fsflyer

It depends on a number of issues. For example, if you want to retire early, you can withdraw Roth contributions after five years, but need to wait until 59 1/2 years old (or 55 in some circumstances) to withdraw from a traditional 401K or IRA.

If retiring early, it may be better to do traditional contributions while working and then do Roth conversions at lower tax rates during early retirement.

Bogleheads maintains a list [0] of many retirement calculators that can use the additional specifics of your situation to give a higher quality answer. It will generally require you to give it a plan for the rest of your life, so you'll want to try a number of scenarios to see if/how the plan changes.

Bogleheads also has an active forum that variations of this question have been asked many times. If you want to see what situations others have asked about in the Boglehead forums and the recommendations they got you can search with [1].

[0] https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Retirement_calculators_and_s...

[1] search for: traditional or roth 401k contributions site:bogleheads.org

My first comment was based on the simplistic onboarding flow before being asked to login. I've poked around the site a little more and have additional comments.

The site is for folks that are ok with a probability of success. There are folks that want better guarantees, probably annuities. Wade Pfau, who has been researching retirement planning for 15+ years has a good description of the issues in his Retirement Planning Guidebook [0] which talks about his RISA model. Looks like he's now productized it at [1].

I looked at the asset allocation recommended over time, and I think that should be adjustable based on the users level of risk.

I like your guide concept, but the content feels pretty generic. I think any product in this space needs to have a big emphasis on educating the user about the issues. I would like to see this integrated into the calculator better. Maybe a report that lists the issues that the product handles, then customizes the list for this particular financial plan showing if and when in the plan the issue applies and gives further resources to learn about the issue. Order it by when, so the customer has a financial issue learning plan.

In the education theme, the product is making lots of unstated assumptions now, and it makes it hard to interpret the output. As my teachers (and probably your teachers as well) said, ALWAYS state your assumptions.

Another way you can make your product more usable is to figure out what the top questions your customers want to answer and then build guides to show them how your product answers that question. I see you've got a part time position open to figure out customer needs, this could make it easier to close a sale. It may be possible to go through the forums at various groups like Mr. Money Mustache, Bogleheads, etc to find common questions.

Speaking of education, the algorithm needs to be well documented. Otherwise it could be based on a random number generator for all I know. Is it based on historical market data? Or is it Monte-Carlo based? If it's MC, then what data is generated and how? Is the data different on each run, or is it the same MC data used for every run for all folks (essentially treated the same as generated historical data.) Jim Otar has some good comments about MC in his book "Unveiling the Retirement Myth" [2]. He's not a fan of most Monte Carlo data generators, but gives a set of tests that any good MC generator should pass. He's a fan of using historical data. Karsten (a retired economist) at Early Retirement Now [3] has done quite a bit of work on Safe Withdrawal Rates using historical data above and beyond what Began has done.

Have you used Financial Engines at all? It was around a dozen years or so ago much like what you are building that William Sharpe was involved in. They tried to partner with 401k providers to offer it as an upsell to large companies. I have an old 401k that still has it. They started as a tool for the DIY, but pivoted to managing your 401k for a percentage of assets.

A recommendation for you is to make the initial onboarding a big more clear as to what type of account and whose account it is for those that are married. Getting quality data here will help for the features I am going to suggest.

Some feature suggestions for you to think about that could be competitive differentiators:

1. Help estimate life insurance needs for folks. There are a number of approaches, income replacement and expense liability matching are a couple common ones. This is a feature that your competitors don't have and fits with the demographic you are targeting. There is a lot of opportunity for education in this area. There is the opportunity for referral income by referring folks that truly understand their insurance needs and are ready to buy.

2. Different forum communities have standardized formats for background data for asking questions. Make it easy to get your data in that format for asking a question. This would mean engaging more with those communities.

3. It looks like the plans go out to about 100 years old. Open Social Security uses five different mortality tables to estimate life expectancy or an entered age, which can tune a plan to meet someone's situation much better.

4. Forced early retirement. It's happened many times in the past and likely will again.

5. Divorce. This is a tough one, but it's fairly common these days, and throws a real monkey wrench in financial plans. The rules differ per state making it lots of work. Some have fairly clear rules that could be implemented, others are kinda up to the judge. Real World Divorce [4] may be usable as a survey to get a feel for the scope of the different rules.

