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Comment by sthatipamala | Hacker News Reader

Great work! This might be unpopular among the HN crowd, but I think you can monetize this further by bundling this with an advising service.

This idea of FIRE has been spreading beyond techies/Internet nerds and into other highly paid professionals like doctors. [0]. The main difference is that non-programmer professionals generally don't get a thrill out of min/max-ing financial projections.

Such people might be willing to pay a few hundred dollars a year for someone to generate this kind of analysis with them and simply execute on it each year. Similar to how people pay for CPAs. My employer actually pays Goldman Sachs to provide a similar service for its employees (no commission, fiduciary advisors) but their tools suck compared to this.

[0] For example https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/, https://www.physicianonfire.com/

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To an extent, I was hoping to support use cases like this with the Pro version I rolled out recently. But perhaps I'm currently more out of the loop than you envision, in the sense that I'm not actively pairing people with advisors and it's just a product that advisors can use if they want. What do you imagine a more "bundled" offering might look like?

Personal Capital actively prompt to try to set up a meeting pretty much every time you log in. They're hoping that you'll sign up for some active management stuff, or do they have a robo-investing option (I can't remember.)

At a certain net-worth, they'll start calling you on a regular basis trying to get you to do the same.

It's all pretty annoying. Perhaps do that, and after a 6 months of so of calls and prompts, then offer to stop calling / prompting for $10 a month.

haha I think I've pretty firmly planted my flag in the territory of not annoying people with calls.

> some active management stuff, or do they have a robo-investing option (I can't remember.)

IIRC it's robo-investing. I got a pitch from them, and it was mostly "high expense ratio funds are bad, we put you in low cost funds with expense ratio of < .10% to save you money".

"OK... but your expense fee is .90% of funds under management - this puts me at approximately 1%/year in fees."

"But we're actively rebalancing 2x per year and we do tax loss harvesting".

I was close to giving them a small $ to manage/test with, but backed out.

Run away when you see some bullsh-t like this:

  "But we're actively rebalancing 2x per year and we do tax loss harvesting".

What if all of your funds are up for the period? There is no tax loss harvesting to be done(!), but you are still paying 100bps per year. To me: "tax loss harvesting" is akin to "tax write-offs" -- see Seinfeld TV episode. The money is still spent / lost. Taxes are an after thought...

Beat them all: Put all of your money is an ETF that tracks S&P 500 index. iShares IVV and Vanguard VOO are excellent. Expenses are less than 5bps per year! After 3/5/10 years, you are nearly guaranteed (statistically) to be ahead of the investment advisor when including expenses.

I tend to agree. There's some value in having a real person to talk to, but it really depends on the person. PC people are generally just going to walking you through whatever the algorithm is implementing anyway, and... I just didn't see enough value in it. That said, I've lost plenty trying 'my own thing' on single stocks, but ... I pretty much knew it was a gamble. Majority of value is in a handful of basic ETFs and mutual funds with low expense ratios (< .10% overall, IIRC), so... there's not too much advantage in having someone else do the same thing for me (or really, for most people, imo).

You wrote: <<There's some value in having a real person to talk to, but it really depends on the person.>>

I agree 100%. I think it is a good idea to pay for at least one hour of financial advice per year. Do not buy any products recommended if they receive a direct or indirect commission. An outsider who studies the financial situation of others for a living will usually have helpful advice, even if limited to: "This is good." or "Have you considered...?"

You’re not too far away. A simple next step is to directly connect me with an advisor who uses ProjectionLab. I bet financial planning is a competitive market and advisors would be willing to use your tool as a unique selling point, or even pay you for the leads you supply.

Another bundling is to help users execute on their projections, similar to how https://www.helloplaybook.com does with tax advantaged investing.

More generally, I think there is an opportunity to market the product not as a tool (“ProjectionLab builds the best financial projections”) but as a solution to a problem (“ProjectionLab lets you retire early/plan to pay down your debt/buy a house”).

I know you’re doing this as a side project and maybe what I’m suggesting is too startup-y. Best of luck either way, it’s a really great product.

To add, the non tech crowd doesn't really know or have the time to learn about investing. They just need someone to manage their finances. The advisory profession is alive mostly because of this. Instead of acting as a lead gen to advisors, perhaps you could add more value by doing some sort of filtering or match making based on user's data, totally at the discretion of the investor/user. This will be incredibly helpful. You could become some sort of a scaled arbitrage between investors and advisors - a huge gap that exists today.

Sounds like an interesting model. I wonder if it would come with any regulatory hurdles in addition to the technical work plus efforts to make inroads with enough advisors... and then I wonder if there's a way to advertise that kind of optional product offering without immediately turning off the contingent of privacy-focused DIYers that the tool currently resonates with.

If you decide to offer advisory services on your own, then yes there might be some regulatory hurdles. You are not going down that route. Match making should still be fine, am not sure.

Agreed about turning off existing users, but you can carefully orchestrate this to help users find appropriate advisors as a completely opt-in service. I think you can find a scalable monetization model in match making. Not sure what your plans are, but yeah unlikely you'll be able to pull it off in solo mode.

Totally impressed with what you have built.

Thanks! I have loads of ideas for new features and things that will be fun to build; but I should probably at least take a breath sometime soon and contemplate all the possible paths. If you or others have any words of wisdom to share, I always enjoy hearing from other perspectives.

Yep highly encourage to take a breath, at some regular cadence and contemplate on all possible paths. I don't know how to be effective at this though. You need some notion of feature management to accomplish this.

I am looking to build a similar tool for engineers who are switching jobs and have multiple job offers. Essentially a financial projection of options 1, 2 and 3 taking into account inflation, location and salary growth.

Happy to brainstorm and collaborate if you are up for it.

I'd be happy to chat if you like; feel free to message me on email/discord.

Are you implying that investing is something specific to "the tech crowd"?

the problem is that the type of advisors you are talking about only care about selling products and making commissions, they actually don't care about helping people make the right decisions.

the same goes for CPAs - the moment they see that your tax situation becomes too complicated or a potential liability or they can't make a good profit (read: cookie cutter tax situation which can be handled by fresh grads but can be invoiced at partner rate) they tell you to go elsewhere.

I've heard of fee-only financial advisors. They don't make commissions or skim percentage points off your portfolio, so their incentives should be more directly aligned to yours.

Any data yet on how that model tends to play out over the long-run in the average case? Off the cuff it does sound like incentives could be better aligned though.

I work with a local independent advisor, and while they do make money on commissions they've never advised me to go a direction that doesn't work just to buy a product, and their advice is worth every penny in fees that I pay on the money they manage (which is not most of my retirement dollars, just a small chunk, per their advice to keep it in low-fee funds.) In general I'd say find somebody you trust. Try to work local if you can.

Anyway, my advisor works via a larger "network" company that provides their white-label tools to run monte carlo sims, etc and game out retirement. None of them are this accessible / slick. Definitely something to this.

Any thoughts on the path you might take to approach that? As a solo dev building this as a side project currently, I don't exactly have a huge existing network of connections in the advisory space.

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