I’m Dan. A few years ago, I was trying to figure out budgeting with my wife. Like a lot of couples, we tried different apps, spreadsheets, and the classic ignoring it all together 🙈 🙈 🙈 I have a background in accounting so I even built a few reports of my own to try and make sense of everything. At the end of each month, we would sit down and review our spending. It was painful. We started calling it doomsday. Sound familiar?
At the end of another dismal doomsday, my wife said to me, “What do you expect me to do with all this information?” That’s when I realized I was approaching budgeting all wrong.
Over the next few years, I built an app called Weekly that scrapped the old system of monthly budgeting with categories and complex reports. Instead, I focused on building features that support how humans naturally work. With lots of trial and error, I discovered three things that help make budgets work.
1. Spend a week at a time
The first thing Weekly helps you do is to find out how much you can spend every week. It’s a fairly simple calculation but the results can be surprising. When you know exactly what you can spend every week and you track your spending against that number your money becomes much more real.
2. Use one number to track spending
Many budgeting apps encourage you to guess how much you’ll spend in a dozen or more categories. This adds unnecessary complexity to an already challenging problem. Weekly tracks all your day-to-day spending in a single number, your Safe-to-Spend.
3. Eliminate distractions
Too much extra information in a budgeting app can be overwhelming. Weekly has a beautiful UI and keeps important information at the forefront and eliminates everything that isn’t helping you stick to a budget.
Now over 200,000 people have downloaded Weekly. Weekly connects to over 10,000+ banking institutions and people have input almost 5 Million transactions. We’ve also implemented all sorts of useful features like tracking bill dates, managing cash flow, and tracking spending with trend reports.
Our mission is to help people maximize happiness on a given income by bringing peace to their financial decisions. But at our core, we are a simple tool based on a new idea – budgeting tools should be made to match how humans behave.
Thanks for taking the time to try out Weekly. We hope it’s the most beautiful and useful budgeting tool you’ve ever used. If you have any feedback or thoughts I’d certainly love to hear them. You can get in touch with me through the “Contact Support” option in the app or simply by emailing [email protected].
Happy budgeting!