I'd like to object to your statements "social security relevant (it's better for younger folks not to count on it)" and "it's tough to forecast how much younger folks should count on it, so we've left it out for now" It's really easy to handle this. Look at how Open Social Security handles it. There is a year and a reduction percentage. He fills in defaults from the Social Security Trustee report, since they are required to estimate it based on current law. For younger folks the year probably doesn't matter, since it will happen before they withdraw, just the percentage matters. This is an opportunity to educate folks rather than perpetuate the fear that it won't be there for them. For many of them it will probably be their largest income source in retirement even after the reduction.

I don't think the complexity of the questions that early retirees have like Roth conversion or 0% cap gains is any more complex than the buy a bigger house question. Look at the complexity of the NYTimes Buy vs Rent calculator [5]. I suspect the buy a bigger house is similarly complex when you really dig into it.

Happy to answer any other questions you have.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Retirement-Planning-Guidebook-Navigat...

[1] https://risaprofile.com/risa-how-it-works/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Unveiling-Retirement-Myth-Jim-Otar/dp...

[3] https://earlyretirementnow.com/safe-withdrawal-rate-series/

[4] http://realworlddivorce.com

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...

I've tried dozens of this type of tools over the years, most in the past ten years as we got ready to retire and then retired a few years ago. Many of the tools were simplistic like Fortunately, but some give better information like I-ORP, On Trajectory, Pralana, Flexible Retirement Planner, ESPlanner and the Bogleheads Retiree Portfolio Model. See the BogleHeads Wiki page on retirement calculators [0] for a bigger list and links to these tools. Darrow [1] also has good reviews of retirement calculators.

Fortunately in its current state doesn't help me at all. It wouldn't have helped me 10 years before retirement either.

You probably want to join the BogleHeads forum [2], as many of these folks could be your potential customers, but they are also your competition that gives away excellent advice for free. Look at the questions that are asked and the high quality answers and see if you can replicate them in your tool.

Claims from the FAQ page:

- Takes into account capital gains. But it didn't ask any basis information about my brokerage balance. Does it guess? What value did it use?

- Takes into account income tax. It didn't ask my breakdown of stocks/bonds in the brokerage account or in my retirement accounts. How are dividends and interest handled?

- Social Security needs to be modeled. The free open source tools at https://ssa.tools and https://opensocialsecurity.com contain the minimum that you need to model. The question "Should I work one more year?" is a common one and one you need to handle.

- Health care is not even on the list of things ignored and it's one of the biggest questions for folks retiring early. It has huge effects on federal taxes and the ACA cliff caused some folks to keep their income artificially low. IRMAA [3] is also a concern for some folks.

- There is no way to separate traditional retirement accounts from Roth type accounts which have very different tax treatments.

- A common question for early retirees is should I do a Roth conversion or should I take advantage of the 0% capital gains bracket? Modeling the RMDs and the taxes on that is complex, but absolutely necessary to properly answer this question.

- Ignoring state taxes can give misleading answers to some of the questions above. I live in a state that taxes capital gains as income, like many states. So when I take advantage of the 0% federal cap gains bracket, my state taxes can be 3-4x my federal taxes.

It looks like you are targeting younger customers that will have lots of uncertainty with how the market will go and what will happen with tax policy. Often times these customers are just as well served by the Mr Money Mustache savings curve [4] and low cost index investing.

I think the real opportunity to make money is helping with the hard problems of folks about to retire and those that are retired. Tools like RPM are difficult to use. A web tool that uses an interview process to collect the data and then writes out a spreadsheet might be a useful tool.

[0] https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Retirement_calculators_and_s...

[1] https://www.caniretireyet.com/the-best-retirement-calculator...

[2] https://www.bogleheads.org

[3] https://thefinancebuff.com/medicare-irmaa-income-brackets.ht...

[4] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...

What opensocialsecurity[0] does is sufficient for most folks. Mike has a choice of five different mortality tables.

[0] https://github.com/MikePiper/open-social-security/blob/maste...

I've looked at it a little bit, but as someone nearing retirement, it is lacking a number of features that I would like.

There are some common tricks that I don't see how to model with ProjectionLab:

1. Do your tax-deferred 401k,403b,IRA saving in a high earning job, state, then move to a low or no income tax state to do the withdrawals in retirement.

