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I made a simulator for personal finance (5 year update)

Details

External ID
47996907
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
I made a simulator for personal finance (5 year update)
Website domain
projectionlab.com
Launched
May 3, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
7
Upvotes percentile
0.4168012924071082
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

In 2021 I shared ProjectionLab on HN[0], and I've now spent half a decade making it better.It started as a simple financial simulator side project. In 2023, I quit my job to work on it full-time. And today it's a pretty robust financial planning and optimization tool.This month, I added a tax strategy engine to automatically coordinate Roth conversions, tax-aware withdrawal blending, and gain harvesting, around constraints like targeting a federal tax bracket, preserving ACA subsidies, respecting IRMAA cliffs, or avoiding NIIT.A beam search wraps around this to help find the best strategy for your objectives (maximizing net legacy, minimizing lifetime taxes, etc.)It's been pretty cool to see that in the median case this often saves about $300k in lifetime taxes.If you tried PL years ago in one of my original Show HNs, I'd love to hear what feels different now, or what areas still need more attention.I've incorporated a lot of this community's feedback, e.g. there is now a free tier with basic forecasting that does save your data. And I've added more international depth for folks in Canada, UK, AU, and some other locations.Also noteworthy:- Flexible spending based on portfolio performance to help simulate more realistic spending profiles and boost Chance of Success.- Net legacy estimation, estate planning, and charitable giving (QCDs, DAFs, etc)- Government benefit estimation (US: Social Security, Medicare, ACA subsidies, Canada: CPP, OAS, GIS, etc)- Monte Carlo options like block bootstrap (stitch random blocks of consecutive years to mix eras while keeping year-to-year patterns)- Changelog [1][0] previous Show HNs: 2021 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26969173), 2022 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31083093), 2023 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36849502)[1] https://projectionlab.com/changelog

Enrichment

Theme
financial and labor market data tools
Vertical
Fintech
Function
Analytics & BI
Audience
B2C
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
personal finance simulator
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

No ProjectionLab is an advanced financial simulation engine incorporating complex jurisdiction-specific tax codes, Monte Carlo simulations, cash-flow waterfall modeling, and multi-decade forecasting built over 5 years.

What it would actually take: Building an equivalent system requires a deterministic simulation engine running in WebAssembly or TypeScript, modeling complex US and international tax brackets, capital gains, retirement distributions (e.g., Roth conversion ladders, RMDs), and estate planning rules. It demands actuarial and financial planning domain expertise combined with rigorous unit testing across hundreds of edge-case tax scenarios, plus high-performance Monte Carlo simulation routines.

Discussion

5 comments analyzed.

Concerns raised: Limited Canadian account type support, Incomplete Canadian tax feature coverage

Feature requests: Full support for Canadian users and account types

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 248 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #113 of 249 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 184 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

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