too expensive for cheap fire-minded folks like myself. Adding a subscription to this would push back our FIRE dates :)
Persistent storage (even if it's just a text file I have to copy-paste every time) for $12/ a year would add enough value to be worth it for me, and for me to replace my spreadsheet with this.
Glad you appreciate the snappiness :) that's the product of a lot of deliberation on optimizations and occasional shower thought / moment of inspiration. Maybe what I should do is add another tier that's just persistent storage with none of the other premium features; essentially "Basic" but with saving.
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.
I installed the PWA but was still using the browser. Will give it a try.
What made it surprising is that usually diagrams and tables display horribly on phone in most apps.
This app is centered around those and works well, which is literally amazing.
Thanks; glad you like it! I think there's still some room for improvement in the mobile version. To me it definitely doesn't feel like a "mobile first" experience... but it is serviceable at least.
hi! I've been using your software more actively, what's the best way to provide feedback?
I thought you could appreciate input on things as a "pair of fresh eyes"
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.
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 :)
I wanted to build something like this myself forever, but decided to start by capturing my data over time into a Google Sheet, and in the end never ended up building it.
However, having that sheet meant I could enter in all my accounts, assets, debts into ProjectionLab in about 30 minutes, and spent the rest of the time fiddling with the projection tool, which far exceeds what I would have built.
The cash flow priorities I simply haven't found in another tool, and was one of the big reasons for me wanting to build my own, since I get about 50% of my total comp annually via RSUs vesting, bonuses and share sales, and route those directly into e.g. my mortgage.
Is there any chance to have the Pay Extra goals be annually (I mean, I can do N/12, but annually probably is more accurate from a charting perspective).
I've never forked out my credit card so quickly, well done.
Thanks so much! Comments like this are a big part of what makes it possible for me to keep consistently carving out the time on nights/weekends :)
And to your point on data entry, I should probably go back and look at all the forms and make more of the inputs multi-type so you can always specify in whatever frequency you like.
I have spent couple hours trying your product, it's pretty damn good! Couple remarks:
1. It would have been great if I could make other variables used in Monte Carlo simulations than the market. It would allow one to model uncertainty. For example, an event could happen following a random distribution (kid arrival, move between 3 and 5 years), or a future salary could follow some normal distribution, etc.
2. The main dashboard for a plan is GREAT. UI/UX-wise, considering the number of dimensions to factor, I find it surprisingly simple to iterate over a plan.
3. Having the option to show expenses on the main plan chart would be great. Expenses are a big part of optimizing personal finances.
4. The plan comparison may deserve a different UI than the simple plan analysis. Seeing differences on the right is not completely intuitive.
5. I'm currently living in France, and we have some accounts with no amount limit but with an annual transfert limit. For example, you cannot add more than 20K€/year to the account. I believe it's currently not possible to set a cash allocation such that it maximizes transfert amount/year instead of overall amount.
6. Related to 5., but we cannot withdraw from that account without paying taxes until retrieving, then it's tax-free up to some amount per month. Maybe similar to a 401k. But it's impossible to set that up on a custom account.
7. I have set that model up, still in trial, but now I'm really scared that my browser might bug or hit refresh by habit and loose everything. The find the saving feature to be really harsh. It'd be nice to find some alternative so that it can be saved, and maybe retrieve it after subscribing? Or limit the number of parameters/events that can be added to the model? Or show in much simplified mode. In my case, I'd like to show my partner and discuss it before subscribing: I want to make sure it contains enough features needed to model our finances.
Really good job overall, I'll certainly follow your work!
7. I'd like to make some improvements here too. Losing data sucks, and I should take more steps to reduce the likelihood of that ever happening. I'll see if I can come up with a good approach that's not easy to take advantage of.
Coincidentally, I've just finished a year-long (side-)project building a similar app for a friend.
Similar, I say, if you only read the one-sentence description of what they do. ProjectionLab is 100x prettier, smarter and more featured than anything I could have done.
You have my full admiration, and perhaps my subscription :) I have to come back to it on the weekend, on the computer (although it looks/works fantastic on mobile.)
Thanks! I did spend quite a while trying to make the mobile experience decent, but if you come back I'd highly recommend checking it out on desktop; nothing beats that 4k monitor with all plan sections expanded.
Oh, how I wish this were open source, so I could add my own custom inputs, views, code, etc.
I’d love to model ranges of uncertainty on, e.g., inflation, recessions, major events, etc. — I’d love to be able to play out scenarios around stock market dynamics, housing market dynamics, and more — and this interface is beautiful.
Part of me wants to make some mocks for you, in the hopes that you’ll add some of this… :)
A good chunk of the features I mentioned in my OG comment here were inspired by user feedback; so if there are new features/views you'd like to see, let me know!
Have you seen the Advanced editor yet that you can use to model how various things change over time? That can be helpful for playing out some specific scenarios. And the compare tool might also be worth checking out. I think I see what you mean about ranges of uncertainty though; I can imagine some cool UI possibilities.
Solid app - I echo others statements on this and am seriously considering switching to this from a spreadsheet for the long term; I tried a similar thing for my own finances (spreadsheet -> own app), but it was _far too tedious_ trying to get all the various financial bits worked out, so this is a huge savings in time. Also, the plan together feature seems to be a solid feature overall so far, and it's really helping my partner with financial anxiety be able to even _look_ at our finances without breaking down so far.
Two things I noticed, one is a minor visual bug and the other is a potential win (unless I missed it entirely, in which case disregard):
- it'd be nice to have a feature to do one-off expenses with greater ease, applied to a subset or all plans right off the bat, the idea being I'd like to see the effect of a spontaneous / fun buy and its greater impact on my plans at that moment (thinking really casual FI where me being off 1-2 years isn't a major dealbreaker);
- the promo image under the `Plan Together` summary for mobile has the app layout _behind_ the device notch when it handles it correctly.
Glad you're enjoying it so far! For one-off expenses, I'm assuming you've noticed that the plan interface has all the expandable columns (accounts, income, expenses, assets, etc.), and that you can create new expenses on the fly by adding them from the expenses column, setting frequency to once, and picking which year to throw it into? Or are you saying that's fine but you'd like a way to propagate specific items from one plan to another/all? If the latter, I'm planning to add something for that: https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi/task/5878-add-abi...
