Oh hey, it's you again!

I discovered projectionlab (formerly projectfi) on HN a while back and have been loving it. Every other "retirement calculator" I found was a dozen text fields and a simple output graph or two - Projection Lab gave me what I really wanted, which was the ability to do much more involved modeling of various scenarios:

- What happens if I buy a house in X years?

- What happens if my old company IPOs and I get a windfall of $Y in X years?

- What happens if I change assumptions on investment returns or inflation rates?

- What happens if I retire at various different ages?

- What happens if my salary increases by 2, 5, 10, 30% each year?

- What happens if we do this kind of mortgage or that kind of mortgate?

- All of the above, but also modeling my in wife's finances?

- All of the above, but with beautiful, interactive graphs instead of my ugly spreadsheet outputs

- All of the above, but without the several formula typos that I made while building my spreadsheet

Anyway, it's amazing, I love it, and nothing else out there really seemed to compare. I found your free plan more than met my needs, but I wound up subscribing just to support it. I'm quite hoping you're able to make this successful long-term so that I can keep using it until I eventually retire. :)

Thanks so much! I use PL for all my own planning too of course, and keeping it around is very much the plan.

Is there a particular direction in which you'd like to see me build from here? The public roadmap is overflowing with ideas at this point, and I'm curious how folks would rack and stack them.

I can't really think of much to add, honestly!

Iirc the last time I was using it heavily, the only issue I was having trouble with was modeling drawdowns of existing funds. It kept drawing down my wife's account to build up mine. It didn't affect the overall outcome (we had the same dollar amount together regardless), but it was a little annoying and made it harder to figure out which account was actually running low. That said, it's extremely possible that I was just doing something wrong and just hadn't configured it correctly. Whenever I get back to it, I'll work up a minimal repro case and ask about it in the discord. :)

I like that this is a solo-dev project, but there's probably loke, a good chunk of people who like this tool likely have built some kind of spreadsheet or other thing to get close to it and likely know exactly what they would like to see for certain things.

Having the abilty to perhaps build our own models and keep them to ourselves, or maybe have them available to share might not be a bad idea.

I'm not sure if this is reporting, or setting up a sequence or frequency of payments, etc. Depends on the backend I suppose.

Having a little trouble parsing the specific feature ideas here. It seems like one of them may be an ability to share a read-only view of your plans... but on the other(s) I might need a little more detail.

Plug-ins. "The Modeling Store":

* Startup9000 Simulator

* ClassicAutosAsInvestments Simulator

* My Personal Stamp Collection API Plug-in (not-public, not-for-sale)

Basically, theres enough weird stuff out there that could be a component of someone's financial hopes and dreams, that communities could sprout on being able to enhance around a topic.

There's also that first step of needing/wanting to be able to API-into the product to explore the idea to see if it's even something that can be modeled.

Being from the UK, having a plugin layer able to differentiate US from UK implications on finances would be extremely useful. But also as a fellow developer I hate to recommend a level of refactoring that might break you!

have you seen the UK tax template (plan settings > tax) and account types? curious what additional controls / differentiation you'd like to see.

Ah - no :-) I just read the feature list and didn't dig deeper. Just assumed it was going to be US-only. Impressive if not. How do you keep up?

> share a read-only view of your plans

I think this is because you are conflating "model" and "plan"; whereas the conventional use of plan probably means model, when playing in your Sandbox it looks as if "plan" is model+data.

The grandparent poster is describing sharing models.

I think the comments below summed it up well.

Basically setup my own versions of Roth, or other products.

In Canada, TFSA and RRSP are one

Have you seen the TFSA and RRSP account types?

I try to offer as much configurability as I can, but if there are other areas where you'd like to see more of that, definitely let me know.

wow! That's a level of personal financial analysis that I've never contemplated doing. It's fantastic that someone has built such a great tool for others, and you get so much value from it.

For me personally, I fail to understand the point of doing this level of analysis, at lest for some of the things you listed that seem highly hypothetical and uncertain (e.g. raises, IPOs, even future mortgage rates). I guess that's the nature of any financial forecasting, but this just seems like it's taken to a level that I would not find helpful. Take for example the kind of mortgage to choose, a decision that all home buyers face and can be daunting (there's so much mortgage/lender lingo that is foreign to most people). The "right" answer is to go with a shorter-term, variable rate, because on average you'll pay less interest than longer-term/fixed rates. But that's also the wrong answer for some people who don't want, or can't handle variability in their biggest monthly expense. Layering those factors into an overall retirement calculator/projector just seems like overkill and over complicated for that decision. MHO...

> The "right" answer is to go with a shorter-term, variable rate, because on average you'll pay less interest than longer-term/fixed rates.

My 30 year fixed-rate mortgage at 2.6% begs to differ ;) Yes, I had lucky timing; I was able to refinance right at the start of 2022 when rates were pretty much at their lowest.

But overall, I think your assertion isn't correct. It really just depends on conditions. If rates are in general very low, you probably want that fixed-rate mortgage, even if the variable one is -- at least for now -- a little bit lower. In the US, most people get 30-year mortgages, and it's pretty much impossible to predict what rates will be like in 10, 15, 20, 25 years.

If rates are higher, and you believe the reason for that is temporary (like the inflation reduction measures going on now), a variable-rate mortgage is probably a good gamble. If rates drop, you can always refinance (either into another variable-rate mortgage, or to a fixed rate).

Honestly, the 7% now on a 30-year-fixed isn't that bad, historically. It just feels bad because we had such low rates in recent years.

Well, I can't speak for most people, but one thing I've been doing is using this modeling as feedback into my budget.

1. Track my current expenses (I use https://lunchmoney.app/, but a spreadsheet works fine). Looks like I'm spending $X/month

2. Build a reasonably complete model of my financial life assuming $X expenses per month (I use ProjectionLab)

3. Do I run out of money before the end of my life? If yes, look at my expense breakdown and look for areas to reduce it (fewer ubers, eat out less, cut back on diamond-encrusted tiaras, etc). My new budget is $Y/mo. Goto 2.

4. Do I have a ton of money left at the end of my life? If yes, I can increase my budget a bit for things I like (more ubers, eat out more, more diamond-encrusted tiaras, etc).

I can revisit this over time as my income changes, or my retirement account value changes based on real-world market performance, or I get a windfall, or I get married, etc etc.

Cutting back on the tiaras before the mocha lattes, huh? Starbucks really has their customer retention on lock ;P

Counting the days to pass before reaching that dangling carrot is a disease. The reality is, for richer or poorer, we all retire when we die.

Alright Debbie.

I know it’s a depressing thought—but considering that money can be thought of as a “unit of work”, and so many people are tying it up in stocks of large companies, miles away—praying they won’t get hit by a car before that special day.

What about getting units of work to start working right now, instead of hoping some big company will make people’s money “grow” into the future?

Invest in local economy. Invest in people. Folks thinking about retirement backwards.

I'd rather not be unable to work and be poor by "investing in people" and "local economy". They sure as hell don't come to my aid when I need it.

You for shit have no idea how bad elder care is in America

By investing locally and in people I don’t mean spend all your money. But to that end, neither are the big companies going to come to your aid. But your neighbors and local business owners will be MUCH more likely to come to your aid after supporting them and helping them succeed.

Went to sign up for the free trial, and noticed you use that super cool dark pattern where it doesn't cost me anything today, but after a week you'll charge me $592 unless I remember to cancel the trial. No, thank you. Seems like an interesting product, and I'd love to see if it makes my life easier, but what the heck is with automatically charging trial members for a lifetime membership after a week?

Where is $592 coming from? That doesn't sound right to me for Premium, esp. since the Lifetime option doesn't even have a trial phase. Which plan, billing frequency, and currency are you looking at?

On the trial topic, I'm using Paddle for subscriptions/billing, and when you add a free trial stage to a product in Paddle, they do charge after the trial ends. For anyone who forgets to cancel in time, I'm happy to issue a refund.

I also offer general discounts and extended trials on request (per the pricing page).

But if there's still a concern, the easiest way to try out the basic features without worrying about any of this is to just hop into the sandbox, which you don't even need to create an account for.

"Pro" has a 7-day trial and this below the CTA:

> Billed annually for $540 + tax.

The dollar amount doesn't quite line up, but it's close. Unless there's very clear confirmation before pulling the trigger on the trial, I would agree this feels on the shady side - at that price point after a 7-day trial, and without a lot of messaging at every stage, I would expect to see an elevated rate of chargebacks.

If it helps, this is via the "Upgrade" option when the app is trying to recover a sandbox session from localStorage; I haven't navigated to the pricing page any other way.

The checkout experience in PL is just standard Paddle checkout, so I imagine the feedback about charging after the free trial applies to everyone who uses Paddle?

I tend to think the Paddle checkout flow is clear enough on how their free trial period works, and I don't recall anyone else taking issue with that in the past.

But if the sentiment is shared that Paddle's checkout copy needs improvement, I can certainly pass that along to the Paddle team.

Was the OP here talking about Premium or Pro though? b/c I'm still wondering where that $592 came from.

Why does this cost so much and why don't you offer a monthly subscription.

If you just add a 10$ a month option most people will just shrug it off even if they never touch the site again. But you start at 108 for the year. That's charge back territory.

If I just forget about this after the free trial but see a 108$ mystery charge I'm asking questions.

I'm a lifetime user that bought back on the first HN announcement.

It has been worth every dollar! They added custom taxes with auto import for various countries and they have been clearing out suggestions over the years.

I'm very proud of this HN solo founder. Borderline jealous that they were able to have the discipline and commitment to continue doing this.

