Why I created Budget Seer

TL;DR: They all had some ‘killer feature’, but none really helped me easily answer the most important question I had when I wanted to make a purchase: “If I spend this right now will I still have enough to ‘build the tower’ I have planned for later?” (Luke 14:28-30) Using Budget Seer has saved me from many missed payments and overdrafts, and their fees. No other tool felt like it really helped me live my budget day to day. Budget Seer aims to be powerful in all the right ways, but simple to use.

THE STORY behind deciding to create Budget Seer goes back nearly 10 years. At the time my wife and I were saving up to buy our first house, I was working full time on hourly wages, working on my bachelor’s degree, and our oldest was still a toddler. I knew I had to be careful with our money if we were going to make all the ends meet. My wife has always been able to work miracles with our money (she is the woman spoken of in Proverbs 31:10), but as the number of our expenses increased it became harder to coordinate between the two of us. How much needed to be in the account for the auto payments to go through? How much do we actually have left for groceries? I can’t even remember all the different budgeting tools I tried. I won’t name any of them by name at this point, but it’s probably most of the ones that you can think of off the top of your head today, including at least one which is no longer available. We’ve even tried physical cash envelopes. We love using cash, but in today’s world that is becoming increasingly difficult to pull off.

In the end none of them really fit. All of them lacked something that I needed to feel like it truly worked. Until eventually I discovered the idea of using a calendar for your budget, and that immediately clicked. The ability to see on each day Your planned transactions and income, with the expected balance of your account, so you can immediately see how much you have left and how much you need to cover the bills for those days. That lets me answer all the questions I always had about where the money needed to be and how much we could take out.

Then I found a great budgeting tool that worked really well for me for a time, but then I started hitting some limitations of that tool as well. That’s when the idea for Budget Seer was born, almost six years ago.

Over the first few years I just took notes of what I wanted Budget Seer to do and how I’d want it to work. I came up with the name very early on, perhaps in the first few day sof having the idea. The name comes from the ability to see into the future and the past, which was the key feature I wanted Budget Seer to provide. After a few years of notes, I started chipping away at it, creating pieces bit by bit. Until I eventually made a simple version as a macOS app that I could use. It was incredibly useful, but it was slow to implement all the features I wanted in my off hours. In time, I realized that if I made a web version my ideas could bless the lives of other families, especially the fathers and mothers that have found themselves in the same situation as my wife and I, struggling to keep our shared finances straight. So, I decided to put the macOS app on hold and started the online version available to you starting today. (If by chance you are one of the users of the existing macOS app, I am not going to remove it from the Mac App Store. It will continue working as is, but won’t sync with the online version, yet. I am interested in updating it to sync with the online version for offline use. Please let me know if that is something you are interested in as well.)

In Budget Seer today you can already:

• track your income
• your debts
• see a list of all of your recurring expenses
• create a monthly budget
• look into the future to get an idea of how much money you’ll have in every account and how much you’ll need

And most importantly, after you have everything tracked and budgeted, you can pull out your phone while you’re at the store and the first thing you see when you open Budget Seer is how much you can spend in each of your budget categories. No swiping, tapping, or mental arithmetic required.

I call it the Spending Power Calculator. When I first created a budget in the calendar, I realized that I could tell how much money I was allowed to pull out of an account by looking forward to the lowest balance before the next income. If I had $500 in the account today, but looking forward I could see the lowest upcoming balance was $200, I knew I couldn’t pull out more than $200 today or I wouldn’t have enough to pay for all of the obligations before my next income. That saved me from many late and overdraft fees over the years.

While useful, that simple method didn’t account for my budget, just how much was in each account. Just because I can pull out $200 doesn’t mean I have $200 left in that budget category. And what if I needed to leave that money in there for something next month, or even later? The Spending Power Calculator accounts for both of those things, giving you a real number you can use, at a glance. It is the first thing you see when you open Budget Seer on your phone, so you can check quickly on the go, no mental arithmetic required.

To help the Spending Power Calculator work properly, and to help you actually stick to your budget, Budget Seer requries a category for every expense. But that is tedious when you have dozens of options, so I decided to simplify the budget categories down to six categories I call budget ‘buckets’. And now I can’t got back. There is still the option to categorize into finer-grained categories if you want to, but that is optional. Only the bucket is required. I’ve found it to be much easier to actually put everything in and keep track of the buckets, which means I can actually see how I’m doing on my budget. (More on the six buckets coming in another post, but they’re based on an idea that I read from Myron Golden that I really liked.)

I do hope you give Budget Seer a try. You can use the free tier as long as you like. I made sure it had a free tier because I want to help more people get out of the rut I found myself in, and I believe the free version will get you on the right track. If it works for you I hope you will consider upgrading to a paid version to help pay to keep the servers running and support the development Budget Seer so it can continue to get better and better. And of course, to get access to even more of the features that already exist today.

With a paid upgrade you can see farther into the future, open more accounts, and (in the future) be able to easily compare multiple scenarios like “what would my budget look like if I bought this car?” or “would I be better of taking this higher salary with worse benefits, or worse salary with better benefits?” Or compare how fast you can pay off your debts if you pay them off in a different order, or cancel a few subscriptions and put that money to the debt payoff instead.

And of course, any journey is made better if you have someone else to walk with. So Budget Seer is not just a budgeting tool, but a community where you can come together to discuss budgeting tips and tricks, and learn more about how money can be made to work for you and your family. (Stay tuned for more on our plans for blog posts and courses to learn more.)

Our mission here at Budget Seer is to empower the world through financial literacy, and I hope you’ll join us in that mission as well.

God bless!