And thanks for the heads-up! That's what the mock-up generator I used produced and I don't have an iPhone so I wasn't 100% sure how it _should_ look haha. I'll take a note to go back and adjust.
Would love some integration with [plain text accounting](https://plaintextaccounting.org/) so that I don't have to re-document all my finances though, even just a simple `ledger equity` import.
That could be an interesting suggestion to add on changemap. Can't say I'm familiar with the site yet, but what would your vision for a good workflow look like if the right integration was in place?
Looking over the app in-depth, I see a lot that could be done depending on how much you want to do ;-)
- The initial import can be done pretty easily, `ledger bal` reports my current balances, so for example I can do `ledger bal Assets` and it will report back totals on my `Assets:<Bank>`, `Assets:Retirement:401k`, `Assets:Retirement:Roth 401k`, etc.
- You could potentially get a very in-depth "progress points" import with `ledger reg`, which just shows the history of my ledger. `ledger reg Assets:<Bank> --monthly --collapse --total-data` gives me a monthly tally of my savings since forever.
- It would be possible but harder to infer future events & spending I think. I can somewhat figure out how much I spend monthly looking at my data, but you'de need heavy processing to get anything useful out of that.
I think maybe a more reasonable request rather than supporting ledger is to just support a general purpose plaintext import. The above `--total-data` command for example just gives me:
Makes sense to me! In fact, if you were feeling super motivated, it probably wouldn't be hard to do a JSON export of your ProjectionLab data to see what that format looks like and start putting together a script to transform from one representation to the other.
I like simple projections. Most calculators out there on the web suck or are advertisements. They account for too much and I just need PERT but for various asset classes.
I tried doing the walkthrough and it told me I'd go bankrupt. I think there's a bug somewhere as I have 0 debt and over a mill in liquid assets meaning net worth positive.
The sandbox was a bit confusing with the seeded data and I wasn't able to make much sense so I had to start over with the walkthrough.
I would pay a few hundred dollars a year for a simplified version of this where I can just play around with fixed percentages based on my expected returns for different asset classes. Right now it's a bit complex for me and I'd just go back to pen/paper & excel.
If I could show something simple like this to my friends and family, I'm sure they would enjoy it too.
Hmm is it possible you just had the frequency wrong on an expense type or something along those lines? e.g. yearly amount specified monthly/daily by accident? Or a dollar amount put into a percent field? I've added warnings in some places like that where it's possible to identify what a surprisingly high/low value would be, but those guardrails aren't quite everywhere.
To simulate different asset classes, you can always add different account types, rename them, and set custom growth rates / change-over-time plots.. but I agree that something more built-in could make sense, e.g.: https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi/task/5670-asset-s... ... though I suppose this moves in the direction of adding even more features rather than simplifying haha.
Having the money showed in today's dollars by default was tripping me up for a bit. The 401k provider my employer uses shows "future dollars" by default, so you have to mentally recognize that the buying power of 10M "35 years from now dollars" is not what $10M would do for you today.
Not helping my "11 months till 30" anxiety/depression. I don't know why it's messing with me so much. The internet loves to make is seem like your 20s are where it's all at but I spent it building a career rather than partying or dating... Leaving the "young adult" phase and just entering "adult". Also mega pissed that I started doing better in 2019 (international travel, lots of time spent with friends) and then the pandemic came and turned the world on its head and trapped me at home for the last bit of my 20s.
I just turned 40. When I turned 30 I thought my 20s were pretty amazing and I was sad to leave that behind. But 10 years later I can tell you 30s are definitely your prime years. You’ve got some shit figured out and maybe you’re a real adult, you have a few more dollars than you did before, you probably have a better understanding of what you want in life. 30s are about going and doing that. By not mortgaging your future in your 20s, you’ll have a lot more options in your 30s and 40s.
I guess it's those few years of increased stress that make the time sound less "prime" haha. As an adult I've always needed good sleep to function well, and can't help but worry my kid would be as much of a wretch as I apparently was as an infant :D
Your prime years are whatever you make them, it’s borderline depressing when people think their best years are behind them when they possibly have 6-7 more decades to live.
That's a bit of a stretch. Stats suggest it's more like 5 decades for a reasonably healthy American 30yo white male today.
Then consider that in your final decade or so, your options are extremely limited because of severe mental and physical decline. 1 in 9 adults will spend one or two of their final decades in a long goodbye due to Alzheimer's alone.
But the decline starts earlier, mental speed is high until age 60. This will affect your job and career prospects, and even if it doesn't for you, employers (esp. in tech) think it will and discriminate based on age anyway (roughly ~45yo based on some articles I've read). If you're a blue collar worker, a career of hard physical labor starts to hit a wall. If you're a woman, fertility starts declining (and childbirth health risks dramatically increase) fairly early (~30) and dating desirability follows rapidly.
Those are just the terminal issues, psychologically your life path more or less calcifies as you age. There's no age cutoff but, for example, it's said that the longer you stay in corporate work, the more likely you'll stay there and the less likely you'll succeed at entrepreneurship. I'd speculate there's maybe one or two more major life pivots in a 30yo.
Most of these factors don't exactly make life unbearable, but after a fairly "young" age (around 30 I suspect) a lot of doors start closing and it only accelerates from there. Depending on what "prime" or "best" means to you in terms of life goals, realistically you have much less than 6-7 decades to exploit them. I generally disagree with this attitude of oh don't worry you have plenty of time, life is much shorter than you think.
Nevertheless, once your doors are shut, there's little use in ruminating over the missed opportunity.
While all of these statistics are valid in their own right, I don't think it makes sense to take them and use them to extrapolate the rest of your life, especially in such a doom and gloom way.
My attitude is certainly not of the 'oh don't worry you have plenty of time' because we really don't have that much time. But if the view is that in an 80 or so year life span, you got to get in 8-10 golden years as a healthy American, oof, that is pretty tough, and I probably won't change that mindset.
It's true, broad stats aren't great predictors of individual outcomes. Or at least that's what I like to tell myself haha, though at times I worry it's tough to distinguish from "yeah, but it won't happen to me."