They do offer a monthly subscription.

Have you actually tried the process? Do you know that it defaults to $500 a year, or was that perhaps user error?

Pro defaults to 500$ a year. It should default to monthly IMO. It's more like I'd rather be able to catch a small charge vs having a large surprise

Why not more? Is there another product that does this as well, for less?

Funny enough, "pricing too low" is still a common piece of feedback I get as well.

I wonder if the fact that there are now voices on both sides could indicate that it's finally in the right territory. Or perhaps that there should be additional tiers. Just not sure how best to carve up the feature set in that latter case.

Well, no, therefore this should cost infinite dollar per year.

My friends love giving this "value" based on need and benefit example.

The obvious counter example is water. We need it to survive, often. Yet it's basically free. So don't tell me you can just charge based on how important and useful something is.

That's an unfair extreme; there are huge ethical issues attached to the core basics needed for survival. A personal financial simulator has none of those.

So, supply and demand. Got it.

(Also, water is definitely not free unless you’re literally collecting rain or going down to the river yourself. And even that has costs associated with it.)

Water is basically free. The cost is basically the cost to transport, stock, and process your sale. You can get water for $1 at a gas station, which means they are charging you basically zero markup for the fact that it is a life saving high value product.

I have tons of friends that tell me to price my saas through the roof because "look at the value!!!" ignoring that there are alternatives to it that are basically free, like a piece of paper.

My guess is that the difference is the tax on a annual Pro subscription.

> The checkout experience in PL is just standard Paddle checkout, so I imagine the feedback about charging after the free trial applies to everyone who uses Paddle?

Yup. It's a manipulative dark pattern. It makes the path of least resistance automatic spending of money rather than making a decision.

Paddle literally just nabbed me for a $40 subscription for another app just a few days ago. I am attempting to get it cancelled through their support, I never even got an email warning me of it at all. If they don't agree to cancel, considering I haven't even launched said app in months, I will dispute it w/ my CC. Madness.

Update: Paddle support got back to me in 24-hours and their emailed link cancelled the payment and put me in touch with an AI that instantly resolved the situation and knew what I was talking about. I was impressed.

The Paddle modal says "Total after trial $594.00" in its order summary for me. This is Pro (which OP also mentioned in their comment).

Hmm which OP do you mean? I was referring to karaterobot's original/top-level comment, where afaik they didn't specify.

From context though, it sounds to me like maybe they meant to look at the trial for Premium (i.e. personal use) but accidentally started checkout for the Pro version. I wonder if just hopping into the free sandbox might have been a better fit for what they wanted to do.

Anyway, if others find Paddle's free trial / checkout copy problematic, or have other changes to recommend, just let me know.

> the trial for Premium (i.e. personal use) but accidentally started checkout for the Pro version

It doesn't seem very clear on the pricing page that Pro is for professionals; this is mentioned in the copy, but deemphasized there (smaller, low contrast type between black-on-white title and feature bullets). Until I read the passage I quoted I did not realize there was such a distinction, and it wasn't till I went back and looked hard that I spotted the copy that clarified it.

You already have a "For Advisors" page on the site. If Paddle makes it straightforward, perhaps consider listing the Pro plan there and just Basic and Premium on the main plan page, or something like that, and have some sort of secondary CTA (eg "Looking for personal/advisor plans?") on both, to help redirect folks who end up in the wrong place.

Or something like that, anyway - I think the root cause here is that you're addressing two separate markets that have separate sets of concerns and cost expectations, but aren't always being intentional and specific about which of those markets you're addressing at any one time. Due to this you're inadvertently violating one market's expectations with another market's offer, in a way that isn't deliberately shady but shares enough commonality with a pattern that is shady that it takes care to distinguish what's actually going on.

edit: You might also and more simply consider renaming the "Pro" plan; that word doesn't mean very much these days. If it was called something like "Advisor", I doubt anyone would've turned a hair at the price; a name like that does much more to help me as a potential customer understand whether or not this plan is meant for me.

Renaming Pro to Advisor sounds like it could be an efficient way to remove any possibility of confusion. Thanks!

Ah yes it was a different person who pointed out Pro. Dunno what karaterobot clicked but judging by the number it was probably pro.

Paddle looks pretty normal to me but I think some people find that norm offensive. "Free trial then we auto charge you" definitely feels a bit dark compared to, say, "Free trial then we put you back on basic". I think that would be good for Paddle to consider.

Yeah I could see that being a nice option to grant the user during checkout.

I guess another workaround for now would be to start the trial then cancel right away -- should have the same effect I believe.

That’s odd.. I just signed up for the trial and got this:

> We won’t charge you during the free trial. Once it ends, your subscription will renew at $15.82 unless you cancel

This is fantastic, smooth and really very polished. It clearly covers a lot of stuff and you’ve really got a lot covered so great work. I’ve not sat down and tried to fill out all my details as I’m worried I’ll lose all my details and have to start again. But this kind of stuff I find really interesting and most online are really bad/basic.

Main concerns are around price tbh (I’m a cheap bastard) and I think $14 a month is steep for something I’d use loads one evening and then probably use once every quarter after that.

I think the persistent storage is the key thing to make someone want to pay and the way it’s presented feels wrong to me. If I revisit the site you basically say ‘hey I’ve got all your data stored, sign up to premium and you can have it back without entering it all’ to me that comes across a bit of a ransom. I think that’s fine I’d say a couple of days/weeks have passed. But I think if you Accidentally closed the tab or it timed out it might put people off.

I think the real money maker here is likely financial planners who can pay a large fee and share/use it with their clients over zoom or whatever. Or perhaps some kind of insights/ yearly/monthly forecast summaries for a fee.

All in all amazing job, I hope it’s a great success.

Thanks for trying it out! I agree the recovery dialog needs some improvement. Ideally I'd like a way to let people back in for a limited time if they accidentally close their browser. Couldn't think of a sufficiently tamper-resistant implementation with the current architecture.. but as another commenter pointed out, maybe that's still net better(?)

Sounds like your notional usage pattern fits with how I use the tool as well, i.e. more like monthly/quarterly. If a discount or extended trial of the annual plan would be helpful, always happy to set those up as mentioned on the pricing page.

What about $5 for a one week unlock, so I can make quarterly adjustments as necessary? Or, say, $10 for a week during Q1 of the year so I can plan out my taxes for the upcoming year? (While I’m not paying the info is read-only, tempting me to play with it for $5/week.)

Currently you can do $14 for a month of access at a time. Does that scratch this itch? Or is there something about having access for even smaller windows of time that appeals to you?

The read-only idea outside of those windows is an interesting idea. I don't have a mechanism for that at the moment, but I'll consider it if some other folks express interest in this kind of plan.

Yes indeed, that'd be grand. I'm finding lots of stuff as I play with it, but after a bit I don't need (or want!) to fiddle with it regularly. A read-only option, whether free or even for a modest fee, would be ideal, especially when paired with occasional editing "unlocks" or "only-monthly/quarterly-progress-point-additions" or the like.

I wonder if the commenter who was talking about dark patterns might look at the notional implementation for this and say it feels like the tool holding your plans hostage.

I'm also curious how much you would see yourself returning to this "read-only" view. I don't imagine there would be a lot to do if you can't make changes to anything.

All good points! I mostly just don’t want my personal use to be I spend each day adjusting models. Having a thing I can check scratches some of the need for action/anxiety about the future/etc. Right now I have some complex-ish spreadsheets, and while not much changes, I find I often look at things just to feel like I’ve “done something.” And yeah, I do sometimes say “what if better market/worse inflation” and then change the values back, so I take your point well.

Yeah that kind of tinkering is what the app is made for. So it's hard not to wonder if cutting people off from that until they buy another "access pass" to their own plans might feel more frustrating than they realize.

This is what would do it for me. I make planning and big decisions once or twice a year where having write access is needed. I'd be happy to pay $14 for it.

For the rest of the year I'm just checking in from time to time to see how I'm tracking against the plan, so a free read-only mode would be ideal.

I would do $14 for a month's worth of access, and while I'm outside of those months, the data is read-only. This would let me spend ~$50/year for me to check in 2-3 times and make necessary adjustments to my financial plan.

When I'm outside those times, being able to do drive-by reviews of the data and/or show other people the plan that I've created (for validation/sharing the joy, etc.) sounds ideal.

Read-only is definitely an interesting and compelling idea.

+1 for read-only access

I want to join the chorus of praise for your work, it's really outstanding! Good enough that I created my HN account after decades of lurking to praise your work. I intend to tell my own advisor that adopting PL would be a huge improvement over his current, spreadsheet-based methods for modeling my financial future. Regarding my usage pattern, I'd be glad to spend the $14 for month's access on the two or three months in a year when I might want to update my personal plans iff when I re-up it can start out using the data I persisted in previous sessions after the subscription hiatus. Does it work that way?

Thanks so much! And yep, you should be able to sign up for a month, cancel when you're done, then resubscribe later and pick back up where you left off :)

And you can always export your data to JSON too, if you prefer to have a local backup just to be safe.

Yeah, I feel the same way about the $14 a month.

Perhaps a "one shot access pass" or something that lets you in for a few months while you do financial planning may be useful.

It might also be a good opportunity to check back in with people later (say in 12 months time) and get them to sign up again, if you can provide them with valuable insights and help them stick to their plan

Do you feel like it's more the price or the billing frequency options that affect the psychology here? To me, a month of planning for the price of a cocktail sounds about right (esp. when compared with traditional advisory services), but perhaps others think in different terms. Or just disagree? haha.

