I don’t know about you but many of those thousands of financial calculators are pretty useless (for some that don’t suck, check out the 80 financial calculators that FinancialMentor just launched).
Why do most financial calculators suck?
Well, for one thing, they’re not personalized. While I’m in control of the inputs and some of the assumptions, the advice spit out is generic regardless of whether I live in New York City or San Francisco.
Other calculators like those focused on mortgages make outlandish assumptions about the type and size of mortgages I could purchase regardless of whether I’d actually qualify for any of them.
SmartAsset: a better financial planning tool
SmartAsset changes all of that. It’s a financial calculator 2.0. Launched 3 weeks ago, the sweetly-designed site enables people to address specific financial purchase decisions: like ‘How big a house can I buy’ and ‘Should I buy or rent’?
But behind the calculations are some nifty mathematics and data personalization. For example, when I determine how big a house I can afford, the platform sucks in the fact that I’m logging in from NY, which has specific closing costs associated with it. Specific loan requirements for my area. A different tax rate than other geographies.
So, when I click the button, I can be pretty sure that the advice (and it is advice) that’s spit out of the calculator is pretty darn realistic.
Anyway, I think it’s a great tool and apparently so do 14,000 other people — the number of people who have built financial profiles on the Y-Combinator-backed site. The platform is built to rapidly introduce new calculations in the same spirit. The company also announced a $900k financing round.
Check out SmartAsset and let me know what you think.
Would you use SmartAsset for your financial planning?