This condensed several of my own musings into one well-reasoned comment. Do you think there's anything ProjectionLab could/should try to do with the concept of health-span?
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 chronic conditions, which are conditions like heart disease, diabetes, strokes, and of course cancer. It's more likely than you think. Stuff like cancer won't just kill you sooner, it'll bleed you dry towards the end of your life as you attempt all manner of surgeries and treatments to delay the end.
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.
The internet is wrong. Nothing happens when you cross the barrier. Do what makes you fulfilled and live without regrets. Nothing worse than wasting the limited time we have worrying about things we cannot change. (talking to myself now haha)
I would absolutely love to tell my brain to stop thinking about "should haves" because there is literally nothing you can do about it. But here I am :)
I "should have" never allowed myself to become obese in college. I "should have" lost the weight in my early 20s. I "should have" focused on fitness during the pandemic. But that's the past. Yesterday would have been a better choice but tomorrow is a worse choice than today ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Got in a funk a few months ago and decided to make some changes. 5 months later I'm down 30 pounds. Fell off the bandwagon after Christmas but I'm pulling myself back onto it. Transferring offices to be near my friends, many of whom are fitness and health nuts who have all told me they're going to drag me kicking and screaming into the wonderful world of actually taking care of myself.
Who knows, maybe I'll actually feel better in my 30s than my 20s as a result. Not that I feel bad now. Even though I'm a 6'4 blob I can still go out and take a 6 mile hike without any pain or trouble.
At thirty, you will feel like nothing has changed (and be disappointed about that). At 32 you will feel strangely young again. At 36, you will feel 40, and at 40 you'll be thinking about retirement.
Could be me justifying my own tendency to ruminate haha, but occasionally "should haves" can be productive if you learn something that improves your mental model of the world. Either way, glad to hear you're prioritizing your health! The hard work pays dividends :)
I honestly like the default as today's dollars, but I honestly only noticed the distinction by poking around. Maybe putting the option in the first few setup cards?
Overall, awesome tool though!
Made me a bit sad to realize that even with a tech salary, most bay area houses are out of reach of a single income family unless you're an L5 at Google or a similarly paying company.
I'm always hesitant to add more steps to the onboarding process, but you might be right that todays/actual currency is worth it to call out as early as possible. It's definitely a source of confusion for some, despite my efforts to put the selector in a discoverable place.
This looks so pretty, building a web app myself and one thing i am struggling with is the UX/UI, I can build the app but my initial design/ux looks like crap, op did you design the UX of this yourself or do you hire a designer to come up with the design ?
All me actually.. though I do have a couple UX buddies I bounce ideas off from time to time. My programming journey started in middle school coding videogames to play with friends, and perhaps that's always shaped the way I approach projects: as much as possible, I like to visualize the end state (layout, interactions, the little things you want to be able to do as a user and how that should feel) before getting too far down the road coding the underlying systems.
If you don't have a lot of css chops yet, using a component library can be a big help to start. Easier to learn how to customize it a bit vs building all the ui and layout components from scratch
This looks useful, but isn't really usable. For example, your investments tiles all call up the same dialog. For example, clicking "Cryptocurrency" calls up the same modal as clicking "Taxable Investments". Because of this, you end up producing nonsense numbers since every modal just modifies the same field.
If this is not a bug, then the modal is confusing. The labels inside the modal don't correspond to anything on the dashboard. The investment modal should have a field for each investment, rather than some random fields that don't clearly map. If I click "Cryptocurrency" and a modal with no mention of it shows up, I'll assume the software is broken.
I'd also suggest having less memeish simulation descriptions for younger demographics. It adds friction for the average user when they think "well, I'm none of these things, what do I pick". Might also be taken as condescending. Comparatively, the older demographics all had very simple descriptions which would have mass appeal. Comes off like the developers don't take this demographic seriously, or don't understand how to market to it.
Cool looking dashboard, but crazy amount of UX friction makes it hard to use. I'd love to see it when it's tuned up.
The modal is definitely confusing, you are right! I used to have those stat cards direct you to the Current Finances screen, but then people wanted the ability to edit in place on the dashboard, so I had it open the section from current finances that contains the item you clicked. I see how this makes the overall grouping/hierarchy confusing... in the short-term perhaps I'll revert to the original, but in the long-term maybe I'll restructure the dashboard a bit. Might be nicer to have more of a top-down hierarchy focused on total assets and liabilities anyway.
Edit: which things jump out to you as meme-ish? The plan names in some of the sandbox examples? Milestone types? All of the above? lol
Makes sense, sometimes I find weird UX friction comes when you needed a feature, and didn't plan it in initially.
For the memeish stuff, it was under the example personas. While its fine to include some of these (ie: FIRE, looking for part-time), it'd be nice to have some examples for the middle of the road. A lot of what you mention isn't even on the mind of a lot of early career folks.
Something like "young professional, focused on building financial stability" or "trying to create more disposable income". Something that would have the same mass appeal as "has a defined-benefit pension, planning for standard retirement age" does to the older demographic.
Good call, I'll try to balance out those descriptions a bit. Doing the whole onboarding, current finances, progress points, and plan creation process 10 times, evidently I converged on too many common themes haha.
I like the interface and the fact I don't have to connect any of my personal accounts. I've used other products that require permissions or user/pw and usually the connections fail or have some issue that makes them useless. It's nice I can do this manually, which I have a spreadsheet I use once a month anyway manually. I'm going to keep playing with this, maybe I can get rid of my spreadsheet!
If there's anything you feel your spreadsheet still does better, just let me know! Always working on new features and improvements. In the past I've had some bad experiences with services that require linked accounts as well; seems like there's still a surprising amount of friction there.
This is awesome! It seems like you've paid close attention to security and privacy, but I would love a clearer, stronger guarantee. "We truly cannot access your data, will never access your data, and will never, ever sell your data." That would go far here.
But more directly to your point, if you enable cloud sync, that uses Google Firebase. Firebase encrypts at rest and in transit and has the usual certifications, but the project owner does have an admin UI for Firestore. If that's a concern, there are always the other data persistence options as alternatives: localStorage only, and/or importing/exporting copies of your data to local JSON files.
