Tarot

About Tarot

It should be simple to see what your financial future looks like. Tarot is a tool that helps you estimate your future finances. I hope Tarot helps you plan for your future, especially if you are intimidated by finance. Tarot imposes some assumptions on how you'll save your money. It assumes that your income is used:

First, to cover your expenses
Second, to save up an "emergency" fund in your savings account
Third, to contribute to your retirement
Finally, the rest is invested in some other way

I think most people's plans are pretty similar to this, and hopefully this pattern is simple enough that it doesn't scare away newcomers. I like that it specifically introduces investing as part of the plan, since I have struggled for years to convince family members that investing money can be a good decision.

Possible Features

These are some features that I am considering including:

include suggestions / tips for common investments (eg, "over the long term, the SP500 has historically returned roughly 8 percent yearly")
add some high-level advice for how to plan for retirement (eg, 'plan to live off of 4% of your investments, here's a link', 'the US tries to keep inflation of the dollar at roughly 3% every year', etc)
include withdrawals during retirement
include house purchase as its own invesment
include vehicle purchase as its own invesment
users can sign up for email reminders every X months to revisit their progress towards their goals
export a summary to csv that users can download and use elsewhere
account for pay period (as opposed to spreading yearly income across individual days)
explicitly handle taxes, instead of accounting for it in income
include variance in the growth of investments
if people like Tarot, find a way to charge for something
probably some others I've forgotten!

I don't know when (or if) I'll get to these. If you are very passionate about some feature, or have feedback of any kind, please let me know by emailing mbagherpour [the number five] at gmail. I especially want to hear your suggestions for how to simplify planning, saving, and investing for newcomers.

Ads, Privacy, etc

Right now, this is mostly just a fun project for me, so I can't promise anything about the future of Tarot. However, this is how I'm thinking about it:

Primarily, I want to make it less scary for people to plan for their future
I prefer something simple and "good enough" over something complex and all-encompassing
I don't like ads, and don't want to include them
I'm not going to sell your data to anyone. I don't even know how I would do that.
You should be able to easily delete all information associated with your account: delete your account
I would love to make money off of this, but don't want to monetize the whole thing -- some part will always remain free