threefour

It should only allocate savings for vacation and the user-defined goal after saving for everything else. There's two separate loops in the code. But I'll verify it's working correctly.

For now we want to learn as much as we can about how people get value from a tool like this and then try to align the revenue model with the value. While we'd like to make some money now, our costs are very low so we can continue to give away the planning for free.

Google's model might work for us: they give away a lot of resources for free and help a lot of people, and they charge certain segments of their audience that can afford to pay. So while people are accustomed to paying advisors for a plan, we think it's better for our audience and a competitive advantage to be free.

There's other ways that people are accustomed to paying advisors now that could work. For example commissions on insurance sales. The price of insurance is fixed by regulations in the U.S., so you pay the same price regardless of where you buy it; might as well buy from us and get a free financial plan too :-)

Another company tried charging for plans, but that didn't seem to work, they've since changed their model. We think it'll be better for our customers and for us if the financial services companies pay for this somehow.

Thanks for the feedback!

Yes, it is rudimentary for now -- it's a prototype after all. There's only one 'financial philosophy' built in to the algorithm, and it's quite conservative about lowering risk. But we think in the future it'll be useful to be able to switch philosophies with a single click.

Regarding life insurance, it only recommends it if you have a spouse, partner, or children. If not, it explicitly says, "Life Insurance: Until you have a spouse, a partner, or kids you probably do not need life insurance." If you're seeing something different it's a bug. I'd love a screenshot if you have one: victor@nickelhq.com

Clickable link to prototype: https://nickelhq.com/nickel

Several people I respect highly recommended this video and immediately ordered his book. But I was bored after a few minutes and stopped watching. His site has a summary: http://www.rushkoff.com/books/throwing-rocks-at-the-google-b...

I asked Medium about this. They replied, "if you don't have your Twitter/Facebook account connected to your Medium account, you won't be able to sign in at all. You'll need to contact us to regain access to your account. If you don't want this to happen, please do not use an email address you think you won't be using in the future."

An alternative to Mint is http://www.hellowallet.com which I like more.

But analyzing transactions in your accounts is all about looking at the past. You might consider focusing on the future instead. For example:

1. Plan how much you want to save for retirement, vacation, etc. and how much you'll need to pay bills

2. Set up some automatic transfers to save the money for #1

3. Have fun with the rest / invest

#1 is easier said than done. Financial advisors can charge US$2000 to create a good plan. We're building a tool now to automate what they do.

If you're interested in learning more, this is a great book on the entire process and industry, a rare critical view from inside:

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25189315-smoke-gets-in-yo...

This timeline seems to put all the blame on Japan. No doubt they had over-militaristic tendencies. But let's also take the long view on America from Japan's perspective:

* Settlers displace native peoples in the north east of North America and the Caribbean.

* The first Americans kick out the British.

* Americans move west, killing more native peoples.

* Americans take over land from Mexico.

* "Manifest Destiny"

* Americans topple the Hawaiian monarchy and take over Hawaii.

* Americans go to war with the Philippines, killing tens of thousands.

It doesn't seem unreasonable for Japan at this point to feel threatened by America or compelled to take action to protect themselves.

Thank you

I find it sad that eBay even has to think about this. The W3C should have built it into the specs from the beginning instead of making accessibility a ghetto.

I think I have great empathy for my customers, but it's hard even for me to justify going through all this extra work when I'm not sure anyone will use it.

Love that. I'm working in group benefits insurance now and spreadsheets are how everyone communicates. The software is just there to hold the data in between spreadsheet imports and exports.

Before I read Tufte I assumed my fellow designers were learning bushels of information design skills from his books that I sorely lacked.

After reading Tufte, I realize it's wonderfully pleasing design porn, and the teaching is usually at another URL.

I used to be product manager of a popular online dating site serving the German-speaking countries in Europe. I and my team were in New York, the developers were in the UK, and who knows where the servers were. Safe Harbor made it very easy for us to work this way, but if we had to locate the servers locally today I don't think that would be a big deal.

It didn't matter to us where the data was, and for that reason I don't think it's going to make a difference to customers either. You have safe harbor because the organization gives a shit about keeping the data safe, not because a regulation makes it so.

I've been in UX for over 15 years, mostly in the U.S. and Germany, and I think looking at salary on the country level is the wrong level of granularity.

For example, it's completely possible that salaries in London are higher than in New York or San Francisco, given the high cost of living in London.

It could also be that there are more US-based UX people working in major US cities so that the average US salary looks higher.

Or maybe the sample size wasn't high enough to control for these kinds of regional differences.

So, while this data is directionally interesting I wouldn't apply it too much to your particular situation.

The chip tune soundtrack is perfect.

I love the new UI, but I thought the old UI was a great poweruser UI. Problem was, I wasn't in the thing often enough to become a poweruser.

If I was the product manager, I would have made the new UI the default and the old UI a poweruser setting.

On iOS I could three steps: 1. tap dropdown to select 2. scroll list 3. tap 'Done'

But with any list of significant length (the reason you would use a dropdown in the first place) you'll probably need a few actions to scroll to the right item.

We're building a 'TurboTax for personal financial plans.' Think LearnVest but automated instead of using human financial advisors. http://www.nickelhq.com

I'm a product designer and my co-founder is a certified financial planner. We're using lean startup and as of our eighth prototype I've maxed out my programming skills. We're looking for a technical co-founder to join us.

Contact me at victor (at) nickelhq.com

Similar but CK looks to expand theirs into more lucrative territory. It's the difference between referrals and commissions.

I once had COBRA benefits administered by ADP and they everything they could to boot me off, and once they did they made a mockery of the appeals process (this was before the day of the Affordable Care Act when getting health care could be impossible otherwise).

The fraud problem is discussed in the Paypal interview in the Founders at Work book. Paraphrasing: "Paypal is really a security company disguised as a financial services company."

True. And closer to our space, years ago I started an online/offline school with a dream of becoming what General Assembly is now. The marketing costs made my venture less palatable. GA was smart to get a $200K grant from NYC to get over that hump.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/24/nyc-general-assembly-200k-g...

+1 to ratcheting drivers, they're great

I could see how that would be true in some cases, but in cases where the startup hadn't launched yet I would assume there's a lot less to audit.

To me, meal replacement drinks sold at drugstore are to Soylent what Microsoft is to open source. Both have their merits and I use both types of products, but I really like a world with open source in it.

"architectural wank" -- that's one for the dictionary!

I love the way Maciej Cegłowski describes his setup at Pinboard:

"Pinboard is written in PHP and Perl. The site uses MySQL for data storage, Sphinx for search, Beanstalk as a message queue, and a combination of storage appliances and Amazon S3 to store backups. There is absolutely nothing interesting about the Pinboard architecture or implementation; I consider that a feature!"

https://pinboard.in/about/

typography...usability...graphics... They do have great design talent :-)

Great post. Though Lean terminology doesn't jive with the meaning of "valid" and "truth" that I learned in my logic class. Shouldn't we be testing our hypotheses for "truth" rather than "validity"?

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Validity