When making big financial decisions, I found myself making a brand new, hyper-specific, spreadsheets and redoing a lot of math every time, since I’d forgotten how my old spreadsheets worked. So I abstracted the common features that went into all my decisions and put them in a single web app (not a spreadsheet, but it sort of looks like one).
At a high level, finances (or at least mine) can be broken down into assets, liabilities, incomes and expenses (including taxes). The app puts all of those in a single dashboard and charts how your assets, liabilities, and net worth grow or shrink over time. I know there are a ton of tools in the personal finance space, but I think what makes mine different is that (a) it’s just about prediction, not tracking, (b) it’s designed to be viewed on a single page, and (c) it’s not meant to answer “can I afford something?”, but “what will happen if I do this?”.
The simplicity is partly born of necessity — this is my first solo project — but also intentional. I’ve found that high-impact financial decisions often become clearer when you focus on how they affect net worth far into the future, rather than on short-term optimization.
My roadmap includes multiple tabbed scenarios, project-based grouping of items, point-in-time snapshots (to compare past predictions with reality), and a chatbot that can game out scenarios with you.
I’d really appreciate any feedback, especially on whether this level of abstraction feels useful, and on user experience. Also, opinions on whether when you come back days later it should show the numbers you put in or the expected values for the current date.
As a side note, in the pre-populated example linked I have incomes and expenses flow directly to and from the investment account. This is simpler than including transfers between cash and investments (which also isn’t even supported). Does this feel unintuitive? Is there a more natural way to model this?
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Show HN: A simple tool for modeling long-term financial decisions · HackerTrans
At a high level, finances (or at least mine) can be broken down into assets, liabilities, incomes and expenses (including taxes). The app puts all of those in a single dashboard and charts how your assets, liabilities, and net worth grow or shrink over time. I know there are a ton of tools in the personal finance space, but I think what makes mine different is that (a) it’s just about prediction, not tracking, (b) it’s designed to be viewed on a single page, and (c) it’s not meant to answer “can I afford something?”, but “what will happen if I do this?”.
The simplicity is partly born of necessity — this is my first solo project — but also intentional. I’ve found that high-impact financial decisions often become clearer when you focus on how they affect net worth far into the future, rather than on short-term optimization.
My roadmap includes multiple tabbed scenarios, project-based grouping of items, point-in-time snapshots (to compare past predictions with reality), and a chatbot that can game out scenarios with you.
I’d really appreciate any feedback, especially on whether this level of abstraction feels useful, and on user experience. Also, opinions on whether when you come back days later it should show the numbers you put in or the expected values for the current date.
As a side note, in the pre-populated example linked I have incomes and expenses flow directly to and from the investment account. This is simpler than including transfers between cash and investments (which also isn’t even supported). Does this feel unintuitive? Is there a more natural way to model this?