Show HN: The Tortoise – a sophisticated retirement calculator (thetortoise.io)

6 points by dnadler 4y ago ↗ HN

Hi HN!

I've been working on this calculator for some time now. It started off as a tool to help me do some retirement planning and I think it could be broadly useful to others as well.

It's very generic, which is both good and bad. Good, because you are not beholden to the assumptions of the model, like in many other calculators. This also means that it’s not US centric. On the other hand, you do need a bit of financial planning knowledge to be able to use it effectively.

There are many retirement calculators out there -- here's what I think The Tortoise does better than most:

1. An easy to use UI

2. Exposes all of the model's assumptions

3. Gives more detailed results than many calculators (more to come), and trusts the user to interpret them

4. Gives you the ability to export/import and save your scenarios

5. Allows you to compare different scenarios, and also perform 'what-if' analysis on Debts and Assets

6. Independent of any other business so there's no conflict of interest

I also think there’s a real need for more financial education, and I hope that tools like this one will spark people’s curiosity and drive them to learn more.

Let me know what you think, and if you have any suggestions or questions!

3 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 18.7 ms ] thread

ksherlock 4y ago ↗

/api/retirement/run/ likes to give me a 500 error.

dnadler 4y ago ↗

Thanks for the report, I'll take a look. My form validation is lacking a bit, so it may be that a field isn't filled out, but it's not giving you a useful message...

A couple questions if you have a minute:

1. Did you load the example scenario and run that?

2. If not, try checking that the fields in the Market & Portfolio tab are all filled out, or set it to "Automatic Weights".

I see a few errors relating to validation on that page, so that seems like the most likely culprit.

I'll work on some better messaging for that particular error as well. In the meantime, I've updated the defaults to use the automatic weights, so that should be less common for new users.