Perhaps it would also be wise for me to look into integrating with something like GCP cloud kms, that way maybe the user could supply their own encryption key client-side?
I've been dreaming of building this for myself (when I one day have time to do so) and seeing this is very exciting. I'll give it a shot and pay for it if it works well!
Feature request: make this an Electron app so I can actually use local storage, and feel safe that my data (and work) is safe and won't be wasted.
I couldn't find a good financial planning tool that felt modern, nuanced, and actually fun to use... and I ended up spending all my free time this past year building one: ProjectionLab
It doesn't involve linking your financial accounts, you don't have to make an account to try it, the free version has a lot of features, and there's a sandbox mode if you just want to see how the interface works.
Last year I posted a prototype here (back when it was called ProjectiFi): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27844194, and the early feedback from the HN community was extremely helpful! I've put in about 1,000 more hours of dev time on nights/weekends since then, and it's pretty much a whole new app. Here are just a few of the things you can do with it, many inspired by the HN commentary:
- Build detailed and flexible plans for your future that go beyond the standard online retirement calculators
- Backtest on historical data and run Monte Carlo simulations
- Model international scenarios with various account types and tax estimation presets
- Experiment rapidly: the simulation engine runs in your browser and doesn't need to send your data server-side
- Control how/where your data is stored: cloud sync, localStorage only, or manual import/export, (client-side by default, no persistence in the free tier)
- Plan for goals like achieving financial independence, taking time off for travel, home ownership, starting a rental empire, etc.
- Create granular models for how accounts/income/expenses/inflation/etc change over time using interactive plots
- Build dynamic configurations using milestones that support multiple criteria and conditional logic
- Create custom plots to visualize the metrics you care about
- Plan separately or as a couple
- Create and manage client accounts with the Pro version
- Track progress over time and see it overlaid on top of your projections
- Cross-compare between different plans, or stage + analyze multiple changes within a plan (and revert if desired)
- Choose your own icons to personalize things
- And a lot more; for a full breakdown of everything that's new, see the version history
If you feel like checking it out, I would love to hear what you think! Most of the functionality is free (minus data persistence), but for anyone interested in upgrading to Premium, you can use coupon code "HN-10" for 10% off any plan :)
This tool is really flexible and you mention "a rental empire," so perhaps it's covered already, but it might be worth trying to add features for freelancers, contract workers, or people starting side businesses. I think those people would be more willing to spend money on a planning tool, since there's more decisions to make. (I think targeting financial planners is also a smart move.)
Fantastic UI. Congrats. It would be really cool to be able to model personal assets such as businesses. For example, I would like to be able to plan when I sell one of my businesses in X amount of years for a price of Y, then perhaps have options on how to spread the proceeds of that sale into different assets like cash, stocks / shares or one off purchases like a house.
One thing I couldn't work out how to do was to add one off purchases once you had already created a plan. Is that possible?
What kind of one-off purchases do you have in mind? Within the plan interface, there are a bunch of expandable columns at the bottom, and within each of those you can create/manage things like types of income, expenses, assets, cash-flow priorities, etc. You can control frequency on things like income/expenses; I imagine setting an expense to happen once would be an example of the kind of one-off you're looking for? You should also be able to model selling X for the price of Y pretty efficiently as well, perhaps with a single custom income event type and using the Advanced change-over-time editor.
Thanks, I managed to model buying a house doing a one off expense. I think it might be useful from a usability point of view to put Buy a House as an item in the list of possible expenses as it is such a common goal for people. Anyway I absolutely love what you have done so I subscribed. Best of luck with this. I look forward to see how it grows!
This is absolutely fantastic! I've long wanted a tool similar to this but have been stuck with spreadsheets for quite sometime simply because I do not have the knowledge nor time to build something so beautiful. I plan on playing with this quite a bit more over the next few days.
I've noticed in this thread a few other requests for import and I'd like to also chime in with that request.
I have a unique situation when it comes to income where I can reasonably predict my income overtime because of a collective bargaining agreement. Being able to import a table of income/year that I've already generated would save me a ton of time!
Happy you like it so far! Have you seen the Advanced editor I added recently to control precisely how things like investment returns, accounts, income, and expenses change over time? When you open up the full dialog for that, I bet that control point table would be a perfect place to add support for CSV import of income (or whatever other variable) by year.
I did! When I get some time to get everything setup this weekend that where I'll fill in my data. Unfortunately, I have 31 years to go :S so it will take time to manually enter. But a quick import of CSV on the left hand side where the points are added would be perfect!
Wow, I had completely forgotten about this. My login still works! I signed up for the original ProjectiFi when it came out but did not use it much. I am a heavy YNAB user and this type of software is right up my alley. I am going give this a whirl again.
Let me know how it goes! One trend I noticed with people coming to this from budgeting apps like YNAB is that sometimes the Cash-Flow Priority system in ProjectionLab takes a minute to grasp. And for emergency fund / cash reserve goals, I'm in the process of adding a few more options to try to provide better support for different strategies there. If you find yourself looking for those, you can try them out on the early access site here (v3.0.1): https://projectifi-201a2--dev-xsmyy9im.web.app
I found the timed accordion about your product to be distracting while I was reading. I felt pressure to read quickly and concentrate, which I’m guessing was the intended effect.
However, I’m a parent of two young children and have a slightly intense job, so my days are filled with time pressure already.
The added stress to read something when I’m trying to explore your content at my own pace produced a net negative experience for me.
One way you might resolve this is by giving users some sort of a “pause” button or opt out.
The reason I spent the time to give you this feedback was because I recognize how hard you must have worked and appreciate the effort you’ve obviously put in. Nice work!
Great point on the accordion; last thing I want to do is add anxiety! If you hover your mouse over the section you're reading, the countdown should stop... but perhaps I should get rid of the auto-advance altogether?
Congrats! If you decide you want to monetize this, truebill sold to rocket mortgage for something like a billion dollars. I could see your features supplementing their current product nicely.
I wonder what metrics drive acquisitions like that the most... I would imagine they might look more for products with a huge userbase, stickiness/gamification, or a demonstrably high virality factor, no?
