Hey all - I've been working on a financial simulator for more years than I can remember. I never felt like I got it right so they always ended up as half-made apps and scripts on my desktop.
After years of iterations I feel like I made a breakthrough. Here's what led me to build Futurez:
Simple calculators let you quickly test ideas and help with questions like "am I on the right track?" It's pretty obvious how they fall flat from modeling actual reality though. (you can't have different accounts grow at different rates, model expenses with an end-date like a 30-yr mortgage, etc.)
Big fat spreadsheets were my next step. I could update balances over time and put income/expenses on a schedule. I found that the more complicated it got, the harder it was to verify accuracy. I also realized that if I didn't model the US tax system I would be missing critical opportunities that would ultimately make my estimates too rough to be a plan.
This year I got more serious about my family's own financial planning and also started to take on my aging parents' situation. I used those real-world scenarios to help me build a new simulator from scratch. It handles taxes, custom logic, easy ways to model accounts/income/expenses, charts, a spreadsheet view, and most awesomely, first-class AI support including an MCP server so you can run all sorts of experiments and get personalized analysis of any situation. It's privacy-minded (no connection to your accounts and anonymous to start) and I've intentionally made it lean slightly conservative.
I'm desperate for feedback so I can help more people and make this awesome.
Happy to answer anything, including the parts that aren't good yet. Very interested to hear how it does with your scenarios!
Comments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49522623](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49522623)
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