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Comment by teach | Hacker News Reader

I hadn't messed around with this when you posted previously but today I did.

I tried to forecast buying a house, but it seems to have defaulted to 0% APR for Infinity. I don't know anything about buying houses; that's why I'm using a tool like this in the first place!

I poked around and was finally able to open a screen to enter values for a bunch of things but I don't know what's reasonable.

It kinda feels like your onboarding wizard is too good -- it creates the illusion that I can use your site even if I don't really know anything about anything, but then trying to forecast expects me to know a lot more.

I know that's not very actionable feedback, but that's what has put me off actually paying for a subscription so far.

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You make a good point that adding more educational scaffolding would be helpful. I try to include some sensible defaults where I can (e.g. assuming houses are going to have some maintenance/insurance/tax costs associated with them), but yeah in some places existing knowledge or independent research comes in handy.

Are there sections in the app that jump out to you as good places to inject more educational content? As you point out, one of the input fields when you add as house and choose "financed" is APR. Maybe that could link to a dedicated page with common rates based on a few parameters like credit score, or perhaps even a separate tool dedicated to estimating that sort of thing?

I use New Retirement and one of my biggest complaints about that app is that it expects you to provide the optimistic/pessimistic rate of return for each of your investment accounts. I would love to have a tool that provides some guidance on setting those numbers, based on historical returns and the asset classes in the account.

I can see value in having similar guidance for things like mortgage interest rates. Maintaining all of this educational content and keeping it up to date may be a challenge, though.

Yeah quite a few FIRE tools which allow you to model retirement scenarios will let you pre-fill return rates based on historic returns.

This one is pretty nice to mimic. You have to Ctrl+F for 'projection method' and then switch it to Historic Cycles, or Monte Carlo Simulation:

https://engaging-data.com/fire-calculator/

Then you'll see basically a distribution appear on the graph with the median (50%), but also the 25% & 75%, and the 10% & 90% likely return scenarios.

Quite useful to see what a bottom 10% ('worst-case') scenario would look like, and how it would affect your finances and your timelines.

Showing or linking to the relevant historical data/rates next to each of those inputs sounds like a good feature idea to me.

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