Sunday morning. A cup of coffee on the table, my laptop open for my monthly financial review. I stare at the spreadsheet — the numbers are all correct, carefully entered, and I understand almost nothing.
I hadn’t always tracked my money. For years my strategy was simpler: pay the bills, spend as little as possible, and hope something was left at the end of the month.
In my 40s I decided to be more intentional. I learned about emergency funds, budgets, investments. I built spreadsheets. I tracked everything. And I still couldn’t answer the one question that actually mattered: am I okay?
I started with something that looked like a simple but effective idea. For each calendar year I split my expenses into three categories: Essentials (the costs I can’t easily cut — mortgage, housing, the kids), Extra (everything else), and Savings (emergency funds, investments, buffer).
Tracking income was straightforward — I had a 9-to-5 — so I started getting a clearer picture of how much I was spending, and where. I got the answer to my first real question: had I spent more than I earned that year?
A useful question — but not useful enough. If the answer was bad, the only lever I had was: spend less next year.
I also started tracking my investments. I created another spreadsheet and put the current numbers in it. At the end of the year I learned how much money I had in them, and how they performed. I could answer a second question: how much had my wealth actually grown?
I had two spreadsheets full of correct numbers, and somewhere between them my actual financial life was hiding.
Tracking your money is not the same as understanding it.
My expenses and investments were separate — and I wasn’t even accounting for the illiquid ones. Stock options in one currency, ETFs in another, a pension I couldn’t easily value — the spreadsheet had no way to hold all of it at once. There was a bigger picture somewhere, one that could show me how everything tied together and where it was heading — but I couldn’t see it from inside my own spreadsheets.
I needed better questions. And I needed answers that were honest, not just numerically correct.
Better questions started forming: are my investments actually working — not just outpacing inflation, but building something? Can I sustain this lifestyle, now and ten years from now? And the one I kept coming back to: when will I be free from a 9-to-5 to live the way I actually want, with my family?
I don’t want to stop working — I want freedom.
I needed something where I could drop in my numbers and get back honest answers — how I’m doing, where I’m heading — without the low-grade anxiety that most financial dashboards seem to run on.
So I started building Erynt as a side project — something that takes your raw numbers and answers the questions you actually care about, not just the ones that are easy to compute. A calm, honest control panel for grown-ups.
If any of this sounds familiar, or if you’ve found something that actually solves it, I’d love to hear it.
I don’t have comments on this blog — if this resonated, find me on LinkedIn and send me a message. I read everything.