WhatCodeCraves

Me vs. Personal Finance

It's the end of the month, the dreaded time to figure out my spending. To my left, I see a stack of bills. On my computer screen, I see a bunch of bank accounts, credit card companies, and personal finance apps. In my wallet, I find a few crumpled dollars and a receipt from Burger King. This mess of information sits before me as I try desperately to figure out what I spent this month by making all the numbers add up. In the end, I know it's all a futile effort. Some bills will get counted twice, and others not counted at all. The web pages all promise a 'spending summary', but the numbers are different than the number I worked out! I have no idea what I spent all those ATM withdrawals on, with the exception of my Burger King receipt. I look over at my feeble attempt from last month and make more rough estimates about my spending. Finally, I grow bored and put it off for another month.

BUT WAIT! That really sucks! I wasted my time trying to figure out my spending. Those precious calories racking my brain for all the stuff I bought in the past month are gone for good. I was sure I could do better, so I set about picking this itch.

The Problem

After several months of this, I saw several repeating reasons for why I kept failing. The whole process was always too much work for too little reward. I wanted the opposite to be true: too little work, too much reward. Sounds weird, doesn't it?

I noticed that all the tools I used to help me organize my spending actually made things harder. I had to login to multiple websites and organizing my spending at each of them. They all had different ways of doing things, and they never matched up to give a complete picture with what I actually spent.

Then one day, I had a spending ephiphany. I had always been a fan of David Allen's GTD principles about organizing daily tasks. The big idea I take from GTD is to offload and categorize 'stuff' from my brain so the information is available when I need it, but isn't constantly in my head when I don't. I wanted to do a 'brain-dump' of my spending so I wasn't constantly trying to remember my spending. The process had to be really simple so I can do it with minimal effort. On top of that, the information has to be useful and easily referenced later. It turns out that several other people have had similar epiphanies.

Excited by this, I threw together a small webapp and named it Kwiqi. I started using it daily in October 2008 and have been tweaking it since. Now I feel in control of my spending. I can make real measurable changes to my spending habits. I can tell you how much I've spent, where I spent it, when I spent it, and why I spent it. I can tell you all of this in an instant. Best of all, it takes so little work to achieve this.

The Little Webapp that Could

With Kwiqi, the idea is to track every purchase as soon as it happens. This keeps your head clear of your finances and makes it available later. It's as easy as sending a short text message description of the purchase to Kwiqi. Writing '47.32 for phone bill' takes a couple seconds and zero thought. Writing '0.99 for gum' is just as easy. Big purchases are as easy as tiny purchases. Once you get into the habit, these small messages add up to give you an accurate up-to-date picture of your finances at all times.

In addition to making it brainlessly simple to record spending, Kwiqi gives you summaries and tools to manage your records. You can see your spending plotted on a chart. You can categorize your purchases, and save filters to review them. In the future, you'll be able to generate custom reports that fit your style of personal finance.

The Kwiqi Difference

There are many apps out there that are meant to help you with personal finance. Mint, Wesabe, and Xpenser are a few of the big players. I think they all have cool useful features, but they all had problems I wanted to fix.

  • Spending is not recorded when it occurs - This led to missing and out of date records.

  • Who does the recording? - Sometimes it's the user, sometimes it's automatically done by the app. You have to figure it out each time, and it wasn't consistent enough. Kwiqi makes it easy for you to do the recording, so you know that the records are good.

  • Multiple payment methods and multiple bank accounts make it hard to centralize records - This was a big problem with online payments, and cash payments.

  • Hard to understand records - It was frustrating to see a note that said 'ATM withdrawal $80 on 09/12/2008' because I wouldn't know what it was for. The same was true for all the apps that would try to guess what you're buying. If I bought something from Safeway, it'd automatically get put under Groceries. With Kwiqi, I only add a record if I've actually spent money, and I can write a description that would be useful to me later like '52.95 for bbq supplies at Safeway'.

I didn't set out to make a clone of the other tools I previously used. Kwiqi is supposed to change how you look at personal finance. It's supposed to give you control while saving you time. It doesn't promise to fix your personal finances magically, but it does give you a good tool to start.

Interested?

There's a rough prototype at kwiqi.com available for playing with. You can login with username 'guest', and password 'asdf'. I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Let me know if you find I can be reached at 'jch AT whatcodecraves DOT com'. I will also be posting updates on Kwiqi's twitter.