Hforecast documentation

Hforecast is a personal-finance simulation tool. You describe a financial plan — accounts, income, expenses, investments, real estate, taxes — in a YAML file, and it simulates the plan period by period and writes a standard hledger journal you can query with ordinary hledger commands.

The output is rough by design and is not financial advice. See Known limitations for what it does and doesn’t model.

Getting started #

• Installation — build hforecast and install the tax data
• Quickstart — your first config, two ways (typed in, or inferred from a journal)
• Examples — runnable example configs to copy and adapt

Reference #

• Command-line reference — every command-line flag
• Configuration — every config field and its default
• Actions — one-off dated events and their fields
• Taxes — configuring federal, state, city, and FICA taxes

Concepts #

• How it works — how the simulation works, period by period
• The general account — the operating account cash flows through
• Granularity — choosing day, month, or annual steps
• Known limitations — approximations and things not modeled

Guides #

• Journal inference — pulling numbers from an existing hledger journal
• Tagging — the journal tags inference and daily-mode taxes read
• Analyzing output — querying the journal with hledger

A first run #

hforecast -c examples/casual.yaml -o hforecast.journal
hledger -f hforecast.journal bal assets liabilities -Y --depth 2