Tomorrow marks my one-year anniversary on Tiller! So, with an eye toward helping folks who might be newer to the platform, I thought I’d offer ten thoughts, reflections, and thank yous from the last year. . .
- I’ve never had such a good handle on our money and where it’s going as I have now after using Tiller for a year. The flexibility that Tiller allows to design a system that works for you can’t be beat. Tiller works how you need it to work, and as strange as it might be to say about a financial platform, I find it fun to refine my workflow and find new things in the data. (And, yes, I will mention one more time how much easier this promises to become for all of us as open banking standards take hold.)
- The Tiller community also can’t be beat. Thanks to folks like Mark S., Martha Rudkin, and Clint C. who are constantly teaching us all various things (and have taught me, specifically, things over the last year). [I didn’t tag the three above only because this platform has a limit on the number of users you can tag in a post and certainly there are many more than these three.]
- Thanks also to those who take the time to develop Community Solutions that benefit us all. I wish I had the Google Sheet programming skills that these folks have, and I’m grateful that they share the products of their time and effort with all of us. Here are some examples of what I use:
- Start with @randy, whose Savings Budget sheet is the cornerstone of my Tiller workflow. It helps me keep track of–and allocate–every penny that comes in to make sure we’re on track with some key savings goals.
- @cps’s Spending and Income Dashboards are incredibly powerful (and reflect so much time and effort). When I really want to dive deep into something, these dashboards let me do it how I want and need to do it.
- For the first time over the last year, I’ve started budgeting off of gross, rather than net, income. It’s helped me appreciate in a way I never have before how much of our income goes to health insurance, taxes, etc. I couldn’t do it without @jpfieber’s Paycheck Deduction Transaction Generator.
- Tiller doesn’t have a way of downloading credit card statements. @1Email2RuleThemAll to the rescue with the Credit Card Settings sheet, which cleverly uses statement closing dates to approximate credit card statement balances via our Transactions sheets.
- Only recently, I’ve started using @rhowell’s Scheduled Transactions sheet, and I’d enthusiastically recommend it to all. With this sheet, I’m able to project balances for key accounts, giving me a better handle on my cash flow that complements the budget tracking I do through my Savings Budget.
- A shout–out to the Tiller customer support folks, who always try to be helpful even at times when I suspect they are as exasperated by a bank that has somehow made it harder for us to access our data as we are. So a big thank you to @heather, @morgan, and @twalane.
- Finally, to @peter, thanks for what you’ve created here. I’ve used a lot of other solutions in the same space as Tiller over the years, but I’ve never consistently used any of them for a full year as I now have with Tiller. I’m excited to see what’s ahead for Tiller! (But I’m still waiting for the launch of the Refresh and Fill swag that I suggested at one point a few months ago.
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Hope some of you, especially maybe some new users still unsure of whether to stick with Tiller, find this post useful, especially the links to the Community Solutions that I’ve found most helpful over the past year. Happy Tillering to all!
