mcarvin

Awesome feedback, definitely feels like the direction we're heading (greater user flexibility) is one that resonates with you and others. The only note I'd make is that you can currently change the home value on the buy vs rent tab (it is beneath the other data entry tabs on the left of the page - clicking on that or on the button that says 'change' underneath the home value should get you going).

Ian, we'll take a look at your specific financial profile. I can say, that in each year, calculating your net wealth is the sum of over 90 line items (ie not simply income + home equity - expenses etc). In the future you'll be able to change the performance of non-home investments to match your view.

Thanks for attaching the link. We do generate referral fee from leads (we receive the same fee regardless of the lender so we maintain financial neutrality) but we're much more concerned with getting the user experience right (ie the second part of your note).

Hit us up on olark and we can go over your numbers.

thanks, you're not the first to raise that point. we'll give that some further thought.

this is an amazing validation of the pain point. sounds like you and I had similar experiences. we want to get to the point where people do not need to do this themselves.

thanks for the feedback. we've been trying really hard to simplify the application as much as possible. however it looks like there is an 'advanced' group of users that wants a lot more detail (which we have a-plenty). we have been thinking about letting people play with the raw models > is this something you would be interested in?

we're building out our refi functionality now. would be great to have you as a test user? we're going to have analysis and data not available anywhere else. info at smartasset dot com.

thanks for that, confusopoly has a nice ring to it, and certainly fits.

great comment. adding this to the roadmap.

thanks for the thoughts. cannot stress enough how important it is to us to build a business and product that people have confidence and trust in.

On your point about our credit score page, we are working on a better way to present this. There are circumstances when a lender is will to offer the same or similar terms across credit bands because it is insured by the FHA.

FHA mortgages start at 3.5% down payments. Our decision engine only shows actionable opportunities (so we've made sure your income is in the right range and that the loan is within the limits defined by the FHA for your zipcodes). So providing your data inputs are accurate, we can help you get that mortgage (and help you find a charity to donate your $10k to). info @ smartasset period com.

Just to be clear, opportunity cost and maintenance / upkeep are both modeled and incorporated in the values you see on the buy vs rent chart.

There are also several components to the decision. Even if you give greater weight to the emotional rather than empirical factors (as many do), it is still prudent to make sure you can afford your home.

Buy vs Rent chart is not net present valued... not sure if that was your question though?

we intend to build a platform for all personal finance decisions. the home purchase decision is just the tip of the iceberg and even here we are just getting started. In 18 months we intend to be able to provide personalized, interactive answers to over 200 questions, on topics from car buying to going back to school, to family and retirement planning.

some of the above is already available (eg we model taxes for single and married couples so you can flex that in the assumptions - also most of the data we use is local to the zipcode you are searching in) and some of it is on the way (like contextualizing our advice with the type of home you can afford and more qualitative neighborhood info).

Awesome. Lets speak. info@smartasset.com.

NYT does a good job relative to most calculators but it is still a calculator and consequently limited.

The big differences then are accuracy and ease of use. On accuracy, there is a difference both in how the numbers are calculated (we use our financial modeling back-end) and the quality of the assumptions used - we have local data sets for transaction expenses, real estate taxes, income taxes etc - NYT uses default values, like 28% for your marginal income tax. This means they end up overstating the tax advantage for lower incomes and understating it for higher incomes). We are also much easier to use, precisely because the user is not relied on for all of the important assumptions - we know your tax rates, we know which mortgages are available to you etc.

Hope this is helpful. Happy to answer any other questions.

thanks for the feedback... glad you like it!

broadening the base of marketing channels available to small biz guys like myself is always welcome... kudos.

Great work. I am a long time finance geek - this will make life decidedly easier.

I'm going to take Monsanto's side here. The farmers are upset because they are being charged royalties over use of renewal seeds produced from the original 'store bought' seeds.

The argument is over whether the purchase of seeds implies the farmer is financing the 'use' (like a car lease) or the 'ownership' of the seed (like a car purchase).

Monsanto will argue that as the seed's utility is not entirely consumed by it's use (planting) that the most suitable pricing model is to finance the 'use' of the seed, not its ownership. Ergo royalties.

They have an enormously strong point to make here - which is that if ownership were implied by purchase the price would be much higher (as they would need to factor in both the value that future generations of seed provides and cannibalization of future seed demand from renewals).

Which is why the outcome of this case is somewhat moot. If Monsanto is prevented from charging a royalty because of some technicality they would simply charge a much higher upfront price, which they would then allow you to finance (and the farmer will end up being economically indifferent to whether it is called a royalty or not).

Kahneman is a must read for founders trying to better understand users, or more accurately, the complexities of trying to please users...

Admittedly beyond at the limits of what this armchair quantum mechanic can say with confidence but to borrow from Hawkings... probabilities in quantum mechanics "reflect a fundamental randomness in nature" [The Grand Design]. So while quantum theories are testable, they are not always predictive (necessary for determinism).

Well played and conceded. So do we need two sets of rules? One for 'our world' and one for the subatomic world?

Certain irony about saying that a LAW of physics is not deterministic. Conceded though that determinism does not hold up at the quantum level.

Disagree though that quantum non-determinism translates to non-determinism at the scale we experience [1]. Have never seen a Feynman diagram for a soccer ball. Which is why I feel comfortable saying that if you believe the macro world is deterministic then you cannot also believe there are objective probabilities (unless, as you indicated you are talking about the subatomic world).

When a fair coin is tossed it will either come up heads or it wont. Put another way, the probability of getting heads is 1 or 0, unless you believe that something magical happens to the coin while it is in mid-air that somehow makes it impossible to predict what will happen when it lands (given a complete set of data).

So the outcome of the coin-toss is knowable, it just happens to be complex enough that it is not known (to us). To bridge the gap between the knowable and the not known we introduce a margin of error in our calculations, called Probability. Probability then, only exists as man-made mathematical spackle - and is by definition subjective.

To prove me wrong find an event that has an outcome that cannot be known in advance. That's why this question is on a philosophy exam.

I understand the question quite differently. The question of objective probabilities is a question of whether the world is deterministic.

If you believe the world is governed by physical laws and you further believe you understand those laws (physics), you consequently must believe that with sufficient information about the past you can predict the future (determinism). So if I was to throw a dart at a dartboard, with sufficient information about arm speed, humidity, wind etc you could perfectly predict where on the dartboard it would land. The problem is that the mathematical / computational complexity necessary to achieve that is still beyond our means. Enter Probability, which we use to reduce the computational burden of predicting the future. As probability will always be model dependant (ie subject to someone's view of the world and necessarily wrong some % of the time) - it follows that an objective probability cannot be consistent with a deterministic world.

So is the world deterministic?