Hey Randy,
Thanks for the diligent and thoughtful response. Thanks also for the kind words - Tiller has been a positive force in our family’s financial trajectory and I’m happy to share and help.
Globally, I wholeheartedly support the MVP approach you’re taking. Start with a nugget of value that is useful to some / most people and make that stable. Then start layering on more complexity / functionality as you get iterative feedback from people using the thing. Although our workflow is clunky, it works just fine and I’m content to wait until you’ve solved enough core concepts to turn your attention to edge cases more relevant to us.
To each of your points:
- Breaking the “transfers” convention isn’t a big deal to me personally. Personally, I view the “zero out” as a controls mechanism to gauge if we are categorizing things correctly. But as long as we are careful and diligent in how we categorize, the value of looking at transfers as a category goes to nil. Practically, since transfers are hidden from all reports for us (and they never zero out anyways), we don’t even pay attention to that category. Running it this way for half a year, I don’t feel like anything has been lost on this front.
- “Dipping into savings” has been useful for our longer-term planning around big expenses. I agree it’s long, and I guess we could have called it “Using Savings” but I think the imagery of dipping is worth the extra few characters
- The discreet savings accounts was born out of a practical need for us - it was hard to keep our savings straight. I’m an analyst by trade and work with numbers all day, so I could conceivably grok it, but it doesn’t feel intuitive or clean. My partner is less fluent with numbers, and she would frequently get tripped up trying to do the mental math allocation of a single savings account. Given that the cost of a savings account for us is effectively zero (institution-dependent, of course), it seemed easiest to just split out the goals by account. That makes the money feel more “tangible” in that the concepts are explicitly tied to specific numbers on the screen. We even nicknamed our accounts by the goal title so when we pull up our bank accounts we see “Car - $XX || Travel - $YY” and so on. Incidentally, this has also helped us fight the inclination to use our consolidated savings account as a slush fund. Now, we have $Y for travel and if we budget out a trip and it’s >Y then we know we can’t afford the trip right now. When things were in 1 account, it was easy to think “Well, we have the money in savings, so is it worth going a little over …?” The simple fact that we see a dedicated number assigned with Travel has transformed the thought process to “We do not currently have enough for this trip. If we go over, what other goal are we going backwards on to fund this trip? Is it worth “stealing” from our car / kids / whatever to do this fun thing?” Cognitively, I know the concept of a single account vs. multiple accounts is exactly identical. In practice, the precision and clarity has inspired greater diligence in our practice and it’s well worth the limited extra steps to open and maintain extra accounts. I honor that the additional complexity may not be necessary or work for everyone. Incidentally, I would recommend this method to anyone who struggles with balancing more than one savings goal, or anyone who isn’t good with mental math, because it’s so bluntly obvious when you see each goal broken out with a number in your bank screen. Just out of curiosity, why do not endorse this approach?
- For goal milestones, we have a simple rinkidink sheet with goal title as the row header and Milestones 1, 2, 3 as the columns. Then in the table cells we put what the milestone is and check back every now and then to see when we hit that milestone. Then we high five and go do the fun thing / get the treat to celebrate hitting our milestone. It’s totally fine, but would be more visually exciting to see a horizontal line in the graph and then have our chart cross it. Happy to contribute to your progress on this concept (or really any other) in V2 or beyond.
- For the trip concept, splitting out tags would definitely work. I try to keep my savings goals in the 3-7 range at any given time. So for me, travel is 1 category as opposed to the 2-5 trips we take in any given year because having a goal for every trip feels too granular for me. But in your system it would totally work.
- Prioritization is a nifty concept if you could get it to flow intuitively. For us, we just do it “manually” in a psuedo-waterfall approach. Every month when we transfer to savings, we look at how we’re stacking up against each savings goal. We have a rank order #1 and budget how much we plan to save each month to meet our annual goal. After meeting budget for #1 for a given month, we move on to #2 and so on. If we’ve met every savings budget for a given month and still have more money to put away, we discuss how we want to allocate to our various goals. Most often, we dump any “extra” into #1 so we can finish that one faster. The reason I call it “psuedo” is that if we don’t have enough to meet every goal, we sometimes do a proportional allocation to each savings account instead of a strict waterfall approach. It’s mostly just how we’re feeling that month in terms of balancing our various goals. Also worth noting that our savings contributions are not static monthy-by-month because our income has a seasonality to it. That’s ultimately why we did the budgeting approach because we needed the flexibility to put a distinct number in each month based on expected income. I cannot imagine an elegant way to solve for this beyond creating a “savings” transaction type that triggers differential logic in your scripting & presentation layer. Happy to help think through various ways to crack that nut and show you how we’ve tackled it if that’s ever helpful.
- I humbly disagree that a single savings account is the way to go based on the psychology I mentioned earlier. I get that it’s more “versatile” in the sense that it can flex in any direction as goals change, but that asset is actually it’s greatest flaw for me. I don’t have an intuition around whether more people prefer multiple savings accounts vs. a single one, but having the flexibility to do multiple down the road would solve for both use cases. I agree that starting with 1 savings account first makes sense and putting in the backlog to abstract out to multiple accounts later.
To your questions:
- Definitely we will not be collapsing into a single savings account. Our current flow is intuitive, stable and serves the purpose much better in our dynamic than a single account did in the past.
- I agree that your template could conceivably help once some of the functionality catches up to our use case. Until then, we’ll stick with a standalone “goals + milestones” sheet that doesn’t talk to anything else and just acts as a mental ruler for our progress.
Thanks again for the thoughtful response and I look forward to continuing to see how Tiller progresses. The work done in the last year has been very impressive - kudos to you and the team!
Cheers,
~Henry