Interestingly, I still get messages fairly often from new users that (in their opinion) pricing is actually too low... so I wonder if more pricing / feature tiers could eventually be helpful to appeal to the different segments.

Pricing is a super tricky issue, especially when its for something related to financials. I think there are plenty of people who wouldn't bat an eye at $14p/m (and maybe they are the target audience), but there are also plenty of people who aren't buying $14 cocktails.

I fall into the camp where I like to play around with spreadsheets (free -£time) or other online calculators (free) just to make loose projections and see where I'm at. I make a good salary (for the UK) but don't pay for any financial advice (and probably wouldn't unless my situation got really complicated). I think if it was priced at £30-50 a year or £4-5p/m I (personally) might go for premium because the tool is honestly really great!

One completely different avenue you might consider is to selling direct to companies to provide to this a service to their employees. I'm not talking financial companies, but more as part of the benefit package. My company added something to their benefits, called bippit - which is awful (or at least not useful to me), but provides virtual one-one financial advisors and some very basic online tools.

Would you fall into the camp of "make it universally cheaper"? Or carve up the feature set into more tiers with different prices? Curious how you would divvy things up, if the latter.

I do also grant general discounts on request (info on pricing page).

You're probably right about the enterprise / benefits angle, but at the moment I wouldn't have a clue how to actually go about it. Enterprise sales is the kind of thing I always imagined you might need a team (and a lot of time and pitching) to pull off... True or false?

I’m speaking as someone who has never had to price anything. To me it feels like a service that doesn’t give me monthly benefit (i.e. frequent recurring usage like my iCloud storage or Netflix etc) as I wouldn’t use it often enough, so paying monthly just feels like a waste to me. The difference between monthly rate if bought as a year and per month is pretty big to incentivise people to pay up for a full year - I personally dislike this strategy, it implies to me that I have to pay a 50% markup just to have the option to change my mind after a month or two (to me this implies I might, so best to get all the money up front).

I think you want to incentivise long term ownership of the product (MRR->YRR) with a focusing of the price at yearly. It aligns more with financial years / tax filings and the general cadence of people looking at their finances.

Now as I say I have absolutely no experience and haven’t done any market analysis. So this is just my opinion.

I think for me it's about the ongoing nature of the subscription. Everything is a subscription model these days, and I'm quite wary of "zombie" subscriptions that take money every month, but I don't actually use them.

For me financial planning feels like a "once every 5 years" process with possible lightweight annual check ins to see how I'm tracking towards the plan and tweek some details. A monthly subscription doesn't map well to this model. This is why I suggested something like an "access pass" might be a better fit for somebody like me.

The problem for me is how rarely you'd use it. I could see myself buying this, and using it forever, but only a few times a year. Monthly pricing for quarterly or semi-annual check ins doesn't feel like the right trade off. (I say this as someone who uses Actual Budget monthly).

I looked at your lifetime subscription and was keen on that for the reasons above but $500USD is eye watering.

On the other hand, mind where and who those people are. $14 is probably peanuts for a wealthy software engineer living the SV life and a 6 digit salary, so if those are the ones writing, no surprise they might think like that. Nothing wrong with making them your target audience, of course.

But in other places, $6 can already buy you a cocktail :-D

Funny how the same things get done over and over again.

I went down this road in 2016. Spent about a year on an incredibly sophisticated retirement planner, with customizable scenarios. It was personally very useful so I started down the commercialization path.

I found that a bunch of people had tried this with a direct-to-consumer model and it ended up being small potatoes every time. All of the companies who had achieved any scale at all were doing so through partnerships with banks or financial planners.

In the end, I decided it wasn't something I wanted to spend years of my life with. I found OnTrajectory, which was a "good enough" solution at the time (and still is).

If you like, feel free to share a link to your tool if it's still active -- I'd be curious to check it out.

In a way, my hope was that "small potatoes" for a large company might still translate into "sustainable lifestyle business" for an indie/solo dev.

IMO personal financial planning is somewhat of a unique task in that understanding the process to arrive at an "output" is a lot more valuable than the output itself. I've noticed that despite so many apps being available, I nonetheless prefer to track my finances in a hideously complex Excel spreadsheet. I don't just want to plug things in and have it spit out a result, I want to be able to intuit the full space of tradeoffs, which is hard to do unless you "build it yourself". The output of the process is arguably just information that assists me in clicking the right buttons in my brokerage account.

Rarely as an individual are you running into such complex financial modeling where the selling point "This has great UI/UX and allows me to accomplish task XYZ 20% faster" actually matters. It's actually kind of the opposite, where the slicker and more "magical" the tool is, the more I'm suspicious that I'm missing something and would prefer to just do it myself.

I know the feeling. The precursor to PL was a hideously complex spreadsheet of my own. You're probably a better spreadsheet wrangler than me, b/c in my case all the formulas eventually got so out-of-hand that it became cumbersome for me to maintain and really trust that thing.

When I was initially casting about for alternate tools that might be a step up from that spreadsheet, I found myself frustrated when I ran into anything opaque or where methodology / assumptions weren't clear. With PL, I've made an effort to expose as many of those as I can directly to the user (while packaged into a UI that tries not to overwhelm), but I'm sure at the end of the day it's always going to be a reflection of the parameters and decision space I had in mind when designing it.

If you ever check it out and run into areas where you feel the model needs more clarity, definitely let me know.

I liked it, highly detailed and wanted to try. I created a plan and it showed me that I am going to bankrupt in two years :). Seems like it is not suitable for economically unstable countries like Turkey. Many factors that can affect your financial plan are out of your control here. Inflation is changing every month, nothing can be predictable, salary is draining even if you promoted in your job. You need stronger methods than monte carlo simulations to survive here...

Haha, looks like I’m going bankrupt a few years after retirement :(

Or I hope it’s just a bug… the cash flow chart lists “House” with something that looks like my mortgage amount. But then, it also lists mortgage payment separately. Is it double counting it?

Edit: oooh, the house as its own expenses within its asset. Like taxes and maintenance. This makes more sense…

Yikes, are there any kind of levers available to someone in an environment like that? Or is it just... as grim as it sounds?

Every few years I see this posted on HN. Every time I play with it. Every time I am delighted by it. Every time, I think I'll use it. And then I don't.

To be fair, my finances are simple to a fault, so I haven't felt like using it. But, once things ramp up, this will be the first tool I subscribe to.

It's a great tool. I recommend.

Anything you feel the tool is missing that might make it more compelling?

Personally I use it more on a monthly or even quarterly basis to consider new decisions, update stuff, etc. That fits with the usage pattern I initially imagined for a long-term planning app, but I'm always open to other ideas.

P.S. I started working on PL in 2021, so we're not quite in "every few years" territory yet ;)

I hadn't messed around with this when you posted previously but today I did.

I tried to forecast buying a house, but it seems to have defaulted to 0% APR for Infinity. I don't know anything about buying houses; that's why I'm using a tool like this in the first place!

I poked around and was finally able to open a screen to enter values for a bunch of things but I don't know what's reasonable.

It kinda feels like your onboarding wizard is too good -- it creates the illusion that I can use your site even if I don't really know anything about anything, but then trying to forecast expects me to know a lot more.

I know that's not very actionable feedback, but that's what has put me off actually paying for a subscription so far.

You make a good point that adding more educational scaffolding would be helpful. I try to include some sensible defaults where I can (e.g. assuming houses are going to have some maintenance/insurance/tax costs associated with them), but yeah in some places existing knowledge or independent research comes in handy.

Are there sections in the app that jump out to you as good places to inject more educational content? As you point out, one of the input fields when you add as house and choose "financed" is APR. Maybe that could link to a dedicated page with common rates based on a few parameters like credit score, or perhaps even a separate tool dedicated to estimating that sort of thing?

I use New Retirement and one of my biggest complaints about that app is that it expects you to provide the optimistic/pessimistic rate of return for each of your investment accounts. I would love to have a tool that provides some guidance on setting those numbers, based on historical returns and the asset classes in the account.

I can see value in having similar guidance for things like mortgage interest rates. Maintaining all of this educational content and keeping it up to date may be a challenge, though.

Yeah quite a few FIRE tools which allow you to model retirement scenarios will let you pre-fill return rates based on historic returns.

This one is pretty nice to mimic. You have to Ctrl+F for 'projection method' and then switch it to Historic Cycles, or Monte Carlo Simulation:

https://engaging-data.com/fire-calculator/

Then you'll see basically a distribution appear on the graph with the median (50%), but also the 25% & 75%, and the 10% & 90% likely return scenarios.

Quite useful to see what a bottom 10% ('worst-case') scenario would look like, and how it would affect your finances and your timelines.

Showing or linking to the relevant historical data/rates next to each of those inputs sounds like a good feature idea to me.

I'm the same. I guess for me, understanding the fundamentals of personal finance was the most important step. Understanding the time value of money, compounding returns, the power of allocating a portion of your income to investments, basic tax optimisations that most countries tax policies offer through tax benefits on retirement accounts and home ownership etc.

Once you see the power of these things and combine them, taking the right decisions actually becomes quite simple.

For example, if you take a 7% average long-term return, as a rule of thumb, your money doubles every 10 years. (1.07^10 = 2, more or less). That means if you save $1k at 25yo, in 40 years you'd have 4 doublings, or 16k, at age 65. That's a pretty powerful multiplier. And 7% is roughly the long-term inflation-adjusted (real) return on the S&P500 (no guarantees it holds, of course).

Many companies will 100% match your retirement investments. So if you put in 1k at age 25, a 100% match will mean your employer puts in 1k as well. Combined with the above, the $16k would become $32k.

