Logging on to the app, I realized that there was NOTHING in my bank account
I remember waking up in Venice panicked that I had missed my train, but there was just enough time to toss my things in a suitcase and sprint to the water taxi. Along the way I gave myself 30 seconds, 1 minute tops, to grab some cash from the ATM, but that turned into 3 minutes and 5 minutes when my card repeatedly declined. Logging on to the app, I realized that there was NOTHING in my bank account. What I never fully appreciated is that when you are moving money from one account to another, or you pay for things via PayPal or Venmo, or anytime you’re purchasing from the internet there is often a lag in those charges.
Born out of necessity and disdain for financial surprises, every day for the past year I have been closing my books; tracking every cent in and out of all accounts, including my wallet. It has been tedious and exceptionally arduous as I, the FinTech product manager, found something wrong with every single app out there marketed to do this work. Instead, I took on the anachronistic chore of maintaining a financial ledger detailing each transaction using AirTable, think user-friendly .xlxs that allows for deeper linking akin to relational databases. My only goal was to create a system that could tell me what is in my accounts in real-time, as my bank can’t seem to do so.
A year later and I have profited tremendously from tracking my expenses as I now have so much data on myself such as my total spend across several categories like my monthly utilities or how much Uber is profiting from me alone. While this was never the purpose, I also have an easy way to track my Net Income. More recently, I began tracking my portfolio’s P&L and my Total Debt, specifically my student loans to see how quickly interest is accruing and I am making payments. Collectively this provides a snapshot of my real-time Net Worth.
Having a high-level view of this information has made it easy for me to define this year’s financial resolutions. While my AirTable has taken a year of cultivating with periodic changes, it truly simplifies my decision making as the scope of my finances is easily accessible. When building products, it is important to do something that doesn’t scale so you can collect random bits of data, sift out what’s not important, and then iterate on the solution in a more systematic way. That’s exactly how I’ve been approaching my finances