Lawyer lawyer lawyer. If not now then before you talk to anyone, especially us, about valuations or any of your business. In fact just don’t reveal any metrics or $ amounts to anyone other than a lawyer. refer anyone interested to your lawyer.
Really nice! I like it a lot. One feature I miss there from my spreadsheet is the ability to track and get updated investment values automatically. I mean, it could be great to have a way to specify the number of stock for each investment account, the cost basis and then, have live record of the investment values. At the same time, it would give a better idea of capital gain tax implication.
I've had a few people suggest something like this in the past, and if it's not on changemap already feel free to add an item for it. I'm still trying to work out if it would be useful enough to implement though, i.e. if people would actually use it, and if it really offers enough improvement over entering balance updates the current way. I guess it depends on how often you're adding to / changing positions. Also, are you in the camp where you would want to see an optional account linking feature in the future? Or is that something you'd steer clear of?
Thanks for replying. I am definitely in the camp of the no account linking feature. In fact, more in the camp where I don’t want to provide credentials to connect to bank institutions.
Sure thing, and that's good to know! I suppose the ease of entering your positions also greatly depends on how many you have. Maybe supporting some kind of format to import from would help there.
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 straightforward to understand and set. And FIREcalc is free and makes it easy to "save" your settings for future tuning/revisiting by generating a link with URL query parameters containing your setting values - I'm good with that approach.
ProjectionLab does provide more granularity for specifying investment accounts that are taxable vs tax-deferred vs tax-free, which allows it to factor in the effect of taxes in the projections. But I wonder if that's a level of complexity that's better left out of the calculations.
Effective tax rate (and yeah verily, taxes) - so damn complicated at least in the US. It will vary considerably over time even during your post-FIRE journey, depending on: your income (of course); your deductions/credits; changes in tax rates and codes; on the state(s) you live in (and how the state taxes social security, HSA earnings); etc, etc and so on and so forth.
Also many folks setup their asset allocation across all the various types of accounts to be as tax efficient as possible (https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Tax-efficient_fund_placement), and AFAICT there's no way to reflect that in ProjectionLab currently.
All that's a long way of saying that I appreciate that FIREcalc doesn't try to factor in taxes. It's easier to get my head around just allocating a certain amount for taxes in the yearly spending number, maybe based on my tax history or some coarse tax estimation calculator, maybe using an expected case and worst case tax amount in the yearly spending number and then running the FIREcalc simulations and comparing - without trying to account for the effect of taxes in a more granular way, given the inherent squishiness of taxes. YMMV of course.
Anyways, nice work on ProjectionLab, I can see where it would be a valuable tool for those who are trying to get a handle on their current finances and FIRE goals and may be a little less comfortable using tools like FIREcalc or home-grown spreadsheets (I geek out on this stuff so naturally I use both!).
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?
I think a "simple" mode is a great idea and worth considering as the default mode until the user gets comfortable enough understanding the results and then wants to drill-down and provide more details to get more refined results. Taxes would be a good thing to tuck out-of-the-way until the user is ready to wade into it. So too, specifying dividend rate separate from return rate (think I saw this, could be mis-remembering).
And even if it's an advanced option, as mentioned before there be dragons with taxes that makes me kind of shrug on the utility. I guess it does help to remind folks that taxes are a consideration in their FIRE planning and drawdown strategy.
Folks might be surprised how low the federal effective tax rate could end up being after they FIRE, especially if all your income is passive - this is if you have have built up a nest egg that's enough, say 20-25x a reasonable (ie non-MMM levels of frugality) annual expense, but not like FU money amounts. And this is in the early retirement stage before Social Security, IRA withdrawal eligibility and RMDs come into play. State income tax rate, on the other hand ... (but of course income tax is only one component of your overall state tax burden to consider along with sales tax, property tax, etc).
What's your take on the utility of researching and implementing feature-sets like what fsflyer was asking for? e.g. optimization techniques and tricks based on current country-specific tax codes, such as carefully timed roth conversions, ACA subsidies, social security claiming strategies, etc. Are you more in the camp that hyper-optimized strategies based on the tax codes of today may not be worth the effort to develop and maintain since there's so much inherent uncertainty with long-term planning?
I get why someone might be interested in those kinds of things, you see these tactics often discussed by more sophisticated FIRE folks and bogleheads. Personally, while I do geek out a bit on this stuff because I like to look at data and crunch numbers as much as the next nerd, many of these are micro-optimizations that take up way more time than they're worth (at least in my specific case, purely anecdotal).
That said, you have to decide who your target user base is - if it's the hardcore optimizer FIRE folks, then yes, building in the capability to at least play those kind of what-if scenarios and maybe do optimizations will probably be important for that user base.
There is another group of folks just looking for a path to lower-case FI, maybe with early retirement, and not treating FIRE as the end goal but rather as a means to an end, that want to follow a not-so-complicated path that will give them that FI but not spend all their time obsessing the numbers. This excellent post Life On Fire – What's Next For Me, You and Us[0] by Vicki Robin of _Your_Money_or_Your_Life_ fame sheds some light on this other group:
"AT THE SAME TIME, I SOON REALIZED THAT FIRE IS ACTUALLY NOT MY TRIBE.
We applied the same methodology to money but it seems for different ends. For me, FI has simply been the freedom to pursue a higher purpose – to grow spiritually, to learn, to create and to serve. While I’ve met a lot of people reaching for relevance in their lives, not just independence, it’s not what people obsess about. They obsess about taxes and investments. There are probably tens of thousands more in my frame, but of necessity investing the majoring of their time and attention into the “getting out” part of the journey."
If you target that group, then I suspect they'll be looking for less in the way of these advanced capabilities to optimize their finances and more in the way of what your app already provides.
I could see some middle ground for offering tools to help make decisions for specific questions / scenarios. I started to sketch out an example of what this might look like for "Should I do a Roth Conversion?" and it might look something like this:
- It would ask for estimated federal and state income tax rates (0% for some states), pre- and post-conversion.
- It would calculate estimated RMDs for different percentages of the projected Traditional IRA balance representing varying Roth conversion percentages (0%, 25%, 50%, 100%), that would be useful and there are a bunch of such RMD calculators out there.