Now, if you instead took the $1k as salary, you'd have paid income tax at the marginal rate, a 30% marginal rate is quite common. i.e. the $1k in salary would've netted you $700 in spending at age 25. By instead putting it in your 401k, it'd grow out to $32k in the above example at age 65, or 45 as much. If you moved at that age to a state with no income tax (there's 8), you'd net it all. For every $1 you put in, you'd have gained $45.

That's such a crazy multiplier, and note it's already inflation-adjusted. For 1 unit of work/time, you gained 45 units of work/time. Take such a multiplier in the context of retirement: 40 hours (= 1 week) of work would allow you 45 weeks (almost a year) of earlier retirement.

These simple fundamentals explain why starting early on personal finance is helpful. But it also explains why it's completely unnecessary to spend decades looking at a graph/UI of all of this unfolding, once a week, and updating the planning.

In fact, the only thing I really did after a lot of personal finance education, was to set-up some automated contributions to investment / retirement accounts from my salary. Every few years I reconsider the balance between 'pleasure today' vs 'pleasure one day' (i.e. retirement), and rebalance how much of my income I spend, and how much I allocate to these automatic contributions. It takes about 30 minutes a year to make these arrangements, and with that the vast majority of my personal finance arrangements are made. That's why additional tooling isn't really necessary. Of course at some point some analysis will be useful before pulling the trigger on retirement, and some analysis/advise is useful around major decisions like a house purchase, or selling your company. But for the most part, financial planning tools are just really unnecessary because the fundamentals for an ordinary person to arrange are so, so simple: allocate a portion of your income towards tax-optimised investment/retirement accounts, and set-up automatic payments.

"ProjectionLab has no link to your real financial accounts and the data you enter stays in your browser unless you choose otherwise. "

I don't see why this would be a positive? I'd love an alternative to Personal Capital (since it got bought out), but without a direct connection to my banks/creditcards/etc, that connection just ends up being less secure.

I'm pretty agnostic on the existing account linking/aggregator services out there, but I know some folks prefer not to use them, and I wanted to build a tool that gives the user direct control of their data and how/where it's stored.

If a (strictly optional) account linking feature is something you'd like to see added though, there's an item on the public roadmap for it that you might like to upvote. It’s currently still in the Suggestions category because it’s a bit of a contentious topic within the PL community, and we’ve had a few discussion threads about that on the discord.

In the past, I’ve tried account linking in some other tools, but always ran into syncing issues (especially on 2FA accounts). From what I understand, that’s still somewhat common even with solutions like Plaid.

With PL, I also wanted to initially steer clear of that support/maintenance tar pit (especially since I’m a solo dev), and design a tool where the focus is more on long-term projection rather than fixating on the latest daily stock price fluctuations.

Man I loved PC when it actually worked. I think I had about 8 or 9 months of seamless integrations and then half my accounts blew up overnight with the response being "yeah we know, we're working on it" for months before I gave up. That was probably 5 years ago now.

The tricky thing about a service whose main value prop is aggregating all your account data together is that 99% of them working isn't that much better than 1% of them working. Looking at your financial dashboard is pretty useless if it can't sync one of your 401k accounts, or one of your loans is using 90-day old data.

I think this is actually a positive for the non-aggregators like ProjectionLab. If I spend 10 minutes manually updating everything when I check it once a month (or however often), I know everything is up-to-date and don't need to spot check things.

They're going to get this comment regardless of the direction they take so it doesn't matter.

True. I wonder what the use case for this is exactly. Maybe a strictly offline platform for techies?

This site helps you run financial simulations, though. It's not supposed to be a product you use to track your account balances.

What are you using now instead of Personal Capital? I'm still stuck with them and looking for an alternative.

I see you have Pensions for Commonwealth Countries; what about US Government Pensions? I FIRE'd at 40 with a US Military Pension and some other investments, and can't really adapt your tool to my case due to that.

There are some interesting things about those pensions though (and the related VA compensation metrics). I have a spreadsheet I use to advise veterans who get sent my way because there are no decent tools out there for that population.

Otherwise it looks awesome!

Congrats! (or in FIRE parlance, f you haha)

Curious what you feel is missing for modeling military pensions. Have you checked out the configuration options for Custom income streams, the Advanced change-over-time editor, and/or binding the start/end of things to milestones?

Nope, I completely missed where you put them. I've always considered them as an asset, as it were, not a fixed income stream. That's my mistake, and I found where you put them. It just wasn't where I expected!

No worries, if there's anything else you run into trouble modeling, feel free to reach out any time.

I was able to recreate my spreadsheet (in a much more pleasing UI!) in a few minutes here.

I think I'm going to be recommending your tool to the Veteran's I help advise.

Awesome work here. I really mean that.

Thanks so much! It's a real passion project of mine :)

Seems to be a discoverability issue.

I love that this has the ability to track multiple scenarios eg FIRE and LeanFIRE. I can see people using this to compare kids vs no kids as well.

I would love the ability to simulate 401k contributions assuming an annual max contribution increase. For example, I will often put into an investment returns calculator that I am contributing $20k per year to retirement, however 10 years from now the annual max will probably be over $30k.

PL assumes contribution limits increase over time to match inflation, so if you switch to visualizing results in actual currency (as opposed to today's currency), and you choose to contribute the max, you should see those nominal contributions increasing over time.

How can I alter the 401k match rate?

Employer Contribution is one of the inputs in the 401k cash-flow priority form, and you can use the More Options ellipsis to the right of that input to choose from several ways to model it.

Probability of success is a common and relatively simple metric to compute and explain, but it is not a good one. If you retire at 60 and expect to live until 90, there is a big difference between running out of money at 70 vs. 85. A metric such as expected shortfall https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3674232 is better since it considers the magnitude of the shortfall.

I really like the "early retirement now" spreadsheet for that reason. (https://earlyretirementnow.com/2018/08/29/google-sheet-updat...) It allows you to plug in expected cash flows and your allocation model, and compares it to the stock market history to get a safe withdrawal rate.

Using that you can also try out alternate scenarios like "what if I converted x00k of my savings to an annuity in exchange for a predictable cash flow" and see how it affects your withdrawal rate.

Yes, the twin idiocies of the freebie planners offered by the major investment firms: "Expect to live until" huh? My death has a probability distribution that's better understood than the market, any Monte Carlo simulations should include varying my life expectancy? And "probability of success" huh? Are we so stupid that we fly the plane into a mountainside at 85, rather than modifying behavior? I want to simulate my actual varying life expectancy and varying budget as I respond to market forces. Our house is paid off and I'm a great cook, but I love to spend money as our budget allows.

MaxiFi Planner is the best consumer tool I know; my advisor also uses it. A puzzle that's too hard for it, making me want to script scraping its reports: Should I choose an annuity for part of my TIAA-CREF retirement savings? Even if one understands that the answer is generally no, there's always a number that flips the decision. TIAA annuities pay more than market, but enough more? There's an annuity paradox that programs like MaxiFi Planner reveal: Even a poorly priced annuity lets one plan to spend more. On the other hand we want to optimize our daughter's inheritance.

Economists optimize varying notions of "utility". The above is a game, scoring what one gets to spend adapting to market conditions, taking into account the inheritance as one's year of death varies. This is beyond any planning software I've seen, yet it's exactly the game I will instead play out badly by hand.

A current WSJ article may interest you: "A Retirement Tax Break That Ends the Fear of Outliving Your 401(k): The pros and cons of using your nest egg to buy a special longevity annuity in retirement" https://www.wsj.com/articles/retirement-tax-break-qlac-annui...

This is one that concerns me. My family members typically live into their 100s and are still very independent and mentally healthy up until a week or so before dying. I am incredibly healthy and don’t expect anything different, barring accident. I plan on waiting as long as possible to start collecting social security, but I’m wondering what else I need to consider when anticipating 30-40 years of retirement.

The monte carlo module includes the ability to break down outcome categories based on how far you make it during each trial. But I definitely want to add more metrics and customization to that mode over time. Expected shortfall (I assume from point of failure till end of plan?) sounds like a good one!

I used it about a year ago and it was pretty useful in making some large decisions but the more I used it, the harder it became to use as I couldn't duplicate and mutate easily without breaking my prior work, or basically without a version control system. I'm probably at a point where I would look at it again but today I would like it if actually worked with my day to day transactions as well, reconciling with all my checking accounts. Also multi-currency support would be very useful.

A vision of the future. Camera pans across a shoebox sized apartment, suspended above a nondescript city with light pollution, air traffic and highway noise. The space is furnished sparsely with generic wall art and take-out containers. Camera shifts to a middle aged, impoverished wageslave sitting alone, displaying a nervous tick, and staring in to their iMirror with an expression of concerned gravity. The camera zooms in to the lips, which begin to move: "Model me this..."

That's the past. The future is a shoebox sized tent in a nondescript city. He is maxing out the 401 so when he retires, he can afford rent.

Let them eat spreadsheets

This is awesome! I spent weeks looking for something like this a year back and am very interested!

I have some feature requests, if I know you've at least considered these (and are/are not planning them), it would definetly persuade me to pay for the product: - Is there an API or some way to programatically upload a snapshot of my banking data, I don't care if the API is cumbersome, as long as there's way for me to interface with this from some custom scripts. (I'm envisioning a cron-job running on a VPS which polls my bank account using the Open Banking standard and uploads a snapshot to Projection Lab).

