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Comment by jebarker | Hacker News Reader

For those in the US trying to do retirement planning I highly recommend trying: https://projectionlab.com/

I first saw it shared on HN and I've been a happy customer for the past year and the ability to compare the impact of different scenarios has helped me make a few big financial decisions. Good community around it for asking questions too.

View on HN

Gave this a try and have to say, these visualizations are super useful and for me. Opened my eyes quite a bit to a concept that seems obvious: $1k spent now isn't just $1k spent, it's $1k not invested and growing over the rest of your life.

Far too much of my own money has been squandered on living in the now, and tools like this help give me the tools to grasp what it really means to tweak the balance of spending and saving when viewed over the long run.

Thanks for this link. Super valuable! I'm not clear on how it's considering 529s (for you, or for kid[s]?). I wish the "about you" allowed you to add kids and their projected college years into the financial plan.

It's worth making the feature suggestion via discord or e-mail. I've found the developer to be very responsive.

That is in the Plans section. Are you in the phase of building a 529 or withdrawing from one? Either way, the app supports it and both of them are in the Plans section. In it, you can prioritize your cash outflow to build a 529 or include it as part of your inflow if you are withdrawing from one.

I'm building 529 balances for two kids, and I have future "school" dates for both, along with expenses for both starting at those future dates. I guess I'm not understanding how it's working in the plan & cashflow, since I'm seeing the cash outflow for the expenses, but I'm not seeing the cash inflow from the 529s (since they're the owners of them)?

The Cash Flow tab is the result of the inputs in Plan, so no inputs needed there. In the Plan tab, lower right, you will see the 'Cash Flow Priorities'. There you enter the details (time span, amount, etc.) of the build up phase. In the 'Income' section you can enter the withdrawal phase on your "school" dates, as cash inflow. You can add each kid their own entries for different withdrawal date span. Under the 'Expenses' tab is where you put the details of the outflow (ie. expenses) during the "school" dates.

HTH

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