Our Story
Getting my personal finances into a good place has taken many years and some would argue that I’m not even in a good place yet. Even though my husband and I now have a solid emergency fund, automated retirement savings, and automated bill payments for all the bills that come up during these messy middle years, we still have debt that keeps us from feeling like we're winning financially.
We have automated everything we can, but one thing we can’t automate is our ‘free spending’ every month. And because of that, we struggle to stay within the set spending amount that fluctuates - food (including groceries), entertainment, clothing, kids stuff, etc. I know, I know we could get on a cash system but who really wants to carry cash around for everything. Plus there are tons of charges that come up in modern society where cash simply isn’t easy or maybe even possible to use. Yes, we could use a debit card but not going to lie - we like the convenience, security, and points of a credit card.
Before we started closely watching our spending, we would go way over what we thought we were (sound familiar?). So I started tracking our spending more closely by logging in a few times a week to the one or two credit cards that we were using, exporting the transactions that had occurred for the month so far, manually reviewing and making adjustments. This manual review was necessary because some transactions we didn’t want to include in that monthly spend number like an internet bill that automatically came out of that credit card. Or there were transactions where I wanted to adjust the amount that counted towards our total spend, like when we went out to dinner with friends and picked up the bill but they Venmo’d us later for their meals. What was worse than this manual work was having to do it all over again a week later for all of the same transactions for the month because I didn’t know if any of the original transactions had been updated - is anyone else confused about the pending, posted date, transaction date, updating of the transactions on their statements?
After all that, I would summarize everything and send a text to my husband with the current snapshot of our monthly spend. I wanted something that would not only make this process much more automated but I wanted to be able to get notifications about how much we had spent so far this much, as often as we wanted. This was because we found that having this information top of mind helped us to drastically reduce our spending (meaning we could actually keep it to the number that we wanted or at least within $100 or so dollars of that number.
When trying to find a spend tracking tool for this, I couldn’t find anything that fulfilled this one goal. Everything was super complicated! I didn’t want to mess with spending categories. I don’t care how much we spend for dog food vs diapers vs eating out. I just want to know that we stayed within the total that we set for the month. I also couldn’t find anything with the customizable notifications that we wanted. So out of this Frank Spend was born. Frank because it’s to the point, matter of fact and kind of cute. Frank Spend is intentionally simple and we want to keep it that way but it is a work in progress as are our finances, so please join our community and share your thoughts - plus your wins and losses for the month. Saving that little extra every month has given us a little more freedom that has saved our sanity, given us more family time, and more sleep at night - and we want the same for all of you.
Fallon