- I'd love a dedicated section for "Jobs". By this I mean a way to set what my current salary is, but also when I expect to be promoted and how much of an increase that promotion should be. This way I can model a successful career trajectory without having to create a bunch of jobs for each promotion (I guess the frontend could just delegate to doing this in the backend).

- I work at FAANG and I believe it's quite common to recieve vested stock RSU units that vest over n years and are then reissued, being able to model that would be super useful... and finally a real killer feature would be visualising actual stock prices and manually set growth expectations

Thanks! I think a good cross-section is already doable :)

There isn't a formal API yet, but there are several methods I've exposed on the early access channel to facilitate community plugin development, including the ability to programmatically update objects within PL. Here's an example thread on the discord where a community member has been leveraging those methods to build a Chrome extension that can pull balances in from YNAB: https://discord.com/channels/869222901054857216/112400124222...

For modeling career trajectory, have you seen the Advanced change-over-time editor yet? That can be super useful for mapping out a series of advancements within a single overall job. It can also come in handy for modeling how RSUs vest over the years, and between that editor and the "Recurrence" feature, you should be able to model some fairly sophisticated patterns.

Thank you for such a thoughtful response! This tool seems great - I'll start my subscription tonight :)

Excited to see the self-hosting option!

I’ve been distracted from personal finance stuff for a minute but am circling back to it now that some life stuff has settled out. If this planning cycle works well, I’m planning to buy the lifetime program and start self hosting.

Thanks for all your work on this!

Glad to hear it! I've put about two and a half years of blood, sweat, and tears into building PL at this point, and that kind of feedback means a lot :)

If you run into any trouble modeling things, feel free to reach out any time.

This looks amazing, thanks for sharing it.

I'm interested in a few angles that are leading me to look at your self-hosted option - is there any customizability that is possible?

For example being in Canada, the basic features will work great, but some of the other types of accounts or programs will be different. It would be nice to be able to set it up in the software, and failing that, see if learning how the backend works with a self-host license will allow addition of different items.

I was just thinking about something like this last week - financial literacy can have an outsized impact on anyone's life, and being able to generate so many scenarios can make a huge difference in visualizing things so clearly for the formula of one's own life.

Most of the account and cash-flow priority types have customization options that can be used to do things like adjust liquidity/withdrawal rules and dial things in based on your circumstances. And if there are some specific areas where you'd like to see even more of that, just let me know.

Thanks for the reply, I'll check it out.

What stood out to me was

Roth, etc are very specific to the US.

Things like RRSP, TFSA, etc are more common in Canada. Maybe it's just configuring one of the flow types as you mentioned.

Did you see the RRSP and TFSA account types? ;)

ProjectiFi seemed promising enough that I was willing to support it with the purchase of a lifetime membership about two years ago (almost to the day, according to my password manager) when I saw the “Show HN”. Seeing the rebrand had me worried about shenanigans like this new thing is suddenly under a different license because it’s a different product or some such nonsense.

Very pleased that my account still displays that lifetime badge! Just wanted to drop a comment expressing my appreciation that the “lifetime” remains honored. Especially considering that said purchase was at a pretty steep discount in comparison to the current price.

Of course! All the early adopters like you have really meant a lot to me, and it's the least I can do to honor your original pricing :)

Hey, are you interested in a faster way of doing Monte Carlo simulations using the GPU? Demo here: https://james.darpinian.com/money/

It runs a million scenarios in a few milliseconds which is fast enough to update the results (the percentage at the bottom) in real time as you drag sliders. It's several orders of magnitude faster than other Monte Carlo retirement simulators; so fast that it may not even feel like it's doing anything. But it really does run a million scenarios instantly.

I don't trust your random number generator. It takes some effort to get extreme speeds out of them.

The speed comes from running thousands of simulations in parallel on the GPU. The random number generator doesn't have to be any faster for this to be a huge speedup. It's possible to use any one you like. I did validate the one I'm using against various others and found equivalent results.

I also have the simulation implemented on the CPU as well to validate the correctness of the results.

Are you suggesting you compared the result using Math.random() on CPU to the accelerated hash functions from https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XlGcRh (linked from your source code comments)?

I believe that was one of the tests that I ran, yes. It was a long time ago. Obviously the results are not numerically identical when different RNGs are used but they converge as the number of iterations is increased. That said, I think you are right that the RNG could be improved, even if it doesn't affect the results right now.

Quick feedback first

It looks great. I'd love to dig in to it more.

I know you've seen this elsewhere but I don't think I'd pay quite that much for the product, and the blow-away-everything of the free model means I'd probably not come back again.

The housing screen should let you fill in your full payment amount but ask if any of it is escrow/PII or anything else beyond P&I.

A pet peeve with mortgage offers I get in the mail, email, from my bank, etc, is they all know my monthly payment but that payment includes escrow for taxes and insurance. This leads to me getting offers telling me how much I'll save when their offer is actually higher than what I've got (especially true now that rates are higher). I felt the same moment of annoyance when I entered my payment amount and saw I'd have it paid off in half the time I actually will.

Back to cost for a moment.

Like many others, I do my own tracking today, which has a cost in time of course. Since it's coming from my free time I tend to value it in terms of what else I could be doing, and mentally to me that's the "movie model". I spend perhaps 15 minutes twice a month tracking my expenses, debt, etc and in movie terms (a ticket is $18 and provides about 2.5 hours of entertainment) that's about worth about $3 to me.

And because I take the time to look at my expenses regularly, I really, really, really try to avoid any kind of recurring costs when possible. I think this is probably true for a lot of your audience.

Thanks for checking it out! Did you make it to the full plan interface? Within the House form on the plan screen, there are additional inputs to model things like insurance, taxes, maintenance, etc., and I have these split out as separate inputs from monthly payment because A) those rates/amounts vary from place to place (and may adjust over time as property value changes), and B) this makes it easier to answer experimental questions like "how would my plan change if property taxes were higher."

And maybe I should do something to make this more clear, but the "years to pay off" text embedded in the house form is just a preliminary estimate -- other things like cash-flow priorities you create to make extra payments can impact the actual pay-off time in the full simulation.

On the cost topic, are you familiar with the pricing for other products in the planning space? I've made an effort to position PL competitively, and a piece of unsolicited feedback I get a lot in the wild is that current pricing is actually still too low.

Do you think dicing up the feature set to create a cheaper pricing tier could be helpful? If so, I'd be curious to hear opinions on which features should fall into each tier.

FWIW I do also offer general discounts on request (info on pricing page).

So I think the problem isn't actually the price (or at least not just price) and I'm not exactly surprised to hear some people are saying it could even be higher.

The real issue is the trial. Auto charge trials, especially ones I'm unsure of, are a turnoff. This brings me to 3 issues...

* 7 days is psychologically a short time to try this. For me, this means I have to set aside time in this coming week to set everything up and see how it works. A longer trial period might help.

* The auto charge at the end of the trial is, as mentioned, a dark pattern that I avoid whenever possible. If I'm not 90% sure I'm going to use the product, I won't sign up for something that needs my credit card in advance.

* The free option is too limited for me to start entering data and come back later. It's also missing functionality I think I'll need later. I have to pay at least $14, and setup an auto-charge, to pick up where I left off later, so this is a non-starter for determining if the product is worth the $14 to begin with.

In short, it might be worth $14 a month and it is even likely to be worth the ~ $100 a year, but the limitations and requirements around the trial keep me from feeling comfortable finding out. The most off-putting is the auto-charge, which make me nervous in any case.

I don't think I have much control over Paddle's free trial mechanic, but IMO a pretty effective workaround is to just subscribe and then immediately cancel. That should still give you access for the trial period and then simply not charge at the end.

I also grant extended trials on request. So if you'd like a longer trial (e.g. a month for free), you can just shoot me an email :)

Immediate feedback on the initial sandbox flow (UK perspective) - there's no reason 'mid-career UK' should be a defined benefit pension (or not) and 'early career UK' defined contribution (I assume? Since it doesn't say?). Could also be a mix, bit more likely in the case of mid-career. DB vs DC is just a function of where you work, these days the former is mostly public sector only (too many private companies with DB pensions blew up and wiped out/raised a lot of questions for their DB pensions).

Would you prefer to see those sandbox examples configured differently? Or would you rather see a different and more nuanced kind of sandbox system where it asks you some questions first and constructs an example based on your responses?

Oh and to answer your question on DB vs DC -- if you're talking about the workplace pension cash-flow priority, that would be for modeling Defined Contribution pensions. For DB, that's an integrated section within the corresponding income stream.

I came here to say the same thing. Defined benefit pensions are very rare these days in the UK.

Also I have to add that your sentences saying, "workplace pension cash-flow priority" and " corresponding income stream" are very confusing.

I think the figures for the UK example are not great. Living expenses, health care, and medical expenses are a lot larger than seems correct.

Also you should probably put a tool tip defining concessional vs non-concessional Australian superannuation. Also that should be in AUD rather than £

Amazing interface BTW

Display currency is more of a global setting (About You section), and iirc the Australian sandbox example should already be using AUD there(?)

When you add a new account or cash-flow priority for super contributions, the choices should have subtitles distinguishing Concessional from Non-Concessional. But sounds like there are some other places it would be helpful to show those subtitles too?

Always happy to tweak/update the sandbox examples based on what folks would like to see. Any good data sources you'd recommend for more typical UK expense figures?

Oz super is always going to be in AUD even if the subject is living in the UK. Does your system support investments in multiple currencies? ;-)

More typical UK expense figures is a really hard one. I think we've got a crazy wide spread of incomes and expenditures the same as the US but with differences such as almost nobody earning average income will spend any of it on health care.

