Personal finance system

The problem

When Mint.com shut down, I learned that a tool I relied on could disappear. I moved to Rocket Money, which meant setting everything up a second time, and I didn't want to risk doing it a third.

I'd always kept the budget itself in my own spreadsheet, because having our own copy made me feel better. But I was still copying the numbers out of Rocket Money by hand. I was also paying for Rocket Money's premium version, mostly because the free version only pulled our transactions once a day. My son and I go over the budget together each month, and those sessions opened with half an hour of typing before we got to talk about anything.

What I built

I started by automating the copying. Then I saw that the only thing Rocket Money had that I couldn't build was the connection to our banks. So I went straight to the company that supplies those connections to apps like Rocket Money, Plaid, and dropped Rocket Money.

• Every account, every night. Our checking, credit cards, loans and retirement accounts update overnight into one ledger, a single running record of every transaction going back to 2018.
• Advanced categorization. Each charge gets a category from a rule. When a charge is unclear, AI works out what it was. It cross-checks my email, my texts and our other financial records, and soon my location history, so it can tell where I was when a charge was made. It looks at the transactions and other events before and after the charge to spot patterns. It searches the web and looks up the business behind the bank's label. The answer becomes a new rule, so the same charge is sorted the same way next time. If I see a category that's wrong, I fix it right in the transaction list, and the fix applies to every past and future charge like it.
• Dashboards built for us. Spending by category with each store's logo, every transaction searchable, each loan's balance over time, our income and how long our savings would last, and the business expenses my accountant needs.
• Charts that fit the view. The scale fits whatever months are on screen. Zoom in, scroll or turn a line on or off, and the lines and dollar labels slide smoothly to the new scale. One huge month, like the month we paid down our home equity loan, doesn't flatten the rest. It gets its own squeezed band at the top, so every other month stays readable.
• The budget sheet stays. The family budget spreadsheet is rebuilt from the ledger, so the budget stays where it always has.
• Questions in plain English. I can ask about any month and get a straight answer.

What had to be handled carefully

• No AI touches the numbers. AI wrote the programs and runs them, but the figures themselves only ever pass through code.
• The AI never holds a password. I signed in to each bank once, on the connection service's own sign-in page. After that, a read-only key does the pulling.
• The balances have to add up. For every statement, the starting balance plus every transaction has to land exactly on the ending balance the bank printed. A separate checker redoes that math from scratch, so a bug in one program can't vouch for itself. If anything fails, nothing gets published.
• A blank beats a guess. A charge the system can't identify goes into a review list I can see. It never gets a made-up name or category.

The value

Rocket Money only knows what the bank sends it, and bank labels are often garbled. A $42 charge labeled "DC Chamber" turned out to be tickets to the Hudson Valley Balloon Festival, found in an old email receipt. A run of large cash withdrawals turned out to be payments to the handyman who redid our bathroom, matched to his invoices. Even the category that comes with the bank feed called a gift shop in Katonah a gas station. The system treats that label as a hint and goes with the shop's own listing.

The half hour of typing is gone, so my son and I start with the conversation. Questions like what our ten biggest purchases were, or which categories have been creeping up since spring, are easy to ask. I canceled Rocket Money Premium. The new system costs less, and I can pull new transactions any time, not just once a day. And if any company shuts down again, our data, our rules and our dashboards stay with us.