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

2 points by mzou 8 hours ago

I hit $180K net worth at 32 and genuinely didn't know if I was ahead, average, or behind.

Googled "net worth percentile by age" – found outdated Federal Reserve tables from 2019. No real-time data. No easy way to track my actual progress.

So I built Guapital (https://guapital.com):

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

What it does: - Syncs bank accounts (Plaid), crypto wallets (Ethereum/Polygon/Base/Arbitrum/Optimism), manual assets - Calculates percentile ranking vs peers your age - Shows historical trends ("You moved from 45th → 62nd percentile in 6 months") - Privacy-first: paid model, never sell data

Curious what HN thinks – would you use percentile rankings? Or is this just comparison anxiety disguised as a feature?

throwawayffffas 6 hours ago

> 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.

jay_kyburz 8 hours ago

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.

  • throwawayffffas 6 hours 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.