Android app for FI

[DarthCreationist]

Hi all,

I am a software developer from Germany and trying to become self-employed. I've been working on a financial independence app that started as a hobby project for some time and now I want to turn it into something real. Obviously, this community might be a good audience to ask:

What features would you like to find in such an app?

Below are some screenshots from my app, to show what is already there. Any feedback would be much appreciated.



Anyway, good luck to you all working FI, I've just started working on it myself. :-)


Best regards,
Michael

[2Cent]

Inputting monthly expenditures is a lot of manual work. Reducing this is a key point for your app I think.

Mapping a bank statement to spending categories is a really nice feature. If its all manual work this takes way too much time, so some clever algorithms would be welcome.

Or some really easy way of adding an expense manually.

And of course I would want to play with the values and get immediate feedback on how that impacts my future.

[DarthCreationist]

Thanks. On the screen with the chart it is possible to show sliders (by clicking on the buttons) and change the values interactively.

I am also planning to build a more elaborate "laboratory" screen, where you define your goal (e.g. 5 years less until FI) and what you are willing to do for reaching this goal (things like "spend less money", "take a second job", etc.). The app can then tell you to which quantity you have to implement these measures to reach your goal. Does this go into the direction you suggested?

As for the bank statements, this might be more difficult. In Europe, it is much more common to pay using cash and I am also unsure about the legal implications of asking the user for their login data. But I'll keep it in mind.

[2Cent]

You should not ask the user for login data to their bank. Who would be stupid enough to give that. Most internet banking sites have an export feature to generate a csv or excel sheet. But as you're on a phone, maybe just easy input and recurring expenses could be enough. You don't want to make the app overly complex with too many details. So maybe exact input is not needed.

For the lab, why not just show a retirement income graph for the next x years that gets updated each time you change something.

Also, as a European I am curious how do you include state pensions etc. The online calculations assume you'll have to live of your savings only.

[dbm]

The one thing I would like is for two people to be able to post expenses and income and so forth with it combined and sync'd across logins.

So if my partner spends some money it will update my transactions and balances.

So basically 1 pool of data in the app with multiple logins.

Cheers and good luck

[Optimiser]

Integration with YNAB would be a really cool feature because it could automatically pull in all income and expenses.

[DarthCreationist]

You should not ask the user for login data to their bank.

I agree and I will not. It's not necessary either. It should be enough to ask for some "big picture" spendings to make an educated guess about early retirement. With my target group being "mustachians", at least for now, I guess people should roughly know what they earn and what they spend.

Also, as a European I am curious how do you include state pensions etc. The online calculations assume you'll have to live of your savings only.

That is correct, however since we want to retire earlier than when the state pension kicks in, I don't think that the pension changes anything (except you will have more money when reaching a certain age).

The one thing I would like is for two people to be able to post expenses and income and so forth with it combined and sync'd across logins.

So if my partner spends some money it will update my transactions and balances.

That is an awesome idea! I don't think I will implement it in the first version, since I want to finally release the app in the foreseeable future. But I can fully imagine some kind of "merge" feature that provides a combined view of multiple balances.