SmartAsset (YC S12) Raises Money to Disrupt Financial Advice | Hacker News Reader

SmartAsset (YC S12) Raises Money to Disrupt Financial Advice

techcrunch.com

41 pointsmcarvin17 comments

The original title is, "Y Combinator-Backed Financial Decision Making Startup SmartAsset Raises $900K" which is better, because they aren't disrupting anything. If the title hadn't had 'disrupt' in it, I'd have been less likely to roll my eyes.

Not to be confused with SmartWater: http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/dynamic/press_center/site...

I know, I'm trolling. Sorry. But it's too similar. They should tweak it.

Moving on... for the most part it seems, big financial decisions like this are usually summed up as: "It depends." It's just hard to make reasonable recommendations since the answer is so dependent on each individual's situation.

For home buying decisions specifically, once you get beyond rent vs. buy calculations for X zip code, and into personal spending habits and discipline, work situations, family history, future plans, market trends, investment history and ability, and just general personal behavior, I can imagine it getting very tricky. (Not to mention how do you trust the information provided by the user without a personal relationship with that person or a decent history? Is it pulled from some source? Or are you just asking them?)

I'm curious to see how they handle that.

If they can give actual advice tailored to the individual based on all that supporting data, they have something. But if in the end it's just vague recommendations (essentially, "it depends") then it's just more of the same.

Not to mention the privacy challenges that would come with gathering all that data required to make solid recommendations.

Anyway, and interesting service worth keeping an eye on for sure. Tough nut to crack, but if they do it, they'll stand out.

How is this different to the many other services that tell you how much house you can get for your money? A pretty UI and being YC-backed does not a "disruptor" make.

on the back-end we are: > ensuring our users qualify for mortgages based on the zipcode and financial profile > further seeing if they qualify for any government programs > running their taxes on a federal, state and local level to understand if there are any tax benefits to home ownership (almost always overestimated for lower incomes and underestimated for higher incomes) > drawing on local real estate tax data > drawing on local transactional expenses (including any transactional taxes you need to pay, like mortgage recording tax in nyc) > the above, including your financial inputs are then 'modeled'. We actually build several different models for you, and through the comparison of those models we can give advice on a level of accuracy that could not previously be approached.

The result is utility, accuracy and ease of use that we believe is dramatic on improvement on financial calculators. And we are really just scratching the surface on what the modeling engine can do for many different decisions.

I love what these guys are attempting. Home buying is a combination of many factors and anyone that can master the art of helping with this process will surely be an important player in the market. Good luck with this.

Will never get tired of hearing that. Obviously have an enormous amount of work to do but thanks.

np. One thing that is a serious pain point of mine right now is help selecting the right location to buy. Other than finances/budget, location is key in real estate as we all know. Do you have a plan to be able to build this feature later ? For example, I work in NYC and my wife works in Central NJ. We have to select a house that works best in terms of commute, preference of size, etc. You get the point. If I can get help with that, I am even willing to pay :)

Thanks for the heads up. Will see what we can do!

I had no idea closing costs were so high (~6%). Guess I'll be waiting to buy a house for a little longer than I thought.

It depends on the area. That is high for where I live. The seller has to pay 6% to the realtors, but the costs for the buyer varies a lot.

Also, you can ask for the seller to cover a lot of your closing costs. Even if they take that money from the price of the home (and it goes up or doesn't come down as much), you get more money towards your down payment. Try to have as large of a down payment as possible.

I ran through the whole system, and I noticed that If I use the sliders in the info-graphic to change the down payment, it doesn't update that value in the "How Much House Can I Afford" Down payment text box. Is there a backwards refresh in the system?

Also, I didn't notice a "reset" button. Any thoughts?

As usual, success will depend on having lots of scalable, indexable content with lots of Google juice. Not just tools.

Brilliant service, quick suggestion - the database that matches IP-to-City that you're using to auto-fill "Your Location" on the "taxesintro" page and others is inaccurate.

Got my city wrong by ~15 miles.

Interesting because it was IDENTICALLY inaccurate to a project I was working on a few weeks ago, we upgraded to http://www.maxmind.com/app/city and that got it dialed in, imagine it would for you too (or if you're using their DB already, pay for the upgrade - we do once a quarter).

Wow, thanks for that. Will definitely look into it.

I filled out the mortgage estimation tool and in three separate cases it suggested trying to find a house with a negative value.

thanks for the note. can you email us at info at smartasset dot com with the inputs you used?

I'm guessing the author of this HN post is an employee at SmartAsset. Sensationalism only works on stupid people (read: for a long duration).

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