When you launch the sandbox you have to select some kind of template (the implications I think aren't completely clear at that stage, I understand better now). If you're in the UK, there are two options, described as (from memory) 'early career with a pension and some savings' and 'mid-career with a defined benefit pension'.

It just doesn't really make sense as a coupling, if I'm early career with a DB pension or mid-career with DC it's not clear which is the better pick or how much it matters. As far as I can tell having selected one and played with it just briefly, it doesn't matter at all because all it does is set some numbers you can change anyway, there's no built-in knowledge/logic of specific country pension schemes or tax treatments?

My intent with the sandbox was just to make it easy for folks to quickly hop into the tool and get a sense for what you can do with it, without the friction of needing to go through the full onboarding process and dig up a bunch of numbers to plug in... the idea being that if you want to give it a real try with a more tailored scenario, you'd typically start over and do the normal onboarding flow.

Does that help clarify? And/or do you feel like a different approach for the sandbox would have been better?

I would just remove reference to defined benefit pension, it doesn't really make sense & isn't important. Afaict nothing else needs to change, it's just confusing copy.

I like the tool & UI & feature tour though. :)

Interesting, so you would recommend keeping the floating tour widgets? Some other commenters found those obtrusive... er, I guess "useless" was the precise word haha.

I really appreciate that this includes UK specific stuff! So many things are US$ only.

I'm slightly confused by the pricing. Is the free plan persistent only in 1 browser? Have I understood that right?

The sandbox is free, but data persistence is one of the premium features (though there is also a free trial for premium).

My thought process was that I wanted to make as much of the planning functionality as I could free to try and low-friction. I'm always open to feedback on pricing model though. Sounds like you would prefer to see a level of persistence in the free tier? If you have more thoughts on how that should work, let me know!

If you want to make it a lifetime thing maybe consider giving 6+ month trials to hook people in and show skin. I considered this for this type of app. Congratulations on the launch!

Thanks, good point. I do grant extended trials on request (as described on the pricing page), but maybe I should make that a more prominent thing?

I think you could easily use it to drive a point home: It's designed to be a for life SaaS -- and you believe in that design so much that the first year of many to come is on you.

This looks awesome! It's exactly what I've been looking for; not a tool for investment geeks, but a practical, everyday, personal finance app. Just signed up for a trial!

Some feedback I have after I signed up and filled out my finances and financial plan:

- It would be nice to somehow get back to the original wizard that I went through when I signed up. Could swear there were some things such as "spend my remaining income" or whatever that I can't seem to find elsewhere in the app. (EDIT: I found this, it's at the bottom of the Plan page, and was a bit hard to find)

- I'd love to be able to export my data even though I agreed to cloud storage. Maybe that conflicts with something about the way that stuff is stored in the cloud, but just being able to download any of the data, even if it isn't all of it, would be nice. Maybe there is a way to do this, but I haven't figured it out.

- Thank you for providing dark mode!

- I don't know what "Starting Cost Basis" is when adding a Roth IRA, and it would be nice to just have a tooltip explaining it; I have a Roth IRA and kinda know what a cost basis is, but honestly have no clue what "starting cost basis" really means or whether it applies to me. Maybe I should know, but this would also be good learning opportunity for users.

> I don't know what "Starting Cost Basis" is when adding a Roth IRA

Cost basis is irrelevant for Roth IRAs since you don't pay gains tax on them. I wonder why this is being asked?

Thanks for giving it a shot! If you go to the account menu (upper right) > Export, you can export your data as JSON.

The sim uses cost basis as how much of the existing $ in there represents your contributions (as opposed to gains), which is useful to know b/c your contributions to a Roth IRA can be withdrawn tax-free and penalty-free. You should see a corresponding category for that in Plan Settings > Drawdown as well.

I just had a play around with this for the first time in a long while (I tried it when it was projectfi), and it's in a really great place - well done!

Love that you support countries other than the US - that's very much appreciated.

What I find when setting up long-term plans like this is that you realize just how much key life decisions affect the outcomes, along with how much uncertainty I have over those life decisions! Being able to explore those permutations is definitely very insightful.

Thanks for playing around with the new version! And sounds like it's a good thing I rebranded to ProjectionLab -- that first 'i' in ProjectiFi was way too easy to miss ;)

Is there a certain direction you'd like to see me take the tool from here?

One thing I'd like to see is a better way to estimate the cost of kids, and specifically per-child. If I could just click a button and have the average cost for a child for my country added from a certain year, that would be awesome.

That's a neat idea! when I estimate future expenses, typically I'll do independent analysis and then bring my final numbers into PL. But I think you're right that there's an opportunity to include some country/region benchmarks or perhaps integrate APIs to pull them on-demand. Do you happen to know of any data providers that might be straightforward to integrate for that sort of thing?

Check out numbeo.com, it's a crowd-sourced database of cost-of-living data.

Hmmm getting NXDOMAIN for that at the moment. But I do see results for it on google. Someone give the intern access to DNS settings?

Hey - this looks like a great project. Congratulations for getting to this point.

I'm UK Based. I'm looking for a consumer facing replacement for (https://www.timeline.co/) which is buggy and not really meant for non Financial Advisors.

Kicking the tyres of this I'm running into an issue - not sure if this is a forum for bug reports/issues - if you'd prefer it elsewhere (discord?) I'm happy to do that. I've entered my data but my plan is cratering into bankruptcy long before it should.

There are various questions I have about this but for starters, looking at the 'Cashflow' tab it seems that the two 'Assets' (property) that I entered (Fully Owned) seem to be automatically incurring yearly recurring fees. I already accounted for the various charges associated with these properties in my yearly expenses (1 catchall of 'general') but it seems that these assets rather than contributing to my NW are detracting from it by causing yearly expenses in the region of ~3.5% of the value of the asset.

We don't have 'property taxes' in the UK, but this aside I seem to be unable to edit these properties in any way (when I entered them I was able to set estimated yearly appreciation of the asset value - but no way to edit the tax on them at the point on entry and no way to edit anything else relating to them within the 'Assets' tab of 'Current Finances').

Happy to help any debugging and contribute as this looks like a really solid project.

Thanks! And luckily I think I know what this is :)

Sounds like you may just need to pay a visit to the Expenses subsection of the House form within the plan interface (Real Assets section beneath the primary chart in the Plan tab).

If you've modeled those externally instead, then you can probably just zero-out the default assumptions for maintenance, insurance, property tax, etc.

Thanks for the quick reply - I just found it myself (this comment helped: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36853067)

Given it's come up twice maybe a UI tweak or prompt might be useful here but I'm loathed to give you any advice to you - this is superb work. Once I have more of a play I'll come back with any further thoughts.

Thanks again

Agreed. That question comes up often enough that I should really find a way to draw more attention to those embedded expenses during the plan creation process. That said, too many dialogs and "hey, look at this" indicators can become obtrusive after a certain point though, so it's always a balancing act.

Very nice! I've been trying to build out a rudimentary simulation / projection spreadsheet. It has scared me into taking my finances much more seriously than I had been.

I'm interested in learning more about the self-hosting option. I take it everything is still closed source? Can you share anything about your stack? The front-end is great! What's the scaffold? Is it JavaScript soup to nuts, or Python, or what?

I'm using Vue.js, Vuetify, Chart.js, Firebase, Paddle, and GCP. PL is pretty client-side-heavy, as alluded to here: https://projectionlab.com/help/enter-data.

Happy to field any more questions about the stack if you're curious what any of the components are like to work with.

Edit: and here's a little more info on how the self-hosted version works: https://projectionlab.com/help/how-self-hosting-works

That's ok, you'd be writing a novella. I've never used any of those components; your stack makes me feel old!

Love this tool! Just signed up for premium.

Question/feedback: is there a way to configure things such that I just pay the correct amount in taxes every year? There's a very detailed part of the plan where I outline that I want to use the US tax bracket strategy, but it's odd to me that I then I have to guess how much taxes to withhold for each income stream. An option where I just always withhold the correct amount per-income stream would be awesome.

If you'd like to see an option to withhold exact taxes automatically (to avoid owing extra with your tax return or getting a refund in the following year), there's an item on the public roadmap that you can upvote.

FWIW though, I expect implementing exact withholding may be a bit more complicated than you'd imagine because of how complex the interactions with the cash-flow priority system can get. To know how your tax brackets align with a particular income source, you need the complete picture of everything else that happens in that year, including every applicable deduction, contributions to any tax-advantaged accounts, any dividends taxable as ordinary income, etc. That's why it is currently assessed at the end of the year (like how it typically works in the US), when all of that information is known and finalized.

My intuition is that it may be difficult for the sim to know everything that's going to happen ahead of time when you consider that cash-flow priorities are often set up to operate on excess cash-flow, rather than predefined amounts per year... so those cash-flow priorities need to know how much is left over to work with, but whatever you contribute to things like pretax retirement accounts would actually end up affecting your taxable income, and thus also affecting what is left over after exact withholding, and around and around that cycle goes... Unless I'm missing something, it seems challenging to ensure that all possible cash-flow priority configurations would be solvable with that approach.

That being said, I agree exact withholding would be a really nice switch to be able to toggle on and off. I just haven't quite wrapped my head around the best way to go about it yet.

Looks super awesome. I was worried about where the data was stored, but it looks like you've already answered that.

Have you looked at adding Google Drive sync? I've done it myself (on a project you've just inspired me to post about on HN) and is a super easy way for people to sync their own data without having to do any kind of setup.

It seems you should be able to do this with other online storage using OAuth but I haven't found anything else that works frontend only.

