How my lifelong interest in finances led to creating my own product and how it helps me with financial decisions
Hi everyone, I'm 33 years old, I have worked as a software developer for 10 years now and I have always had a strong interest in finances.
When I was in my early twenties I started tracking how much I could save each month. Then I started investing and finally bought my first property.
I always kept all my financial data in a spreadsheet because it showed me how much I was able to accumulate each month (savings + profits from the stock market etc.)
That knowledge has always helped me in making financial decisions. Like when buying a new car you can easily calculate how long it will take to make the money back.
The spreadsheet was quite ok, but I started to find it tiring to fill it in each month, remind myself to fill it in, adjusting columns when I had to add an extra bank account, or a new investment portfolio...
Another thing I disliked about it was the experience on mobile. Filling in a spreadsheet on a phone is terrible!
So after all this time, I decided to put in some work and create an app for it. At first I wanted to create it for myself alone, but after working on it for some time, I thought to myself: why not build for others as well? There might be more people with the same problem.
Why didn't I just download an existing app?
Well, I tried a few. The problem I had with most of those apps was trust. A lot of them wanted me to connect my bank account, or they work with accounts, which means my financial data would live on a server of some random person or company, ready to be breached and stolen by some hackers. No thanks!
Other apps required me to track all my expenses, that was not something I wanted to do. I wanted to continue what I was doing with my spreadsheet, but easier and faster. Just the numbers at the end of each month, 12 times a year and done.
Using my app has been such a relief for me compared to the spreadsheet!
I don't want this post to be about my app alone, but I also hope to inspire others to start tracking their finances. It's just very useful in making big financial decisions and can prevent you from making purchases that end up giving you a financial headache for years to come.
For the people interested in the app:
it's called "Fyrgo Finance" and it works entirely on-device, so you don't store your financial data on a server, keeping it entirely private.
It's available on both the App Store for iOS and on Google Play for Android
It's free for the first 3 monthly entries, so you can try it out, after that there's a premium subscription (monthly of yearly, yearly is cheaper per month)
You can export your data to CSV at any time if you decide to stop using the app. This way you can just use all you're inputted data in a spreadsheet, or a different app. You're not locked in.
Looking forward to connect with others in this community!