Comment by tinkerrr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tinkerrr | Hacker News Reader

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This is great but ... rudimentary. The same advice on 'create a 6-month emergency fund' no matter the financial situation, without regard to the cost of such a plan (in lost returns) and taking into consideration that depending on your financial situation, getting that amount in credit isn't that difficult.

Similar thing with life insurance. Sure, it is great for some. But when I entered that I am single and have no kids, it still recommends life insurance. Why exactly? It is known to be bad from an investment point of view - insurance should be bought for insurance reasons anyway.

Similar situation with renters insurance - without knowing what my belongings are worth, how can you recommend that I need renters insurance up to $500 per year?

p.s. the app doesn't work if you have ublock origin installed. Just an FYI.

Thanks for the feedback!

Yes, it is rudimentary for now -- it's a prototype after all. There's only one 'financial philosophy' built in to the algorithm, and it's quite conservative about lowering risk. But we think in the future it'll be useful to be able to switch philosophies with a single click.

Regarding life insurance, it only recommends it if you have a spouse, partner, or children. If not, it explicitly says, "Life Insurance: Until you have a spouse, a partner, or kids you probably do not need life insurance." If you're seeing something different it's a bug. I'd love a screenshot if you have one: victor@nickelhq.com

It seems to prioritize savings for a vacation over savings for children's education.

It should only allocate savings for vacation and the user-defined goal after saving for everything else. There's two separate loops in the code. But I'll verify it's working correctly.

It also allocated to the user defined goal before children's college education.

My advice would be to reduce the number of inputs and achieve a testable range of permutations as the minimum viable product...then test the hell out of it so that features can be added without regressions.

My impression is that the state space is enormous given the number of options and it is unlikely that any individual can hold the corner cases in their head given the combinatorial explosion.

Good luck.

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