Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Hi,
I'm interested in financial independence, let's get the obvious one out of the way
Dreaming for FI was not enough for me. I wanted to more details for my dreams, so I built a savings estimator.
It also estimates a schedule for your financial independence with parameters you can change. I'd love to hear your thoughts, especially the financial independence side of it.
Here it is: www.yourdream.io
Thanks!

I like it, nice and clean interface. This can definitely be a nice tool for someone getting started.

The only change I'd make is to have a graph for the output rather than a table.

Hey, graph would be a nice idea!
I'll squash few bugs and then try making the graph at the results page. Thanks for the idea!

We have 170.000 for starters, I can't put that in. Would be nice if you could type in values, rather than working w a slider and ot getting it to the exact right position. Otherwise: me like! (I'm on an old ipad by the way).

What DutchGirl said, some more flexibility to play with the initial investment would be nice... Nice, simple and functional.
Also what tuomasj said, a graph would be nice to see where the investment income crosses over the expenses.

Thanks for feedback! I haven't really got where I want with bar graph, but I've bumped the initial investment up to 250 000.
Actually, it did not even occurred me that 150000 might be too low for an initial investment

I thought it was neat but I couldnt bump the initial investement number up high enough. My 17 year old had a ball with it!!! He was figuring out how much his $ could grow to if he saved 80% while still living at home through his last year of HS and then college. I think he was convinced to bump up his current 50% savings by playing with your app.

The sliders approach seems somewhat troublesome if people are outside the range, or want to get more specific.
One thing I noticed is that the app didn't let me set a negative starting principal (i.e. debt).
Pretty nice design/idea. Keep at it!

It would be nice if:
* there is an option to go back to the sliders page on the show details page instead of only being able to go back to start. I need to reenter my information every time to play with the results.
* there is an option for inflation input

Thanks for feedback, I'll try to find some free time to work on few improvements (i.e. manually typing numbers outside the range of slider)
@blessed59, wow! that's pretty cool to hear!
@bulgaria, I thought about the inflation input when I was building user interface the sliders. But the thing is, the financial terminology is pretty hard and scary for common people. I don't want to scare people off, I want them to get curious about the subject

Hey everybody,
quick update, I've added the button to go to calculator page from results, so you can now play with the sliders and not to lose the settings.
There is also a bar graph to visualize the estimation, not sure if it's actually useful or not. I'd like to hear some feedback on the results page
http://yourdream.io

Its a nice app! It would be really cool if you could offer the interest rates etc that your numbers are based on...

A lot of good improvements!
What I would like to see is:

- the delta of saving between years (this could be added to the matrix).

- see which part of that delta is caused by principal and which part caused by interest.
This will make it a lot clearer which impact compound interest has on your goals.
It would also be nice if you could involve safe withdrawal rate percentage since a lot of ERE people use this approach. So they don't care at a certain point how much can be withdrawn, but how safe their nest-egg is.

tuomasj, this is awesome! I look forward to being able to type in my own numbers as others have mentioned, but in terms of the feedback you have asked for - the graphs look good to me.

Pretty slick, and I like how you keep it really simple. While this calculator is pretty much perfect in my mind for retirement calculations (http://www.flexibleretirementplanner.co ... unch-page/), it is not nearly as accessible to the average person.

However, I second bulgari's comment on safe withdrawal rates. Two components are currently missing without it:
1. standard deviations - while, for example, 8% might be a reasonable return - 8% with 0 standard deviation is, not which is what would be necessary to sustain an 8% withdrawal rate
2. expenses need to keep up with inflation - though i guess you could think of all numbers including the return as inflation adjusted numbers if you wanted to

If you wanted to still keep it really simple, but more realistic I suggest two things:
1) assuming a 3% inflation adjusted safe withdrawal rate in retirement in your calculation, not the return rate entered.
2) either:
a) assume an inflation of 2.5% or something (you pick the number) and automatically adjust the monthly income for inflation (you should probably then put a note that it is today's dollars)
or
b) make some comment that the return entered should be after inflation and savings should increase with inflation or something like that
You could then have an advanced button that when you click creates more options and lets you adjust these numbers

Also, I suggest making the sliders a bigger range of numbers.