Google drive sync didn't occur to me, but I'll check it out! Could be a nice option to add to the storage method suite if they have APIs that would be easy to integrate.

Very cool. Is there an easy way to easily toggle on/off various scenarios like "pay for private school for my children" to see how that affects wealth? I didn't see a way to do this without copying a whole plan.

My financial advisor does this with emaplan or blackmountain (or something) and I don't have access to this feature. It's very annoying and an incredibly important part of financial planning.

If you have that modeled as an expense, you can click that expense's icon in your plan to toggle it on and off. Same for other things like income items, real assets, accounts, and cash-flow priorities.

Interesting, but I don't understand how it does taxes. I live in a completely different, much more income tax heavy nation than the US. It shows me large tax returns in the simulation which are orders of magnitude higher than what I'm actually getting. How do I disable or change these?

Edit: Found the taxes tab, but it seemingly didn't apply the income tax rate I provided in the plan creation "wizard"?

Is it possible those large tax returns are a result of not having any tax withholding configured on your income sources?

Just playing around with it and the UI is really intuitive and snappy. Nice job!

Thanks for checking it out! That UI is the product of more than a few sleepless nights.

Are you using Angular for the UI?

I'm using Vue.js, Vuetify, Chart.js, Firebase, Paddle, and GCP.

Very impressed with the mobile UI. Only thing I found was on the Plan tab on mobile there's that tiny extra horizontal scroll. Looks like your app wrapper does max-width: 100%, so if you add overflow-x: hidden you can fix it.

Oops, thanks for the heads-up!

Is there any way to trial the self hosted version? I'm rather interested, partially as someone who doesn't like the idea of putting such data "in the cloud." (For products with less sensitive data I would try the monthly subscription first.) I'm assuming not, and that the self hosted is probably a small percentage of your customer base. But worth asking!

Easiest way to get a feel for the self-hosted version is just to play around with the sandbox in the web app and enter fake data if you like. The planning experience is essentially the same.

If you did end up jumping for the self-hosted version though and hated it for whatever reason, I could always refund you.

Looks a bit expensive but they again you're targeting finance nuts so maybe not.

As a Canadian it looks like you're missing the FHSA as well, though it is relatively new.

Any plans to allow adding stocks to accounts? So I could add that I hold 1000 shares of XEQT in my TFSA and it would update the value automatically? At the very least a flat interest option would be nice for savings accounts.

Good point on FHSA! For savings accounts, you should be able to go into the Growth section of the account form in the plan interface and edit what the account yields.

It would be great to get your thoughts on tickers/tracking in the item on the public roadmap about account linking. Some good back-and-forth on there, and I'm still not settled on which approach to take.

I love to see more tools like this for do-it-yourselfers like me. I've only just now tried using ProjectionLab for about 20 minutes, so take this with a grain of salt, but I've watched Rob Berger's review of the tool and I've been a subscriber to New Retirement for a few months now.

First impressions:

- It's obvious you've put a lot of love into this tool and it really shows. The UI is very responsive and I think I would enjoy using it.

- At first glance, it compares favorably to the core features in New Retirement: Tracking your assets and investments; Showing projections based on different scenarios and assumptions.

- I didn't see any places where it's providing financial planning suggestions. New Retirement offers "Digital Coach Suggestions" which recommends various things to look into, based on the information you enter. For me, that's a valuable feature because one of the reasons why I'd pay for a tool like this is so that it can help me poke holes in my financial plan.

- Your pricing is totally fine. I see your competition as financial planners who charge a few thousand dollars for a one-time financial plan or, worse, an ongoing 1% AUM fee. I've paid a human to do a financial plan. It was worth the money because it gave me the reassurance that I kinda know what I'm doing, but I didn't see the value in paying a recurring fee for them to "monitor" my investments going forward. I'd much rather pay for direct access to a tool that lets me do that myself.

- Despite the previous bullet point, I do see some value in having a human who can give good financial planning advice. I would pay a few hundred dollars to meet with a human who can give me useful advice whenever I'm at an inflection point in my financial life. Maybe that's another potential revenue source for you in the long run.

Thanks for the detailed feedback! A lot of love indeed. And also blood, sweat, and tears haha.

I built PL to be as DIY-centric and unopinionated as I could; and the tool itself doesn't provide formal advice, though I can understand why that's something you might like to see in a planning platform.

Your point about offering a human in the loop somewhere is a good one. I wonder what form that kind of offering could/should take, and also what regulatory hurdles it might introduce.

How are you maintaining the tax rules? I considered building something similar to your tool and found this, which would decouple that hairy task: https://openfisca.org/en/

Also, plans to add Danish tax? A stretch I know for our small country.

So far research and crowdsourcing from the community, but I'd like to get something more automated in place.

If you happen to be well-acquainted with the Danish tax system, one option would be to set up custom brackets/rates/config in Plan Settings > Tax. If you do take a stab at that, let me know how it goes -- if you send over an export with the config, I could probably get that added as a formal template.

I like this.

I've been tracking my financial expenses, incomes, debts and deposits ever since my graduation and start my first job. I've tried saving pdfs of my credit card bills, using beancount (a great tool, text-based, local web UI), developing my own python and in-house text format. I even learnt a bit bookkeeping. Now I'm using Excel and I'm happy with it.

I really don't need your app to gain everything it markets itself with. I either already have it or know how to implement it and it's not hard. But still, if an app could ease my workload and provide a mood-easing beautiful UI and animation, what's the point refusing it ?

My point is, I liked your app and I'm willing to use it only if 1. it's not expensive 2. it does not come with a subscription plan (I hate subscription billing) 3. it's available in any future once my payment is done.

Sounds like the Lifetime plan could potentially be a fit then? And I do offer general discounts on request too (see pricing page) if you feel it's out of reach.

Subscriber here. Just a note to say this is a beautiful, helpful, and well thought out in-depth tool for planning (particularly love the scenario modeling). While my financial updates tend to only be on a ~monthly schedule, I often pop in more frequently simply for design inspiration. Thank you Kyle.

It's this kind of feedback that has kept me energized through all the ups and downs of solo/indie software development over the past two years :)

And FWIW, I tend to update my plans about monthly as well. Feels like a good cadence for me... maybe a little healthier than becoming overly fixated on all the daily price movements.

It would be really nice to be able to set my "Cash Flow Priorities" to max out, or put some other dollar amount in a 401k rather than specifying a percentage of my income.

EDIT: Ah I now see that I can do this, it was just sorta hard to discover at the bottom of the form.

If you click the "more options" ellipsis next to the Your Contribution input, you can switch it to an amount in today's currency or actual currency if you prefer.

Thanks, really enjoyed the app by the way!

I’ve been using the pro version for a year or so and I love it! It was exactly what I was looking for, allowing me to create multiple plans to see how different financial decisions will affect my upcoming retirement. Keep up the good work!

Thanks, glad to hear it! Is there a specific direction you'd like to see me take PL from here?

Very cool. Some of the assumptions really throw your plan out of whack, but digging around I eventually fixed it. An option to limit property tax increases would be nice, to reflect Prop 13 in California. The default estimate of 1.25% of my home value was blowing my entire projection out of the water given the 100+% increase we've seen in values over the last decade.

Also, a default tax rate of 30% is misleading, as that is the marginal rate for the next dollar, not the overall tax rate for someone in that bracket.

It does look good though, and a step up from the projecting that I can do in Quicken. I have 20 years of data in Quicken, which makes some things easy, but other things are hard.

Good point, I believe there's an item on the public roadmap you might like to upvote for adding more property tax options (e.g. to help with modeling cases like California's handling).

Ideally you'd probably want to be using the "Estimate for me" setting in Plan Settings > Tax rather than using a fixed rate. But for those just playing around with the free sandbox that doesn't include tax estimation, would you suggest a different default default fixed rate?

Why don't we have automatic personal finances for every citizen, unless they opt out?

I mean, we sort of have this for retirement plans in many countries. Why not apply the same ideas to the entirety of personal finance, including savings, investments, etc.

Cool to see Projection Lab on HN! If I recall, I've heard you on the the FI show and read on the MadFientist a while back? I come back to play with it every few months and dropped by just this past Sunday. I haven't dove in yet just because my finances are very simple, but I wouldn't be surprised if I dove in to start planning drawn down strategies in the next few.

I'm constantly amazed by how much detail in each option there are. Really cool work and just wanted you to know you that you've made some really impressive software.

Hopefully I'll be a customer soon when I stop being cheap and need more planning!

Thanks! It's a real passion project of mine. Hoping someday it can maybe grow into a full-time thing.

It looks very nice. I have used wealthtrace in the past. I see a lot of mentions of various other tools in the thread. You might consider a competition comparison page to distinguish your solution.

That could be a good idea, yeah.

I think on the whole, PL is at the point now where my engineering abilities have definitely outstripped my marketing/outreach abilities. So I guess I should spend some time really thinking about how to get the word out more broadly.

I think you'd do well doing a podcast interview with some financial independence folks, if that's in your comfort zone. Understandable if it's not.

Paula Pant gives a great interview, as does Brad Barrett at ChooseFI.

Public speaking is always a bit out of my comfort zone haha, but this year I did go on The FI Show and that turned out to be a pretty good conversation: https://thefishow.com/kyle

Just got mentioned on the latest Dough Roller podcast FWIW, from July 21.

Oh thanks, I had no idea!

And you're using https://changemap.co for your public roadmap, another incredible tool in its own right ;)

well hello there ;)

Biggest problem with the pricing is that you are selling an expensive tool to cheap bastards that tend to be in your ICP.

