Welcome to Weekly! 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 150,000 people have downloaded Weekly. Weekly connects to over 10,000+ banking institutions and people have input over 1 Million transactions.
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.
There are three steps in getting started with Weekly.
- Entering in regular income
- Entering in committed expenses
- Linking bank accounts and credit cards
The best way to get started with getting Weekly setup, is to log into your online banking and take your most recent bank statement and your credit card statements and have it ready to reference when putting your data into Weekly.
1. Entering your regular income
Weekly works no matter how often you get paid. Simply add your net paycheck (what gets deposited into your bank) as a regular income item. Then select the frequency of this payment whether it’s monthly, bi-monthly, every other week, or another frequency. If you get paid from multiple sources, you can add additional income sources.
If you have irregular income, read this to show how to handle it.
2. Entering your committed expenses
Next is to input your committed expenses. Committed expenses are expenses that happen regularly for a set amount. Examples of committed expenses are your mortgage or rent payment, loan payments, bills, and subscriptions. Weekly will suggest common committed expenses to help you get going quickly.
It’s important to note that expenses like groceries and gas are not committed expenses since they don’t always occur at the same or for the same amount. (The exception would be if you had a grocery subscription 😉 ). You can also add a savings goal as a committed expense to ensure you don’t spend the money you’re saving.
Once you’ve added all your regular income and committed expenses Weekly will reveal your weekly Safe-to-Spend! This amount will be added to your primary Safe-to-Spend at the beginning of each week.
3. Linking bank accounts and credit cards
Weekly can automatically download transactions from your bank account and credit cards so that you can track your spending automatically. To link your accounts simply search for your bank and enter your online banking username and passwords. You can link up to 5 bank accounts or credit cards.
After linking your bank accounts, Weekly will automatically download your bank transactions on a regular basis and alert you when there are new transactions to review. You can then map these transactions to the recurring expenses you setup or take them out of your Safe-to-Spend.
Thanks for taking the time to try out Weekly. We hope it’s the most beautiful and useful budgeting tool you’ve ever used.
PS: I love hearing user feedback so please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected].