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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
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!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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! 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.
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?
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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
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
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 :)
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.
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?
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...?"
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.
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'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.
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 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?
239 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadhttps://projectionlab.com
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 :)
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?
It's a good product so it's nice to see that it's still getting some love.
Adding an export, with yearly/monthly resolution and customizable columns would be trivial probably.
I would be really interested to hear how this product is different - maybe there’s a different monetization strategy or a different marketing strategy?
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.
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.
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?
Am I crazy?
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-f... https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-perce...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[edit] absolute <-> relative
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.
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.
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!
Also the most expensive states by this metric are almost all in the Northeast, which matches my intuition.
1: https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-highest-and-lowest...
Source on the all-inclusive assessment? I am familiar with Texas and California and New York. One of these things is not like the others.
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!
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 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.
- https://mui.com/material-ui/getting-started/learn/
- https://chakra-ui.com/docs/components/overview
- https://ant.design/components/overview/
- You can add a "dependent expense" (have a kid) at a certain age
- You can run Monte Carlo simulations of your portfolio performance
- Expenses can be configured to increase linearly, with inflation, up to an amount, or using a custom function that the user can input graphically
- Adding a house purchase automatically cancels out your existing rent expense if you indicate that it will be your residence
- Easily visualize all of your projected earnings from portfolio growth and losses due to inflation and taxes
As an avid YNAB-er, this is heaven.
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.
I think I have a mental friction on paying monthly based on how much I interact with the software, so it might be me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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:
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/
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.
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.
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 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...?"
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.
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.
Totally impressed with what you have built.
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.
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.
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.