Idea: sell this with a course to idiots and call it "how to be nerd rich", and then create the OnlyFans of Finance by letting said idiots subscribe for 5 dollars a month + streaming fee to the kinds of nerds you are marketing this to now.

I offer you this amazing plan at a 0 basis point equity stake. Deal?

And I assume rebrand to OnlyFinance? XD

Amazing product, well done! I see that you support some country-specific stuff. What's your plan for adding more countries? Clearly you adding them one by one, and tracking the various rules and regulations of each one, isn't scalable. Is there a way for the community to help adding (and updating) country-specific stuff? I'm personally interested in adding Israeli stuff and I'm willing to contribute my free time to that end.

My aim is to make the tax config UI increasingly flexible over time to allow modeling a wider variety of countries. And since you can export your data to JSON via the account menu (upper right) > Export, you and others in the community may be able to get a sense for what the data model looks like and propose tweaks/changes to the international tax templates.

Have you considered creating a github repo with a folder for each country, and then let the community add country-specific stuff in some simple yaml/json file? Each country can have it's own maintainer that verifies the data is correct and up to date. You'd then be able to source this data back into the app.

Thanks, I think this idea is worth looking into!

I've been tracking finances for years, can I add historical information so I can see timelines or is it all just from today forward like so many other trackers?

You can add historical progress points. Just with the caveat that those currently capture a slightly higher-level rollup than account-level data. In the future I plan to convert the progress point system into more of a "snapshot" system.

Thank you for developing and offering the self-hosting capability. I use spreadsheets for my planning at the moment but self-hosting makes this a serious option.

It's always been a goal to put the user in direct control of their data, so when the HN community asked for a self-hosted version last year, it felt like a natural fit.

Way back, PL actually started as one of my personal planning spreadsheets as well. I'm sure there are more talented spreadsheet creators out there than me, but I remember that mine ultimately reached a point where the complexity became so difficult to maintain (and trust) that I threw in the towel and decided to build a web app instead.

I ran into a bug so bad I gave up.

I entered some details, then got confused by the UI so I pressed the back button.

Then I got a “Recover Data” message, but to actually recover the data I had to upgrade to premium. Obviously I’m not going to upgrade to premium for an app where I have spent about 2 seconds looking around it.

Also I’m not going to spend another 10 min re-entering my details.

Sorry to hear you ran into trouble with the sandbox. Data persistence is a premium feature, but it should warn about unsaved data if you try to close the tab or navigate away. Did that not happen in your case? And if so, what browser/OS/device?

If it's not clear, you can just sign up for the free trial of Premium, cancel it immediately, and have 7 days to try everything out for free. Perhaps offering a limited time to restore a previous session without needing to do that would be nice, but I don't think I have a good mechanism to make that tamper-resistant.

Would love to see some integration of insurance and risk modeling (e.g. techniques to minimize downside risk, healthcare insurance, ACA subsidy interaction, P&C/home insurance, auto insurance risk) included as a feature — that's been incredibly hard for me personally in my own risk spreadsheets! DM me if you are interested in some of the actuarial data on some of these and how I model it...

Is there a certain kind of UI you envision for more first-class support for insurance modeling? Curious to hear your take on the best way to integrate that into the current setup.

Most unexpected insurance-covered events follow a Poisson-like distribution in both cost and frequency. By modeling different deductibles, premiums, and frequency of events, you can help plan and optimize for what insurance coverage you should purchase, how much drawdown you could expect to see in worst case scenarios, etc.

the app looks incredible, but I'm apprehensive about putting all of my financial details into a solo project without knowing a little more about how you've addressed security & privacy - is there somewhere I can read about how you are ensuring my information stays secure?

as a HN user/pretty senior webdev, I'm happy to get into the more gritty details :)

let me know if this helps, or if there's more you'd like to see: https://projectionlab.com/help/enter-data

oh, that's wise – don't even take the data in the first place. good idea :)

I miss when websites had username only login. I get that password recovery is a thing, but I use a password manager.

Why do you need my email address?

In this case, I'm using Firebase auth and didn't see an auth provider option to allow username only. I think it may let you sign up with a nonexistent email though, so maybe that's close-ish to what you were looking for?

I'm a very happy user of the app.

Love the sankey charts you added. I had a DIY version of that before.

Excited to try the self-hosting when I have some free time.

Thanks! When you kick the tires on self-hosting, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the setup flow and if you find it smooth + intuitive enough.

LOL, people serious about financial independence aren't paying $100+/yr for a model they can run in a spreadsheet.

Hi Kyle, congrats for launching! I hope you're monitoring HN discussion. If you do, some questions:

1. Is this auto-saved? When I'm about to close it, Chrome warns me about losing data.

2. I think it does auto-save, but when I return, I'm blocked by a pop up with 2 buttons: Upgrade or Remove Data. OK... how do I resume?

The free sandbox does not include data persistence, so if that's something you would like, then signing up for the free trial of Premium would be the next step. And if you want an extended trial beyond the default 7 days, just let me know; always happy to set that up.

These finance apps bore the heck out of me. Seems like they all do the same thing. When to retire based on sufficient money. It's not hard to know you shouldn't overspend in life. Then you just need to figure out when you want to stop working. Not about money but about when you're over it.

Many people have complicated finances, or are on uncertain trajectories. This can provide a mental model to help understand and navigate the lumpy bits, and hopefully assist with making sensible and valuable decisions early on.

If it’s boring, change the channel?

There is just a flood of these apps. Sigh. Isn't there anything else we could work on and monetize?

This looks really, really good. I would certainly use and pay for this if it had my data, but I'm not willing to take the time to enter it all and keep it up-to-date. I don't see anything discussing features for importing data and linking accounts, so it just doesn't work for me.

Is account linking the primary thing you'd like to see? Or is there another kind of data as well?

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the back-and-forth in the public roadmap and also the discord related to account linking. Whether or not I should actually try to tackle that (and in what way) is a somewhat contentious topic within the PL community.

Pretty much just account linking to get the balances for all my investment accounts and for mortgage (honestly don't care much about checking/savings/credit) and to keep them automatically updated. Don't really care about anything around transactions or finer grained budgeting. like, i imagine there's people that really want that, but it feels like a different (huge) project. I guess I find I get some small value from mint tracking that stuff, I wouldn't be against that being supported (but i wouldn't want it to detract from the main point).

i don't think i would use pdf imports. i'm sure some would be fine with that, but it's not worth my time.

I probably wouldn't really trust you with my credentials to any of those accounts, like i begrudgingly would for intuit/mint, and i don't know the state of integration apis these days but maybe that, unfortunately, would mean that you'd need to integrate with someone else that I do trust with that (if all the things i cared about allowed me to give you read-only access without sharing passwords, that's fine).

getting rsu vesting schedule automatically would be a nice bonus, but at least schwab's handling of this seems pretty much like a second class citizen so wouldn't be surprised if it's rather impossible.

What's your experience been like using account linking in other tools? From what I hear, most of the aggregator services still have frequent enough issues that just taking 10-15 mins to plug your numbers in manually to a tool like PL once a month is sometimes less overall effort than trying to identify and debug why x, y, z accounts aren't syncing right this week.

If there's a good solution out there that just universally works though, and wouldn't be a giant support/maintenance tar pit for a solo dev to take on, definitely point me in that direction :)

My experience in the last 5 years or so it's been fine, I haven't had any issues that bothered me. I'm not going to waste my time trying to debug something that's not working. I can imagine that someone willing to waste their time doing that might also be willing to waste their time doing manual data entry.

I find the pricing structure a little odd. I think it's expensive for individuals (selfishly, as this is the group I would be in), and it seems way cheap to me for advisors. I'm admittedly not in the financial world, but I would think the value-add for advisors would make this a no-brainer.

If a few people are starting to complain about pricing, then maybe I'm finally in the right ballpark now haha. I do also offer general discounts on request (form on pricing page).

Something that would be cool would to do Traditional IRA to Roth conversion planning; a friend has put together software to estimate that, and due to taxes, found that he could save significant amounts of money by converting earlier than I would have expected.

If you open up the account form for your Traditional IRA (plan interface, left section), there's a subsection for Roth Conversions :)

Thanks!

I'm yet to spend time on this, just wanted to let you know that I absolutely despise those walking tour flying dialogs. They're very annoying and quickly move my eyes from the dashboard (what I want to see) to something I couldn't care less about.

Me too! haha. I only added those after a bunch of people requested them.

If you dismiss them, they don't reappear do they? They shouldn't at least...

I had it reappear 3 times when I was trying it out moving between pages. First time was before I created an account though in the sandbox. Not sure exactly the replication steps for the second and third time it showed up.

A complicating factor is that there are at least 2 different tours for different sections of the interface (e.g. high-level dashboards vs plan interface).

Do you think it would be better to infer from one tour dismissal that a user never wants to see another tour for anything else?

I would say just write a tutorial page (or pages) or a record a video to show usage. Those tours really are useless.

I've had some less tech savvy users say they appreciated them. Demo videos might be a good alternative though... until other folks roll up and ask for a UI tour to show them where the demo video collection is :P

Have to give this a try. personal finance is a pain point for me, signing up.

Thanks for making this. I’ve been a subscriber for awhile now and have advocated it’s usage to coworkers, family and even a Chase financial planner who had a lamer version that took minutes to rerun.

Wow thanks! Maybe you were one of the OG people who inspired me to keep working on it :D

Nice! this is the closest to what I have been wanting to build for myself.

If there are any pieces of what you envisioned that you would like to see added to PL, let me know.