Why Budgeting Wasn't Enough
I had bank accounts, credit cards, transactions, bills, savings, bank statements spread across PDFs — a vague idea of where my money was going, and no way to bring any of it together.
For a long time I thought the fix was better budgeting. It wasn't. I didn't have a financial system.
Personal Finance Books
So I turned to financial help books. Most of them ended up in the donation pile. I'll argue I was very generous with some of them, because a few belonged straight in the trash. It continues to baffle me what you can get away with in the name of "value generation" if you have an audience.
Regardless, every book started with budgeting, or something along those lines. The only one that brought a new perspective was Ramit Sethi's I Will Teach You to Be Rich, where he talks about creating a conscious spending plan (CSP). That idea intrigued me, so I decided to implement it.
Budgeting vs. information questions
Budgeting usually starts with a simple question: how much should I spend? What I loved about the CSP approach is that I got to choose the categories and spending habits that worked for my life, instead of following a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all program from some finance guru.
But before I could answer how much I should spend, I needed to answer a few others: how much money do I actually have, and where is it? What am I spending it on, and how much each month? What changes from month to month, and what recurring expenses do I have? How much of my income is actually available for saving or other goals?
Those aren't really budgeting questions. They're information questions.
And I started to realize that financial literacy isn't just knowing what a 401(k), credit score, or interest rate is, it's also being able to look at your own financial data and understand what it's telling you.
A transaction belongs to an account. An account has activity over time, and that activity belongs to a month, and months belong to a year. Transactions can be categorized.
Once those relationships exist, individual transactions become much more useful, e.g., a $47 charge at a grocery store doesn't tell me much by itself, but hundreds of similar transactions, tagged, can start to tell me a story about how I actually use my money. Now, I was not treating every transaction as an isolated purchase.
Banking Apps
The obvious next step was to just use the categories my banking apps already gave me. That didn't work for long.
The categories were generic and built for a general audience, not for how I actually spend money. A purchase at Target could be groceries, household stuff, or a gift, and the app had no way of knowing which.
The categorization was also inconsistent across accounts; my credit card and my bank labeled the same kind of purchase differently, so nothing lined up when I tried to look at everything together.
And every app was its own silo, and none of them could show me the full picture across accounts, over time, in categories that actually meant something to me.
Personal finance apps
Naturally, I turned to apps built for exactly this such as Monarch, YNAB, and others. I actually worked with Monarch for a while, and I liked it. It's well designed, and for a lot of people it's exactly the right amount of structure. But it was not working for me.
The whole point of an app like Monarch is to help you understand your spending by organizing it into categories. But to set it up, you have to define those categories yourself, which means you already need to understand your spending patterns before the app can do anything useful with them.
On top of that, the raw data feeding into those categories isn't even consistent. If I used two different cards at Target, I'd get two different categories, sometimes because of how I'd customized each app, sometimes just because of how the bank tagged it.
So I was stuck reconciling those inconsistencies manually, or risking transactions going uncategorized. Monarch is decent, to its credit, at prompting you to categorize the ones that slip through.
Most importantly, I didn't love the yearly price tag either app came with.
Future-proofing
Apps like Monarch are also built for spending, which means that if I ever wanted to incorporate investments or other financial instruments down the line, I would have to bring in yet another app.
Part of future-proofing also means building something that can handle iteration. I cannot integrate every single account I have all at once. That's unrealistic, and trying to do it that way would mean delaying the whole thing until everything was ready.
I need a system that will still make sense to me five or ten years from now, not just this year.
Cybersecurity concerns
There was also a security piece I couldn't quite look past.
As a software developer, I know what it means for data to live inside someone else's infrastructure.
It means trusting their access controls, their breach history, their third-party integrations, their incident response, all of it, none of which I have any visibility into.
There were also a few other financial considerations shaping this decision — places where I ended up deviating from standard financial advice — but that's a story for another post.
I was back at square one with these apps, just with a nicer interface, and a whole lot of setup time and energy that I could pour into my own system instead.
So, I decided to build.
