Show HN: Opul – find and optimise your financial freedom age | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Opul – find and optimise your financial freedom age

opul-ai.github.io

Hi HN - here is a tool I built to provide modelling around an individuals journey to financial freedom, a journey which fascinates me and one I believe is worth optimising.

One of the biggest challenges I faced in my own journey was knowing exactly how to balance living well today with my goal of reaching freedom as early as possible. This is why I built Opul - to provide the modelling that enables better financial decisions by quantifying these kind of tradeoffs.

A key use of the tool I find helpful is when I'm deciding between spending today and the amount of future freedom that translates to. Eg What budget allows me to enjoy life now whilst reaching financial freedom when I want? What is the impact on future freedom of a $5 a day lunch habit? How about a $200 a month gym membership?

I hope Opul can help you make more optimal and precise decisions too. Feedback welcome.

I love this idea. There are so many financial apps out there but none of them actually help the average person plan things out and understand the effect of different decisions. Is there somewhere I can follow to receive updates on the project?

Have you thought about making it more of like a choose-your-own adventure interface? I've thought about that before, but there are too many projects in my queue.

Hi alex, thanks for your thoughts.

Not currently publishing updates other than to the site itself... opul.ai is hopefully an easy link to remember :)

I like the choose-your-own interface idea - this could hide a lot of the complexity that isn't necessary for certain users.

I made a similar and more shitty version of this a few weeks ago https://peasleyk.gitlab.io/easy_fire/. I like your idea of ways to modify it with the toolkit to see alternate paths.

Nice tool. Just curious... how did you chose the default investment return and salary growth over inflation?

Maybe you can add some tooltips in both fields explaining what are typical realistic values.

Thanks for taking a look.

Good question. Investment return is a ballpark figure from my knowledge of long-run assumptions in the investment industry, and for salary growth I've put a conservative estimate. Salary growth in particular is more intended to be picked by the user for their specific circumstance and understanding of pay growth in their role.

Tooltips are a great idea, certainly planning to add these!

When I try this in an incognito window with wifi turned off it doesn't seem to work. I see some invalid date error messages.

Thanks for taking a look. On load there's instances where numbers aren't yet being calculated which gives some text reading "(invalid date)" and "NaN" in the place of results.

It's only when you fill out the "Current situation" inputs that the request to the API fires to run the calculations and return the results - I suspect the case here may be that the request hasn't been fired yet as the inputs haven't been fully filled?

I'll be working to make this user journey more clear in any case

> that the request to the API fires to run the calculations and return the results

Why use an API? seems like that raises a lot of security/privacy issues and these calculations are simple enough to do locally, no?

Primarily because C# is my main language and I vastly prefer to write calculation engines with it.. Also the inputs could just as likely be random theoretical numbers, I am not perceiving a security or privacy issue?

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