2. Retire early so there is some time before taking social security payments to do Roth Conversions. I-ORP[0] turns this into a branch and cut linear optimization problem. User Indyhou at Bogleheads[1] has built a spreadsheet that uses a solver plugin. It may be possible to build a model in CBC[2] and compile it to WASM and run it in the browser.

3. After turning 63, watch the Roth Conversions to make sure you don't trigger IRRMA medicare surcharges.

4. Are you trying to stay under income limits for ACA subsidies? It's not quite the sharp cliff that it was, but can be important for some.

5. Are you trying to balance regular income and capital gains to take advantage of the 0% cap gains rates? You've got to plan ahead on your contributions to the taxable and tax deferred accounts for this to work. Jeremy at Go Curry Cracker has written about using this to pay $0 in US Federal Income taxes[3].

6. Paying full rate for health insurance will likely get you over the 7.5% limit for tax deductions.

7. Social Security claiming strategies can be complex for married couples.

A feature that would be useful during accumulation is life insurance planning for the death of a spouse.

The death of a spouse can throw a wrench in some of the strategies since the single tax bracket is much smaller. Tax law changes can also upset highly optimized strategies. So any highly optimized strategy should also have a monte carlo simulation around a spouse dying and tax law changes to understand what disruptions are possible and maybe accept a non-optimal strategy that is better in these adverse cases.

[0] https://i-orp.com

[1] https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=365518

[2] https://github.com/coin-or/Cbc

[3] https://www.gocurrycracker.com/go-curry-cracker-2020-taxes/

Look at Thesisdown[0] which is a modified bookdown[1] template for a thesis. It’s based on R Markdown[2], so you get R (or other programming languages) in your document that is run when the document is processed.

The authors of R Markdown/Bookdown are working on a newer tool, Quarto[3].

[0] https://github.com/ismayc/thesisdown [1] https://bookdown.org/ [2] https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/ [3] https://quarto.org/

When I hear the requirements in #3 I think of the Pacific Northwest. I don't know how far out from Seattle you'd need to go to find affordability #1. You can also look in Oregon.

New Hampshire doesn't divert gas tax money away from road maintenance. [0]

[0] https://reason.org/policy-brief/how-much-gas-tax-money-state...

Head over to the Bogleheads wiki[0] and forum[1].

The general consensus on the forum is that Schwab, Fidelity and Vanguard are the big three to use. Do you need a HSA? Fidelity is the only one with a completely no fee HSA. Read through the wiki and and look at previously asked questions in the forum. If you still have questions, ask away in the forums.

[0] https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Getting_started [1] https://www.bogleheads.org

Some tricks for sleeping better:

Given that you are leaving at 2pm and arriving at 10am, I'd suggest that you start shifting your day earlier a few days before leaving. Get up early and go to bed early. That will start your body getting used to the time change.

Earplugs or noise cancelling headphones with nothing playing and a mask to cover the eyes help as well.

No. Just used a CD-R to transport medical images between two different implementations of the Cerner healthcare medical records system, because that was the easy way.

I'll guess Clive Sinclair, discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28554565

Microsoft open sourced the Windows calculator in 2019. Ratpak[0] is their infinite precision math library.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/tree/master/src/Calc...

The href is wrong for the paragraph:

Visit the site: https://writeydrawey.site

The href is missing the 'e' in drawey.

Not open source software development, but if he wants to continue helping folks with a different area of the US tax code there are the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance and Tax Counseling for the Elderly programs[0]. Not sure how COVID has affected the programs. It would provide an opportunity to meet and help folks in his community.

In a more software development type idea, there is a guy that maintains http://excel1040.com, which is a free spreadsheet to calculate US personal income taxes. It doesn't handle everything, but it handles quite a bit and provides a version early in the year to estimate your taxes. Something like that for imports might be an interesting project for him.

[0] https://www.irs.gov/individuals/irs-tax-volunteers

Is it swap, or is it mds (spotlight) indexing?

I've had similar problems for the past year and a half with updating. Apple has a support document[0] that suggests unpairing and repairing to update the watch.

I've also seen the photo count be wrong for several years. Mine shows 34 photos installed in About, but the photos app only shows 19, and the in the album on the phone that is synced to the watch contains 19.

I've had another problem where the watch would run itself out of disk space (not sure what it was, my theory was crash logs or something like that) and then lock up hard requiring a hard reset. Took several months for this to happen, but was consistent for several firmware updates.

