Help me improve my website for the community.

[tgd13]

Hey friends, I’m a 32-year-old FIRE enthusiast. I started reading about FIRE 6 years ago (on this blog), and I must say, it has had a tremendous impact on my life, finances, and overall happiness.
I transitioned from mechanical engineering to software engineering to increase my salary and work remotely from places I enjoy (with the added benefit of reducing COL). It’s been 4 years now, and I must say—it has worked for me so far! I feel empowered and more in control than ever when it comes to my finances and my future.

I truly value the freedom and confidence that being on the FIRE path has given me. I haven’t reached FIRE yet, and I don’t follow a strict plan at all times. Lately, I’ve been appreciating the ability to take time off 😊. I like my job and don’t have a strict retirement date in mind, but I like knowing that I could “retire” within the next 10 years—without too much hassle—while enjoying myself along the way.

One of the biggest struggles on my FIRE journey has been staying motivated and visualizing my future finances and progress. I believe seeing your goals clearly is key to achieving them, so I’ve started building a website with that idea in mind:
 Helping myself (and others in the FIRE community) stay motivated by visualizing their financial future.
 Not necessarily focused on daily optimizations, but more on the big picture:

• Where could I be in 5, 10, 20 years or more depending on different strategies I follow?
• How much passive income could I have?
• How can I share my progress with friends, partners, and family to onboard them on the journey?

As a software engineer, this project is also a fun way for me to learn technologies and try new tools (the first version of the website is built with NextJS, Terraform, and AWS if anyone is interested 🤓).
This is the first draft of my project:
➡️ mymoneystash.com
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the FIRE Journey Planner.
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If you’re interested in helping turn this into a truly useful platform for the FIRE community (not just another calculator site!), I’d love to know:

What challenges do you face on your FIRE journey that a website could help with?

How do you stay motivated, track your progress, and adjust your FIRE goals?

You can answer here in the comments, OR, if you’d prefer directly here:
➡️ mymoneystash.com/survey (which will make it easier for me to collect and analyze your answer)


Thanks a lot for your time! Looking forward to reading your thoughts
Thomas  ✌️ ☮

[Tasse]

The "FIRE Journey Planner" should be clearer when it's talking about cash savings vs investments. It asked me what I had in savings, so I entered roughly our NW. Then it asked me what I had invested, and I entered the same number. Resulting in a NW double what we actually have! If only it were that easy. ;)

[JupiterGreen]

Cool, nice work! My honest first glance is I can't get past the visuals...it doesn't look like a person made it. It looks like one of those landing sites for a url that has no website. I'd love to see you add more design and more of you, your personal story. I assume everything on the internet is fake and I have to be sold on the idea that the blog is made by a real person instead of a business/corporation. I like reading personal stories since they seem more relatable and also more difficult to fake, so chronicling your journey would appeal to me. That's what brought me here.

[Kris]

Cool, nice work! My honest first glance is I can't get past the visuals...it doesn't look like a person made it. It looks like one of those landing sites for a url that has no website. I'd love to see you add more design and more of you, your personal story. I assume everything on the internet is fake and I have to be sold on the idea that the blog is made by a real person instead of a business/corporation. I like reading personal stories since they seem more relatable and also more difficult to fake, so chronicling your journey would appeal to me. That's what brought me here.

This was my first impression as well.

[ChpBstrd]

Survey completed.

My main advice is to offer something not offered elsewhere. E.g. a mortgage calculator or savings calculator is nice, but these are all over the place. Think about what specific needs are not being met, rather than adding to the background noise.

For examples,

https://www.fireaggregator.com/blogs.html pulls together links to other blogs and saves time as a hub for people seeking FIRE information or new sources.

Early Retirement Now is the undisputed champion of backtesting investment stratgegies.

Mad Fientist is the leader in personal FIRE progress tracking.

cFireSim is the best (I think) at modeling future investment returns in a probabilistic way.

Physician on FIRE touches on issues specific to medical professionals. Frugalwoods talks about pseudo-homesteading.

The only tool I personally still have not been able to find is something like cfiresim that can account for options hedging strategies like my beloved collars. You could probably use existing equations like Black/Scholes or similar to generate a table of hypothetical options prices for every given day throughout the history of markets and backtest, for example, how a 1 year protective put strategy would have fared starting on Black Monday 1929, or how a 2.5 year rolling collar strategy with 20% upside and 15% downside would have fared throughout the 1970s. Can hedging increase the 4% rule? Your target audience would be the top 5% most informed people interested in FIRE plus 100% of financial advisors who need something to show their clients about their locked-in ranges of returns.

Presumably no one has built such a thing because it is too mathematically difficult. However, I think even if you just generated the data and offered it up as a series of tables or lookup values, you'd get decent traffic from people who want to hypothetically backtest modern strategies that didn't exist in the past.

[Tasse]

The thing I'd like most is an easy way to do more complex projections. It's easy to do "if I save $X, where will I be in Y years?" But I would like to be able to say, "I save $X for this long, then I stop, then my spending changes in this way, what RANGE of outcomes are likely?" And be able to tweak each of those parameters separately.

[Metalcat]

The thing I'd like most is an easy way to do more complex projections. It's easy to do "if I save $X, where will I be in Y years?" But I would like to be able to say, "I save $X for this long, then I stop, then my spending changes in this way, what RANGE of outcomes are likely?" And be able to tweak each of those parameters separately.

Yeah, I still love the Pretirement app, where you input your savings plan and then it allows you to check what impact a spending decision would have on your retirement timeline.

[Tasse]

I googled "pretirement" that and found AARP materials. Is that what you're referring to?

[Metalcat]

I googled "pretirement" that and found AARP materials. Is that what you're referring to?

No, I don't think you can find it anymore. It's an app that IIRC someone here made.