I'm super interested in this, but, every time I try this you end up losing me in the funnel. It takes too long to set everything up and I eventually lose interest and exit.
1. Beginning of career 2. Mid career (20 years in) 3. Close to retirement
It'd save on some of the starting questions, but I don't know if that's even possible.
It's true though, making a detailed plan requires detailed inputs. Are there any specific areas in the funnel that you would recommend cutting out or altering?
- compound interest should be the default.
- when asked rent and house expenses as a percentage, is it a percentage of initial cost? current value? future value? It doesn't really make sense as a percentage. I don't charge a tenant X% of my cost, I charge market rate which may be more, or less than my actual expenses.
- same for taxes. it's a nearly fixed amount that increases over time, but trying to do it as a % calculation of actual dollars is often incorrect because that's not how it's calculated in real life.
Effective yearly tax rate
Yearly maintenance costs
Yearly insurance rate
I automatically visualize "rate" as a percentage but I see "costs" as being expressed in actual money, so I inserted (believed to be inserting) 2,000 Euro in maintenance costs which of course ended up being 2,000% of the asset value.
Quickest bankrupt ever!
Maybe Yearly Maintenance Rate would be less prone to possible errors?
Still in Assets->House.
Your simulator seems to work "by category", i.e. it takes expenses for the house (taxes, maintenance, insurance) from the value of the asset?
I.e. with constant income fixed 6000 (salary until retirement and same amount as pension, tax exempt, todays money, follow inflation), no living expenses, and only a house with value fixed to 200000 (but adjusted to inflation), 1% tax, 1% maintenance, 1% insurance, the value of the asset decreases.
That should be 6000 income tax exempt, 6000 expenses, same house, everything fixed but adjusted to inflation.
But it is not like you are going to pay taxes, maintenance or insurance with "slices" of your house.
Anyway, with those values I start at 25 Net Worth 200,000 (only the house) and end up at 92 with a house worth 26000 and a lot of cash, 121000.
In the Wizard:
House 200000 200000 paid off
Acknowledge, etc. Confirm
Create a Plan
etc.
Now I have Other Asset value 200,000, Already Owned, cancels out Rent expenses during ownership, Value is fixed only adjusted for inflation, never sold
etc.
House starts at age 25 200,000, arrives at age 92 at 25,986. 25 first year is 200,000 26 second year is 194,000 27 third year is 188,180
The asset is defined "Fixed value only adjusted for inflation".
Of course if I enter the asset and change from "none" (that is now explained as "Inflation of 3% will decrease asset value over time") to "Match inflation" (that is explained as "Asset value will increase over time matching the inflation rate of 3%" and comes out on the main plan as "Value increases to match inflation" I get the "flat graph" I expected.
The issue is about the wording:
"Fixed value only adjusted for inflation"
vs:
"Value increases to match inflation"
The (fixed) value of an asset cannot "increase to match" (it is fixed) it can only be "adjusted to match".
As I see it the first one is "Fixed not adjusted to anything" and the second is "Fixed but adjusted to match inflation". (and something like these will disambiguate from Appreciate/Depreciate).
BTW the actual Appreciate/Depreciate % needs to be increased/decreased of inflation rate.
As I see it, there should be three possibilities only:
Fixed
Appreciate (and its %)
Depreciate (and its %)
and then a separate checkbox for "Match Inflation".
As an example, if you have Inflation at 3% and select Appreciate 1%, the result is a declining value (as you have no way to Appreciate it 1% AND match inflation, while it is common - at least here - to consider appreciation rate not as absolute but the difference over inflation, it should be specified/explained that there you need to put an absolute rate including inflation).
Free tier does not appear to persist data. Please do not make me re-enter the data if I want to get on a plan later...
Maybe persist for the free plan but only for a month. That should give me enough time to decide if I want to convert.
I feel like a lot of products with subscription plans want to convert too quickly. I have a full time job and family. Life gets in the way of being able to dedicate full attention to getting something setup.
Does the data I'd entered thus far get purged, and I would have to re-enter it if I picked the plan back up?
I feel like this kind of tool might be something I'd update once a quarter or once a year, but not want to pay for every month. But if my data is deleted in between uses, it's also a lot less useful. Is there a rational middle ground?
And yeah I see your point on wanting to come back and update things periodically. Is this perhaps where the yearly / lifetime plan options make more sense? Or are those priced too steeply in your estimation?
There's no way to know that before choosing a paid plan though, is there?
I'm not a good person to ask - I avoid spending money (I think) much more so than most people. And I wrote my own software for tracking all my finances (with zero graphs.) So I'm hesitant to spend money on other software.
Depending on a person's weakness or uncertainty, this kind of software can fill in a lot of gaps and help them make decisions that can dwarf the cost of your software, so I doubt the pricing is prohibitive.
As always, take me picking apart your software as a token of interest and a compliment. (I really wish I'd start picking up graphs from my back log...!)
On the home page in the "How it Works" section, there's a screenshot showing how you can remove your data. Perhaps I should make that even more prominent though, since evidently not everyone notices.
Thanks for the feedback!