- It could estimate the delta on estimated taxes due to estimated RMD and total the additional taxes due to RMDs up to your life expectancy age (assumes tax your fed and state tax rates stay the same, kind of a wildcard)
- It could estimate how much on average and in aggregate you'd pay in taxes if you converted 25%, 50%, 100% and of your traditional IRA to a Roth over N many years starting at age A (N and A user changeable)
- It could estimate your balances remaining at your life expectancy age broken down by account type ($X in taxable accounts, $Y in tax-deferred, $Z in tax-free) if you converted 0%, 25%, 50%, 100%.
I think that would have to be good enough, though I suppose you could add all sorts of bells and whistles in terms of charts and visualizations to make it easier to understand the data. The data provided would be helpful to make decisions based on various personal judgment calls and preferences: the importance of the highest possible tax-free balance in your estate to be passed along tax-free to beneficiaries; the importance of minimizing overall taxes paid over the various scenarios; your interest in either paying more taxes now or more taxes later; your comfort in doing the conversion on your own; your willingness to pay a professional to do the conversion for you if you don't feel comfortable doing it on your own; your willingness to move from a state with high income tax to a state that has no income tax which would maybe change the numbers enough to make it more reasonable to do a conversion given your other preferences. Those personal preferences would be tough to factor into an optimization calculation, though I suppose a questionnaire to capture preferences like the above (eg "on a scale from 1-3, how important is ...) could be used with a rule-based algorithm to guide the user to a scenario that fits their preferences best.
Thanks for the response! It's a lot to think about. And also worth keeping in mind that optimizations like these probably wouldn't generalize well to international use cases; it would be special-snowflake US stuff. I'll try to feel out where current users of the tool stand on this topic; perhaps there are a few relatively straightforward features in this area that would have reasonably broad appeal.
Nice work. I remember being very critical of the first version of this a year ago and it looks like you legitimately took the feedback to heart. Thanks.
Sure did! Many of the original comments were tough but fair, and I appreciated that. And if you play around with it some more and end up feeling like it's still rough around the edges, don't hold back.
Thanks! And I definitely didn't build it with acquisition in mind (or have any experience navigating those waters), but I suppose stranger things have happened haha. My intuition is that big firms/institutions would probably be looking for something with more crazy growth metrics and stickiness though, don't you think?
Financial institutions have been known to throw big money at products like this one. Many are looking to incorporate new, unique features into their online banking platforms.
It looks pretty great, I hope to try it more extensively in the future. I was somewhat surprised how intensely I was overcome with existential dread as I put in my information, and just left. It's hard to approach thinking at all about finances, being some years into a pretty volatile career and having basically no assets, investments, savings of any kind, debt, and very rapidly rising costs.
Huh, I figured Thor would have had you set up pretty good by now... kidding aside though, if you have any thoughts on how I could do better with the UI to ease the existential dread a little, always open to feedback!
Let me add to the enthusiastic chorus with my own "This is great!". One thing that I feel you can do better (and forgive me if it's already there, in five minutes of poking around I couldn't find it) is a knowledge base of some sort. While I was building a model I wasn't sure what reasonable values would be for some of the knobs and stuff that I might be missing. Basically, I think that you could link to existing articles or pointers on personal finance that could help me, a complete novice, model better.
Also, and maybe this is a non-goal, you could help me optimize - let's say I've set my living expenses to $X/mo and income to $Y/mo, and I've set a goal for financial independence by age A, the model could suggest things I could do to achieve that goal, say by cutting X down to X' or putting more of Y into a different kind of savings account. It might not be easy to do, but again, as a complete novice I'd really love to get a plan that didn't require days of work to set up.
Did you see the help center / FAQ? I added that last week, so it doesn't have an immense amount of content, but there are a few things that might be helpful. For things like growth rates, I have more-info popups in a variety of places to provide some context on what's happened historically and what the defaults are. But overall I think you're right that adding more resources over time would be a great idea. I've always wanted there to be more educational content as you step through the onboarding process and build a plan... just need to find the time to draft it up and/or link to it in the best way.
For optimization, I could see that getting a little bit tricky, since for now I want to steer clear of anything that could be misconstrued as formal financial advice. Definitely understand where you're coming from though, and there may be some opportunities to add different kinds of optimizers (e.g. a button that runs the permutations for drawdown order and stops on the one with the best outcome).
Thanks! I built it with Vue.js, Vuetify, Chart.js, and Firebase. Firebase only comes into play for those who get premium and enable data synchronization though.
Before I added code-splitting a while back to improve my original lighthouse score, you actually used to be able to load the app and then disconnect from your network and still do everything except save to the cloud. In fact, you still can if you visit all the parts of the site first so that every chunk is loaded. With so much being client-side like that, web workers turned out to be really handy for things like Monte Carlo mode or running multiple simulations at once (e.g. on the dashboard).
To circle back and add a little more detail here, you'll notice it's mostly front-end (by design). In addition to Vue.js, Vuetify, Chart.js, and Firebase, I'm using some supporting modules like vuex, vue-router, threads, dayjs, and vuedraggable, among others. I also use web workers in several places, e.g. Monte Carlo mode, and for running all your plans on the dashboard without blocking the UI.
Thanks! It was tricky to build in so much flexibility and customization while still keeping the overall UI feeling relatively clean.. I try to strike a good balance there, but if you feel there are areas where I haven't succeeded, definitely let me know.
I've noticed a lot of humility in your comments which is always nice, but you have truly done an incredible job design-wise. Like many users have said, it looks very professional and feels fast/snappy. I have an enormous amount of respect for you doing this solo. I would love to get to this level some day.. Keep it up!!
I've looked at it a little bit, but as someone nearing retirement, it is lacking a number of features that I would like.
There are some common tricks that I don't see how to model with ProjectionLab:
1. Do your tax-deferred 401k,403b,IRA saving in a high earning job, state, then move to a low or no income tax state to do the withdrawals in retirement.
2. Retire early so there is some time before taking social security payments to do Roth Conversions. I-ORP[0] turns this into a branch and cut linear optimization problem. User Indyhou at Bogleheads[1] has built a spreadsheet that uses a solver plugin. It may be possible to build a model in CBC[2] and compile it to WASM and run it in the browser.
