![]() ![]() I said of course, and flew out to Sydney to meet him. He reached out to me one day wondering if he could help me improve the look and feel of Savings. Chris was actually an early user of Savings. ![]() I said “we”, because I met a great designer from Sydney named Chris Sealey who helped me redesign all parts of the app. We wanted to modernize the user interface so it looks great on modern macOS. Nevertheless, I was stubborn and persistent (and sometimes don’t know the difference between the two), and I did a complete redesign of Savings and turned it into what it is today. So over the next several years I struggled to keep the project alive. I made the typical mistake that a founder whose background is programming typically makes, which is I kept working on the product itself but never told people about it. I thought my software venture was off to a great start. Immediately, it was earning around $3,000 a month, and I was ecstatic. I was lucky in that the Mac App Store (the Mac equivalent of the iPhone App Store) opened at the same time, so my app was one of the few at the time with little competition. (Savings was later renamed to GreenBooks) So, I decided to quit my full time job to build a personal finance app of my own.Īt the beginning of 2011, I launched the finished app called Savings into the world. And my problem with Mint is it is an imprecise tool that doesn’t offer the control I need. My problem with Quicken is it is overly complicated and hard to use. Remember, this is still before the App Store, so there weren’t thousands of apps to choose from. I looked around for software solutions at the time, mainly Quicken and Mint, and neither of them worked the way I envisioned. Some people need a budget to have more control, others don’t. But that’s really just a variation of number 3 where you set a cap on each spending category. Use breakdown chart like the one above to change your spending habit.Log your transactions and categorize them.Bring all of your accounts in one place.I realized to manage one’s money effectively, there are only three things. I suppose one reason it kept coming back is because it was so clear to me what a money manager should do. For some reason, it just kept coming back. That went on for a couple of years.īut this problem of money tracking never left my mind. Since my salary was quite high, I stopped the habit of keeping track of my money. I realized all the little expenses add up, and I would never have known it if not for tracking my money like this.Īfter I graduated, I, like many of my peers started working as a software engineer. Some categories I rarely think about, such as Food, turns out to be a major sink hole for my money. I was quite surprised when I saw my “breakdown” for the first time. However, I decided to just manually enter my transactions into an OmniOutliner document (think of it like a spreadsheet), and generated a breakdown of my spending. The money management app that everyone knew was Quicken. These were the days before the iPhone, before the App Store. This is back in 2003, so there weren’t many apps that helps you manage your finances. It is by categorizing, that I can evaluate which category of spending I need to cut back on. It is only by categorizing my spending that I can know where my money went. I wondered, where did all of my money go at the end of the month.Īfter some thought, it became clear to me that I needed to categorize my spending. As someone who likes solving problems, I asked myself how can I be smarter about money. Like many college students, I only had a limited amount of money to spend. So when I decided to create a blog for GreenBooks, I decided it’s only fitting that I tell the story. The story of GreenBooks has never been told. Behind every app, there is a story of why the creator made it. ![]()
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