This is a side project that I’ve been working with my friend since last year but haven’t gotten many hours into it because … procrastination. But hey we finally have a MVP deployed onto Netlify and for the rare few people who somehow stumbled upon my blog, this is something you can check out.
TLDR; this is a quick calculator online designed to answer complicated questions regarding CPF and HDB (tbd).
Even though I call it MVP it’s really still an early alpha and we’re still trying to figure things out and add more features to it. So there’s a high chance that things will just break from time to time.
Inception
We decided to work on this because planning for finance and housing in Singapore is quite a pain. While there are many calculators online that can give you numbers that you’re looking for, nothing is as simple or specific as, “How much do I have to save to retire with XYZ sum at the age of N?”.
I wanted to build this calculator because I wanted answers to many of these questions, and I feel like many people have them too. An elaborate excel sheet can only get you so far in terms of customizability and visualization.
Yes there are calculators out there if you know your finances to do this sort of things, but it’s difficult for a normal person. We know because we are the normal people and we had to do a ton of research into understanding how the schemes work, allowing us to fill up those numbers so that you don’t have to.
So currently it’s still pretty bare-bones, with only 3 questions that can be answered regarding CPF, but the list will slowly grow and expand overtime. In the near future we would want to incorporate questions regarding HDB because that’s another rabbit hole.
Tech Stack
- Front end: Nuxt.js (SPA)
- Front end host: Netlify static page
- Back end: Python Flask
- Back end host: AWS Lambda
It’s actually pretty simple, may write a medium article about it in the future but that’s the gist of it. Shouldn’t have any major issue scaling this as everything is stateless and we don’t store any information at all. Also because this design is the cheapest to host (:
Once we have more functionality (i.e. more questions), we would consider adding Google Analytics just to understand which are the most popular questions, but that’s still pretty far off in the roadmap.
The stack actually changed multiple times since it’s inception because this was initially planned to be a development platform for me to test and learn new frameworks. But a huge refactor recently has made this more stable, and the whole covid-19 situation gave us more time to work on this.
If anyone is interested in contributing, feel free to reach out to me, have not really decided whether to open-source this or not yet, but we’ll see! Will definitely be posting updates on this projects as new features get added.