3. After turning 63, watch the Roth Conversions to make sure you don't trigger IRRMA medicare surcharges.
4. Are you trying to stay under income limits for ACA subsidies? It's not quite the sharp cliff that it was, but can be important for some.
5. Are you trying to balance regular income and capital gains to take advantage of the 0% cap gains rates? You've got to plan ahead on your contributions to the taxable and tax deferred accounts for this to work. Jeremy at Go Curry Cracker has written about using this to pay $0 in US Federal Income taxes[3].
6. Paying full rate for health insurance will likely get you over the 7.5% limit for tax deductions.
7. Social Security claiming strategies can be complex for married couples.
A feature that would be useful during accumulation is life insurance planning for the death of a spouse.
The death of a spouse can throw a wrench in some of the strategies since the single tax bracket is much smaller. Tax law changes can also upset highly optimized strategies. So any highly optimized strategy should also have a monte carlo simulation around a spouse dying and tax law changes to understand what disruptions are possible and maybe accept a non-optimal strategy that is better in these adverse cases.
For 1: you should already be able to add a milestone which has tax consequences; there's an option on milestones that lets you redefine the overall tax setup when the milestone occurs.
2-7: all great points; I'd love to add more strategies over time to help optimize scenarios like these, though I'll have to think carefully about what can be generalized and what is strictly US-specific.
Thanks for writing these up -- I'll be looking into them in more detail :)
This sounds great! I'm signing up to try it out now. The only issue is that I'm in New Zealand and have some financial ties to the US, so I'm anticipating that there might be some issues around multiple countries and currencies. But will see how it goes.
I took a look around and just want to confirm my impression: this is not an accounting system, right? I’ve been trying to automate my accounting workflow for a long time and this is the kind of tool that I’d love to not have to build myself.
What kind of workflow are you trying to automate? ProjectionLab's current focus is long-term projection/forecasting and planning your whole life based on where you are today and what you want to do. I'd hazard a guess that you might be looking for something a bit different, more along the lines of analyzing/organizing current transaction-level data?
Just out of curiosity, do you have a lot paid customers for this? It's clearly a useful tool but I'm just wondering whether there is a significant cohort that is interested in paying actually paying for value added services.
Not enough for me to work on this full-time, but enough that it continues to be an energizing side project. I'm sure there could be more if I would pull my head out of the sand and spend more than ~0% of the time doing marketing haha. Certainly all the options and customization appeal more to the DIY types and/or people interested in building detailed plans for financial independence / FIRE.
I worked at a startup that pivoted away from this product so have the same question. We found that people wouldn’t pay for our product that showed financial projections based on current data.
I would be really interested to hear how this product is different - maybe there’s a different monetization strategy or a different marketing strategy?
So far I've just been building what I really wanted to exist for my own planning purposes combined with the best ideas from early adopters, and then I've posted in a few places and gotten a little traction here and there. I can see how it might be difficult to build and sustain a real startup around this kind of product; it does feel a bit niche, and I haven't tried ads but I've always imagined that the target audience would probably be especially hostile towards them.
A startup pivoting away can mean a few different things, but one thing it doesn’t mean is this couldn’t turn into something big for a long-term-focused solo dev!
> I can see how it might be difficult to build and sustain a real startup around this kind of product
Yes, I think the most important difference is that, as far as I can tell, you're looking for a bit of side income rather than trying to jump start a whole company.
What direction did that startup take their product out of curiosity? Did they ditch the projection/forecasting element altogether or still keep a vestige of it?
Pivoted to a B2B API in the same sector but fairly unrelated features-wise.
Basically they had a few B2C customers who had a more pressing problem than forecasting, and the company provides an API for other companies to solve that problem for consumers as a feature.
This is awesome. I've been considering building a (very) simple version of this for my own use, but this is way better than anything I'd be able to do. I've signed up, and will try to keep up with using it!
Only criticism is that after playing with the sandbox data prior to signing up it stuck around and I didn't see an obvious way of removing it besides overwriting it with my own data. The plan settings was non-obvious for getting my data input started. I began with the Current Finances, rather than overriding the plan settings which made things a little odd.
Thanks for sticking with it despite the friction going from sandbox to premium! I did add a "clear sandbox data and restart onboarding" button a while back, but I'm not sure that hangs around if you go right from sandbox to being a subscriber. I'll take a note to improve that flow.
Glad to see that you've continued investing in this project! I paid for the Premium version back in the Projectifi times and would have loved a heads up by email that you made some significant updates.
I sent out a few rebranding messages and a bunch of updates on new features over the past few months, but it sounds like maybe you subscribed before I even had an email list haha. Thanks for being an early adopter! It's folks like you that helped encourage me to keep working on it :)
Google may have squatted some mindshare here by launching a product called Project Fi (later renamed to just “Google Fi”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fi
Seems like Project Fi predates this; I was just a bit of an idiot at first and didn't realize how common the confusion would be until too late haha. Pronunciation was solid, but readability... not so great.
I'm really interested in this. My big question is: how easy can it be made to fill in details?
I've been thinking quite a bit lately on what I could possibly hack together in a few julia scripts, where I can at least munge my own transaction data.
I'd never wind up with this level of polish on presentation -- visually it's very pretty. Manually inputting a bunch of details is such a chore though.
An option to link accounts could help with one aspect, i.e. updating balances as they change over time... but I get the sense that it's a can of worms, and it seems like the larger incumbents that do that often have syncing issues anyway.
But beyond balance updates, it seems hard to avoid having a ton of input fields in an app where you build a detailed model of your future. It feels like there's a tradeoff between being able to build a super detailed model and having a comparatively frictionless experience where you don't need to enter much.
Thanks! Did you find the sandbox intuitive? Or did you feel like it needs more persona types? Recently some people expressed they would prefer a parameterized system that tries to dial things in a little closer to their situation... but since then I've tweaked the presentation/phrasing a bit to try to make it clearer the sandbox is just for showing how things work.
