My wife wanted to have a simple life planning session. I ended up building a no-code tool for dream life/retirement planning. LOL.

Hey IH fam, happy new year! Hope 2021 has gotten off to an amazing start for all of you.

TLDR: I made a free dream life / retirement planning tool literally last week that I think many of you would find useful, read the rest of this post if ur interested - the link is near the bottom of this post. I'm thinking that right now at the beginning of 2021 might be the perfect time to do some of this planning stuff!

Built with Coda, which is pretty amazing. I'll be writing some Twitter threads shortly about my experience with it.

THE BACK STORY

Inspired by many of you but also by some stuff I read last year like 4-hour work week, my wife and I spent some time over the break reflecting on what our dream life would be like in 10 years, and how we could go about trying to achieve those goals.

A big part of our dream is to be able to take 3 month "mini-retirements" each summer with our kids to travel and live somewhere else, so it's pretty clear that we need to develop sources of income that are semi-passive, not tied to a regular job, and can be managed in 10-15 hours a week during the summers.

We didn't want to just stop there with the reflection: we wanted to take it a step farther and actually quantify the income we need to have in order to support this future dream of ours, based on today's situation (how much we have in our investment and retirement accounts now), our future expenses (both regular monthly expected expenses and big one-time things like a home and kids college), and when and how we want to retire.

The end result gives us a good target to reach for and then allows us to set shorter term goals, like for 2021.

Anyways, we did all this stuff for ourselves at first, and then I was like, wait, this would be a perfect opportunity to:

1. build something that'll help other people visualize and understand their financial futures and how to define and achieve their dreams, and
2. discover and play around with a new no-code tool in the process, which is something I love doing 🤓

ABOUT THE TOOL

And so with that, I ended up spending a bunch of time and effort last week over the holiday break making this free step by step life/retirement planning tool and making all the complex math work behind the scenes (like taxes, 401K, retirement distributions, etc).

The end result is something that should be super easy for anyone to use, while at the same time having a shit ton of cool info and resources for anyone who wants to go deeper into the content.

My fave part is probably the cool little graph visual thing where you can see how your total wealth, retirement accounts, and investment accounts change over time, which updates based on all of your other inputs!

I hope that some of you will find this useful! It's a fairly comprehensive intro to financial / future planning, and even for those who have done this sort of thing before, I think you'll learn a thing or two and come out of it with some valuable insights. I def learned a lot from the process of building it and doing research for it.

A final word: I know financial planning is sometimes a thing people dread doing because of how complicated it seems and how annoying it is to find the right info and look at government websites 🤣, which is why hopefully this tool will lower the barrier by simplifying things and pulling essential info all into one place. It's honestly not so bad, and once you know what's going on, you can prepare and plan for how to improve your situation (if it's bad, or maybe you just continue doing what you're doing!)

Excited for you to try it out! Totally free (Coda is annoying and will ask you to create a free account), and bc some people have asked me about this already: don't worry, no one will see any info that you put in there, it doesn't get sent anywhere or anything like that.
https://coda.io/@thatdudedenis/planning-your-dream-life

ABOUT ME (IF ANYONE'S STILL READING LOL)

Yeah so I moved from the Bay Area to Paris 2 years ago after having been there for like 10 years (college + Big Tech job as a mechanical engineer). My wife and I were tired of the tech bubble and wanted to experience what life was like abroad (btw if you want to hear more about that, feel free to check out my newsletter which the tool links to!). This past year, thanks in large part to discovering IH, I've gotten way more into indie hacker / muse / side hustle / no-code stuff as well as entrepreneurship (been helping my French company develop their own startup studio), and will probably be launching a startup this year in the HR space around career coaching. I'm super into this whole "building in public" thing, so I'll be sharing my journey via my newsletter and Twitter - if you're curious to learn more, feel free to check that out. Always down to connect and help people out if I can, so don't hesitate to get in touch either here or on Twitter!

HNY! lookin forward to connecting with some of you in 2021 🤙