I've used the Apple Feedback Assistant to provide logs and on this. But I don't think it's fixed in 7.3 yet. I've lost 500MB of available space since installing 7.3, with no new songs, photos, or applications installed since installing 7.3.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211283

From 2008

Here in the central US, I'm able to find Smucker's natural peanut butter at Walmart of all places. The other grocery stores don't carry it.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32508375/apple-live-phot... gives some of the details.

Rather than using AirPlay, many video production tools use NDI[0] for video over IP.

OBS[1] can take multiple video streams in NDI or from HDMI input cards and mix them with more flexibility than the BlackMagic Mini Pro (which is a cool device for what it does.)

[0] https://ndi.tv [1] https://obsproject.com

I haven't seen an M1 Mac in person yet. Does the hardware actually switch resolution on the M1 Macs? Or does it only change the software scaling and leave the hardware alone? I suspect the laptop panels just stay in their native resolution. What about external monitors?

MacOS sends a notification to each app that the screen size changed, so fast CPUs speed that up. Lots of cores can process those notifications in parallel.

Depending on how much you spend, you're likely Financially Independent. Some call it Financially Independent Retire Early abbreviated FIRE. There's a whole community talking about how to get to FIRE and what getting there means for them. Some have tried the retire early part and it wasn't for them, so they have found some work that is fulfilling to them.

Bogleheads[0] is a good community, and Reddit has /r/financialindependence and /r/fatFIRE If you search these communities, you'll find others asking for similar situations with different numbers.

You can now control what you do in your time. You can use it to improve your health, learn something new, spend time with family, or work on a passion project of yours.

If you have questions about how to invest and live off your windfall, Bogleheads is a good place to learn about that as well.

[0] http://bogleheads.org

There seems to be plenty of software issues found:

The MCAS software was modified to read from both angle of attack sensors and to be less aggressive in pushing the nose of the plane down. The software that controlled the indicator light that illuminated when the two angle of attack sensors disagreed was also fixed.

While reviewing the software systems, a number of other software issues were found.

The wiring bundle issue was also found during these reviews.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/these-6-issues-are-preventi...

https://simpleflying.com/boeing-737-max-software-update-3/

I'll speculate that the follow-on to the M1 Mac Mini will use a more powerful processor that has higher power requirements and supports more ports with higher power requirements. Is it cost effective to drop to a smaller power supply for one generation? Or just leave that supply chain in place?

After Metrowerks' CodeWarrior became popular, Projector was still used. There was a CodeWarrior plugin for it:

https://www.mactech.com/1997/12/20/md1-cwprojector-1-0-relea...

In later versions of MPW, Projector was split off as a separate executable, SourceServer. Searching for MPW SourceServer finds a number of hits.

I also have 15C from my early University days and my 28S from graduate work, both still working. I got the 15C used from a junior EEE student that was quitting the program. I think it's on the 3rd set of batteries in 35 years. It got used several hours a day for the first three years.

The 28S burns through three N batteries every two years, even when it doesn't get used much. That may have contributed to the battery doors wearing out on the 28S. Mine is still in great shape however, as spent most of it's life on a desk rather than thrown in a backpack with heavy books that the 15C endured with aplomb in it's case.

The 28S was at work and the 15C at home. Now that I'm working from home and they both are on the same desk, I find I pull out the 15C unless it's complex enough that I want the four line display on the 28S. And if it's slightly more complex than that, a spreadsheet is probably the better tool.

Hugo 0.62 added Markdown rendering hooks so you can do custom processing of a standard markdown image. I was able to use this to get rid of my <figure> shortcodes. The render hook generates the figure tag and also uses Hugo image processing to generate multiple image sizes for srcset.

This way I'm able to keep the markdown completely standard which makes it easier to move to a new platform in the future.

I don't agree with the premise that Apple hasn't created any new technologies to create new apps or app categories.

I would argue that ARKit, HomeKit, Metal, CoreML and Vision have created new application categories and applications.

Just one example, look at the intelligent photo editing apps: Luminar 4, Pixelmator Pro.

Apple spent $1B buying Intel's modem business last year. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/07/apple-to-acquire-the-... Apple knew this transition was coming. They could have easily slipped in other terms to deal with any IP licensing issues around implementing the x86_64 instruction set.