Why I built Budgeto

As Budgeto starts to go live to the world, I wanted to share my journey on how Budgeto came to be, in the hope that I can inspire you to take the same control of your finances as I did.

 

Article originally written for https://mitchellmartinez.tech/blog/how-i-stopped-overspending-with-budgeto

 

A welcome from the Founder

Hi! My name is Mitchell, and I wanted to give you a massive welcome to Budgeto. If you're here, you've probably either just created an account, or are seriously thinking about it. Whatever your situation may be, I'm extremely happy to have you here.

 

I wanted to take some time to share with you the story of how Budgeto and its budgeting style came to be, through my own struggles of dealing with poverty, coming into full time work, and realising how I hadn't been set up for success with financial literacy.

 

It's my hope that I can inspire and help others like you and like myself to take back control of their finances, by spending within what you make in income.

 

The prelude

 

I left home when I was 17 to move from my small country town to Adelaide, to start my university degree at The University of Adelaide. Combining Centrelink, a part time job at McDonald's and a couple of scholarships, I was making just enough to get by.

 

For years, I would budget from the point of controlling individual expenses. I'd set a limit of $100 for groceries, I'd have my phone bill, I'd give a reasonable buffer for bills and a little bit for necessary expenses like stationery.

 

But the budget was incomplete and optimistic. I never left any room for clothes, fun money, or once-in-a-while essentials like toilet paper. I'd go out once with friends and my budget would be blown. I'd grab a new jumper from the shops and I'd be stretching my buffers. I was constantly trapped in a guilt cycle because I didn't allow for life's natural variances, and I'd consider my budget "blown" so I thought "no point trying now".

 

It was the wrong approach.

 

Things actually got worse when I got a full time job

 

I always told myself during uni that the problem wasn't my budgeting, it was that I didn't make enough money. During uni I had access to AfterPay and ZipPay which made it easier to spend, but harder to tell what was safe to spend. And while my limited income was part of the problem, the bad habits I had picked up during uni actually became much worse after I got a full time job.

 

Suddenly I had all this money that I could spend. I moved to Sydney for a promotion. I started buying takeaway more because I was "too far from the shops". I took out a credit card to buy all the exciting things I could never afford in uni. With a credit card, the same problems got even worse, because I never had a mindset shift.

 

The underlying theme was that I wasn't checking that I was capping my spending to how much money I was actually earning.

 

I've seen multiple friends go through the exact same problem too in the past couple of years.

 

The shift

Eventually I started trying to save up to buy my own apartment. I got sick of my debt constantly growing. I felt like I had no visibility over whether I was actually growing my savings or not. Semi-frequent calculations about my net position were hard to manage - I needed something that worked at an individual pay cycle level, where I could really feel exactly where my money was going.

 

Because with a credit card you typically get up to 44 or 55 days interest free between making a purchase and your repayment being due, I leveraged high-interest savings accounts. With interest rates at 5% at the time during 2023 and 2024, and seeing my friends getting hundreds of dollars a month for their savings, I started restructuring my finances.

 

I created two savings accounts in my bank accounts

 

• Unallocated
• Spent this fortnight

 

As soon as I got paid, I would shift all my money into "Unallocated". I started viewing the money as "unconfirmed savings", that if I limited my spending would get me more interest. Every time I made a purchase on my credit card, I would shift the money into "Spent this fortnight"

 

This had more benefits than I imagined

 

• My money started earning me interest - even money I had technically spent
• I introduced a point of friction to spending; there was now effort. Companies want to make it easy for you to spend, I had just made it harder by adding an action I had to do with each purchase
• I could visibly see the money I had not yet spent from my paycheque, and know how much I could safely spend
• I could watch my savings potential decrease with each purchase, which motivated me to limit spending on discretionary purchases moment-by-moment to make sure I would have more savings
• I could be assured knowing that what was left in Unallocated at my next pay was true savings
• I had funds intentionally set aside to pay off my credit card so my debt stopped growing

 

Almost overnight, my savings started growing - and my debt stopped growing.

 

Building Budgeto

 

The system wasn't perfect though. I had direct debits that would need to come out of my bank account. I had to pay rent. If I went out for dinner with friends I would lose visibility over that money.

 

I wanted a system where I could replicate my banking setup inside an app, that would allow me to have full visibility over every dollar. That was the non-negotiable, being able to see every dollar I had spent and every dollar left over. I wanted to always know the full amount of money that had actually left my pay each fortnight.

 

There were also some other points of friction.

 

• I wanted the regular expenses to be automated, like rent or my phone bill
• I wanted something where I could input multiple transactions at once, instead of one-by-one, and
• I wanted something that would be easier to access than always opening my banking app and having to login each time

 

It was in that moment that Budgeto was really born.

 

The Donut

 

The prime core of Budgeto is the Donut on the dashboard - the circle that visually indicates at the top of the dashboard what % of your pay you've spent and have left over. The idea of the Donut came from a literal donut representing your paycheque. Each expense represents taking a "bite" out of your leftover donut. The more you spend, the less you have for later.

 

The dashboard of Budgeto initially just had two donuts

 

• Leftover
• Spent

 

Where Leftover = Income - Spent
And Spent = Income - Leftover

 

The combined values of Leftover and Spent would always equal your total income; if you spent 30% of your income, you'd have 70% of your income in Leftover. Simple. That's all I needed, that's all it would ever be. Just a simple app to track my pay, using local storage.

 

Then I built it and realised "oh my goodness".

 

I'd turned my budget methodology into an app. Previously I had just verbally explained my budgeting methodology with bank accounts to friends. Now I had a way of showing it to them.

 

I had built something that could be transformative for other people.

 

Over time, I added more and more features. I added a third donut for Savings. I added recurring transactions. I added settings. I added history.

 

Before I knew it, I was building a production-grade SaaS with login, monitoring, a marketing site, and subscriptions.

 

What's Next?

I'm excited to start the Budgeto journey. As I finalise the subscriptions, banking integrations, and app store registrations for Budgeto that I hope you will come to be using, and I hope to look back on it and this article in a few years with immense pride, hopefully counting you as one of my customers. I'm actively working on a marketing plan to promote the app and am excited about helping others stop spending more than they get paid.

 

Worst case scenario, I've built a really cool app.

 

Sign up with Budgeto today and stop overspending