Show HN: I couldn't tell if $180K net worth at 32 was good, so I built this

personal financenet worth trackingfinancial comparison

Discussion (5 comments)

Showing 5 comments

jay_kyburz

2 months ago

2 replies

You're doing it wrong. Its not a race against other people.

It's a race to freedom from wage slavery. A race against time because you only have about 50 years left.

What you really need to know is, how cheap can you live, and how soon you can retire. How big does your warchest need to be so that it will grow with inflation and so that you can live off that growth without drawing down the principle. That's really all that matters.

mzou

2 months ago

those are valid takes. I have build a feature in Guapital that takes current value of the asset, and project its annual compound growth to project the future warchest size. the projection is updated automatically with Plaid, so you can see your warchest grow in real time.

i built the Guapital's net worth ranking percentile system as a way to gamify their finance. and like in any sport, if you want to get to the top 1%, you really need to work hard for it, and i hope this system can motivate the users to work hard to achieve financial freedom.

thank you for your input, these are comments engage me to think more about the impacts on the users. i would love to hear more from you.

throwawayffffas

2 months ago

While I agree with the first two lines I have to disagree with the third one.

> What you really need to know is, how cheap can you live, and how soon you can retire. How big does your warchest need to be so that it will grow with inflation and so that you can live off that growth without drawing down the principle. That's really all that matters.

That's a recipe for disaster. Living cheaply is not the way to go. You want to go big so that you can have resources in case of extraordinary events. You don't want to be the retiree that has to go back to work because they can no longer afford groceries or because their house burned down or whatever.

throwawayffffas

2 months ago

1 reply

> Core insight: Net worth tracking is pointless without context. $200K means nothing without knowing "...compared to whom?"

That's kind of silly on two fronts.

1. Why compared to peers your age? Why not the entire country?

2. 200k means something regardless of ranking, you can compare it to cost of living, assets etc and figure out if you are doing well.

mzou

2 months ago

1) that's a very good insight. and that was my original plan to compare net worth with the entire country. but as i do more research, the net worth distribution is wildly distorted from age group to age group. for instance, the median net worth for age under 35 is about $39k, but for age group 35-44 the median net worth jumps to $135k, that's almost 4 times larger in span of 10 years.

2) i think that's my next step if there are interests showing for user wanting to know where they at compare to their peer, my main blocker for this feature is personal data sharing, some user might not like to share too much information regarding their finance. So we will see how this goes.

thank you for your input, these are very great questions touch on the core concept of the app.

Resources