HN Explorer

Show HN: When Will I Run Out Of Money? (weekend project) (whenwillirunoutofmoney.com)

11 points by adrianmsmith ↗ HN
Hi everyone, I’ve been on Hacker News for a good number of years, but this is my first “Show HN”.

I changed jobs recently. Tax is weird in Europe (and maybe other places as well?) in that different amounts go out at different times and repeat at various intervals. I needed to make sure I had enough cashflow to make all upcoming payments, I didn't want any surprises.

So I created a little tool for my own purposes, then had fun putting a small HTML frontend on it as I thought it might be useful for someone else. I'm a backend developer in my day job, as you can probably tell from the design :)

There are other tools out there that do a similar thing, but they normally require you to upload the relevant data to other people's servers, which I wasn't comfortable with for financial data. Also I didn't fancy paying anyone for a service as small as this.

I'm posting it here in the hope that it's useful to someone. And to gather feedback, let me know what you think.

7 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 24.4 ms ] thread
BrutalCoding
Honestly, this tool looks pretty neat. I haven’t tried it yet but it looks so plain in a good sense.

I can’t be bothered with spreadsheets. Also, tools like Firefly III (and their data importer) is powerful but takes a bit more mental effort and couple of hours…

ezekg
Just FYI, the website crashes my browser tab using Firefox. I see a white screen, and maybe "loading..." text if I try a few times.

Edit: also crashes in Chrome for me. Windows 10.

adrianmsmith
Thanks very much, that's very helpful. I had heard of that problem once before, but am at a loss for how to solve it. I wrote you an email, I hope that's OK.
pastacacioepepe
Consider integrating a tool like Sentry. The free tier is enough and will help you debug platform specific issues like this one, without having to ask your users for info. More importantly it will notify you of the issue before your users have to.
zerojames
This is a cool project -- thanks for sharing! I am a _big fan_ of single-purpose web tools like this.

It would be nice if the bottom bar didn't change state if I am still typing a word (i.e. if I type "monthl", a red error shows up, then when I aadd the "y" the app shows the right state).

adrianmsmith
Yeah I know what you mean. In my head I imagined auto-updating being cool, but it suffers from the problem you describe, and also if you go to a web app which does calculation you probably expect there to be a "calculate" button, as that's the way must such web apps work (rightly or wrongly). Thanks for the feebdack.
Rovoska
Unfortunately, does not seem to be able to load for mobile Firefox, if that was a concern. I'll try again on desktop later.