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.
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.
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.
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.