Thanks! I've put a ton of work in since then, and it's been a fun side project that kept me focused and energized and thinking positive thoughts during the pandemic. Also, the fact you remember it as "ProjectFi" is one of the many reasons for the rebrand -- that first "i" in ProjectiFi got lost by so many people.
Ha! Fortunately, in my case I was in a position not to make that mistake. Project Fi (now Google Fi) used to be my phone provider. That does seem like it would be a common mistake, though.
It's a good product so it's nice to see that it's still getting some love.
Haha I did missed that "i". Seems like a it's worthy of more than just "side project" title. My side projects look like crap compared to this. Very professionally done.
Well, I must admit there is a graveyard of 60 or so other projects over the years before making anything worth posting here. The dream would be to find a way to work on ProjectionLab full-time, but so far I'm preferring the side-project/bootstrap route focused on growing it slowly and sustainably, in contrast to the VC "unicorn or bust" mentality.
I think many investment firms would be interested in buying it out. Just look at the ancient tools the big places use. Places like r/stocks pretty much joke about Vanguard having outdated interfaces/tools.
I'm not actively working on this at the moment, but I'd definitely entertain the idea and be happy to help think through if there's a reasonable way to do it. What's your biggest motivation for wanting a self-hosted version?
i) Connect to bank accounts automatically and pull the balances and transactions.
ii) Owning my data.
Currently, I have my own tool that gets balances from credit cards and some bank accounts. I save all the data in a random xyt format which I export/import to my web tool/app. I am looking to replace this tool with something but without giving my data.
FWIW, data already stays client-side by default. If you upgrade and enable saving, you can choose from localStorage only, cloud sync (i.e. not what you want haha), or manually importing/exporting JSON files. That being said, totally understand the desire to have a version you host in your environment under your absolute control.
How do you envision i) working in a self-hosted version? Something you wanted to code up on your own? And does that imply you'd expect the self-hosted version to be easily editable, e.g. the actual source code?
My current setup -> My web server connects to bank accounts every 6 hours and creates a xyt file which is encrypted and synced. I take that file and load my web tool to get the visualization, simulation etc.
My ideal solution is something similar.
Great work with projectionlab nonetheless. I have tracked the progress since it was called project fi or something.
Thanks! And if you want to chat further about what the possibilities might be for supporting a self-hosted option, feel free to email or message me on discord: https://discord.com/invite/dZQ5DDEmT7
Glad you like it so far! Possibly the hardest I've worked on a side project by an order of magnitude... actually maybe that's not true, in years past I did spend an irresponsible amount of time coding video games that no one would ever buy :D
I loved this when this first came out but kind of ran into this spiral of using it like a game. I couldn’t quite do anything actionable from it. Any advice on how I can use this to improve my future financial situation?
I'm curious to hear more about this "spiral" haha. The way I use it is to create a few different plans and compare between them to assess long-term tradeoffs of different decisions, and come back sometimes to update things and consider new paths or opportunities. The tool can't give you alpha of course, but my hope is that building a better understanding of the spectrum of possible outcomes helps people plan more confidently for how to live life on their terms.
Looking forward to trying this. Last time I searched around for a tool like this, all I found was OnTrajectory (which seems right up your alley). Do you have a comparison with that or other similar tools?
I haven't given that tool much of a try specifically, but overall I wanted to build something where you could do granular and flexible modeling across multiple scenarios in a modern and responsive UI, where you don't link your accounts, you control and experiment with a wide variety of options and assumptions, can plot/visualize what you want and see breakdowns of what happened in each simulated year, etc. If you check it out, I'd be particularly interested to hear what you think of the Milestone system, where you can define key events/stages in your life, add multiple criteria with conditional logic for when they should occur, and bind the start/end of other events in your plan to them (with support for offsets as well). So far, I haven't seen anyone else try to build that kind of system.
A bit over 1,200 hours so far... but I only tracked actual coding time, and not time spent answering questions, brainstorming new ideas, meeting with people, casually testing stuff, wrangling images, etc.
This is seriously impressive. I remember your post from a year ago. I’m thrilled to see you kept up with it and added more features. I’ll be subbing for a year!
Thanks so much! If you have questions, suggestions, or new feature ideas, feel free to hit me up on discord any time: https://discord.com/invite/dZQ5DDEmT7
I don't want anyone to feel priced out of being able to create a quality plan for their future, so I have a discount request form under the pricing section :)
I'm using Vue.js, Vuetify, Chart.js, and Firebase, as well as some things like vuex, vue-router, threads, and dayjs, among other supporting modules. I also use web workers in a few places, e.g. Monte Carlo mode.
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.
I'm not sure what you were seeing, but I spent a solid hour playing with my own data without (yet) creating an account.
Aside from that, this kind of low-effort dismissal ("has/lacks X, closed the tab") plagues a lot of Show HNs, and it's not constructive. If you really feel so strongly against signing up, it would be more constructive to explain why you feel that way and suggest ways OP could improve their project. As it is this comment doesn't contribute to any meaningful discussion, it just comes off as rude.
I was able to put my data in. The simulation predictions still showed $1m+ retirement data.
Also, I feel strongly against signing up for stuff because I already get tons of spam marketing from sites that I have signed up. I also am very protective over who knows what about my money.
For what it's worth, data already stays client-side by default. If you upgrade and enable saving, you can choose from localStorage only, cloud sync, or manually importing/exporting JSON files.
If you feel like there's something amiss, always happy to help troubleshoot. There are definitely a lot of inputs, so there are quite a few places where an errant input could have a large effect on the long-term outlook. When you say "didn't update" though, that sounds odd... does that imply you were somehow seeing no change at all in a plan despite making radical changes to configuration? Or something else?
This idea of FIRE has been spreading beyond techies/Internet nerds and into other highly paid professionals like doctors. [0]. The main difference is that non-programmer professionals generally don't get a thrill out of min/max-ing financial projections.
Such people might be willing to pay a few hundred dollars a year for someone to generate this kind of analysis with them and simply execute on it each year. Similar to how people pay for CPAs. My employer actually pays Goldman Sachs to provide a similar service for its employees (no commission, fiduciary advisors) but their tools suck compared to this.
[0] For example https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/, https://www.physicianonfire.com/