Great start, and very clean layout.
I use mint regularly but feel it is catered to those who can’t manage money, and it is cluttered by expense categories I don't use but can't delete. I only use it to track my net worth over time, and as a overview of all of my transactions to help me spot any errors.
I don't mind entering the data manually. It takes more time, but it forces me to recognize every penny coming in and every penny going out.
Some changes that I'd love to see:
- More colors on the pie charts. They look too similar to each other, so I can't tell which category is which slice of the pie.
- Ability to add expenses on a rolling basis without needing to update every single category. I'd prefer to update my expenses daily, and update my investments every couple weeks.
- It'd be cool to filter retirement location by region. I want to retire somewhere in the US with amazing winters, so my interest would be piqued by a city in western montana but I had no interest in the colombia that it showed me. I'd also recommend showing fewer pictures - just let the user click on it to expand if they're interested. An uninterested user will see it as visual clutter to an otherwise clean page.
My personal excel projection showed me retiring in 8 years, whereas your calculator said 4 years. Maybe that was influenced because I only entered one data point, which happened to be this month when I got a big bonus?
One thing that I haven't figured out (with or without this calculator) is how to treat my retirement funds. I am 23, and will not be able to access them for decades to come, but much of my net worth is tied up in them. I guess I need to calculate how much I need in non-retirement funds to last me until I'm 59.5, and how much I need in retirement fund to take me from then until EOL. I've decided to max out my 401k this year but it might not make sense to do that in my remaining working years.
I recently read "Your Money or Your Life" and will make the chart recommended in that book. That would be a great addition to your website.
Thanks so much for sharing your hard work with us! Sounds like it started as a fun project - is the plan to ultimately earn income from it (thru advertising, donations, or other means)?
Great post! Thanks for taking the time to type it up, it means a lot.
Regarding providing more colors, I just added it to the backlog.
Regarding adding expenses, can you clarify a little bit more by what you mean. The idea I originally came up with for trackFI is that you only have to create expenses once during the onboarding or whenever a new expense arises (say in 3 years your future mini you starts daycare, etc). Im interested to learn more about what you mean by adding expenses frequently (daily).
The retirement location by region needs a complete overhaul and might move into its own tab in the next couple of days/week. Right now, the main purpose for it is to provide you motivation and inspiration. I want people who maybe only are 30% of the way to login and see whoa! I could retire to this backwater in India right now if I wanted to! But obviously, most people wont do that, but its a fun thought exercise and provides motivation to keep going as each month, in theory, the cities improve as the cost of living in those cities increases.
I do like the idea of having the ability to select a city and it telling you how many more years it would be until you could retire there as well.
I will look into reducing the amount of images loads with the option to load more.
The time til FI metric is heavily dependent upon that particular months expenses. If you have a very high expense month, the time til FI will be drastically increased as it is using that months expenses to calculate how much you would need to become FI (based on the 4% rule AKA safe withdrawal rate, which is also now customizable). It does not use an average of expenses but I plan to tonight roll out new charts that will show, over time, the fluctuations of all the main metrics on the dashboard overview page. This will allow you to see how the Years til FI has bounced around based on expenses.
I'm really curious about the "Your Money or Your Life" graph you mentioned. Could you point me towards an example or more information? Thanks in advance!
Regarding monetization, I have no immediate plans. I really, really, REALLY want to stay away from advertising as the monetization source at all costs. It just feels dirty and in my opinion cheapens whatever product you are using. I am hopeful that enough people find trackFI useful that I can build out advanced power user features, possibly some nifty importing, more customizable features, better control, insights, etc, and offer a premium version, at a very reasonable price (credit to fumanchu282 for the idea!). It would be totally optional and I plan to always have a free version that is very capable.
But adding membership is months off. My costs right now are around $200/month on server fees, plus around $3000 in sunk costs, so unless things increase by a factor of 10, I have plenty of runway to focus on building features and incorporating feedback. This does not take into account the literal 1000's of hours I've invested, but I look at that as more of a learning experience.
I would love nothing more than to quit my day job (which I really enjoy), and focus 110% of my time on this but until I can prove out a sustainable business model, it will remain my hobby project for the foreseeable future!
