E222- Great New Tool For Finances

Katie Welsh [11:34]
I like it. So I’m going to start with that, can you pull it up onto the screen? So we’re looking at our transaction, transaction detail, like live, it has stuff that we bought yesterday. So once I get over the anxiety of so many lines and how often we eat, yikes. So what is something that people should know? I don’t even know where to start with my questions it so give me something.

Denis O’Brien [12:8]
Yeah. So once you’re logged into the accounts that the most important tab you’re going to spend a lot of time on is your transactions tab. And that’ll be a list of all transaction detail from your account. Now, the most important thing here is learning how to categorize all your transactions. So initially, when you log in, they won’t be any categories. So just be a list of all your transactions. So what you want to do is you Want to start adding different categories and start deciding how to categorize stuff? So, as an example, I can click on this line item here. Hit the drop down and they’re all my different categories that I should set up here. Yeah. So but but effectively, this is a whole bunch of different categories. I’ve set up based on stuff that we do. So there’s also a categories tab. And if you’re on the categories tab, you can start adding in different categories. Okay, now what you can do here as well as you can group the different categories too and you can label them as whether they should be hidden from reports or not.

Katie Welsh [13:6]
Wait hold on, what does that mean? Like hiding money?

Denis O’Brien [13:10]
No, no, not hiding money. So say for example, I have money that I spend for my job, and I get reimbursed, okay, I can mark to hide that as like an expense, okay, because if I’m spending, let’s say $500 for a hotel for my job, that’s not really my personal budget, right, I’m going to get paid back for that money. Something else you can do in the categories tab is you can sort of set monthly budgets for each different category. So as an example, I have over here that electricity, we budget about $150 a month for, okay. And, you know, like you’re sort of go through this whole list and create whatever categories you want. Once you tagged all your transactions, like I said, they’ve got this auto cat feature, which allows you to set certain rules. So as an example, I’m looking at this one here for giant food. If the description contains giant food, it tags to groceries

Katie Welsh [14:2]
For a little disclaimer, that is a grocery store, not super large food.

Denis O’Brien [14:7]
Right

Katie Welsh [14:8]
For people who don’t live in the north.

Denis O’Brien [14:11]
Yeah, and Amazon it tags to Amazon purchases, so we track all of our Amazon purchase separately as well. Okay. So what you can sort of do is start creating these rules for your different categories. And then it’ll and you’ll be able to automatically apply these categories for your different transactions. Now, where this becomes useful when you start looking at your monthly budget. You can start looking at a whole bunch of different categories for whatever month or year however long you want to do. And you can see, okay, well, let’s see how we’re doing in gas for the month. Okay, we budgeted $30, we’ve spent $24 and 32 cents this month on gas.

Katie Welsh [14:50]
So we have $5 and 68 cents leftover.

Denis O’Brien [14:55]
Correct, and that isn’t gas for our car, that’s gas as a house expense. So, you know, like, you can sort of track as many as many categories as what you want and really get super granular. So initially, when I downloaded the spreadsheet, it just had two utilities and I was like, No, I just want to see utilities. I want to see the exact utilities that we have. So I added in different categories and I started tagging stuff. So you can really get super granular and you can see where your over or under and effectively

Katie Welsh [15:26]
And now how can you tell if you’re over under here?

Denis O’Brien [15:29]
Okay, so in this available column is how much money you have left. So this is for October. So we’re recording this now in end of November. So they obviously October has come and gone. So we’re looking at our budgeted versus actual income and expenses. And we can see over here,

Katie Welsh [15:46]
and that available number is what was left over.

Denis O’Brien [15:49]
Correct. How much is left over. Okay, so for our expenses as an example, we still haven’t available $242 on our expenses, which means that our actual spending was less than our budgeted spending for this month, like I mean, right, which, which means we’re below means here and we managed to live within all the categories. The only problem with something like this is you’re looking at a cash perspective, and maybe one off expenses are a little bit trickier to factor in, but you could still put that in your budget and every month, you know, that you need to have certain money left over. So that’s really cool. And also if your account isn’t here, for whatever reason, you can manually tag and manually bring in an account. And you know, like, just have it as a sort of offline item, which is pretty cool. So as an example, in our Robinhood, we use some of their margin facility, which means they lend us money for that, that we can use that money to invest. And previously, when we pulled the report here, it showed everything, including our margin. And I was like, No, I don’t want to include our margin and our net worth, because that’s not our money. So I added in this negative balance for the margin, and you can see it separately on our Report tab, and we know exactly how much money we actually have.

Katie Welsh [17:4]
Now, I’m going to slow down and ask a question, comparing to our old budgeting tool, and you didn’t like the old one as much because a lot of times it would miss categorize what we would be spending our money in and then we would have to do a lot of shuffling around and you really had to look at it more closely. Does Tiller kind of eliminate that in a little extra hassle?

Denis O’Brien [17:30]
Yeah. So Tiller by it’s self just links to Google Sheets, okay, so it’s effectively aggregating data for you. It’s up to how you categorize stuff to sort of pick up those rules. But what I like Kate is the categorization is super specific, I can say when money is received into this account, that’s between certain dollar value and has a certain description, then do this or categorize it like however, okay, and in doing so, is like tricky to do. No, it’s super easy. So it is literally one tab here. And this is actually a plugin for for Tiller. And it’s, it’s also free. It’s called auto cat. And you’re able to sort of say exactly what rules there are here. So you can say when, when the transaction description is online payment, and the account is American Express mark that is a credit card payment and credit card payment is executed for my report. Okay, so you can get super duper granular and I’m looking over here and I already got over 100 different categorizations in all of our accounts. But it’s super like the thing is, the more time you spend categorizing stuff, the easier it will be to manage your money because it automatically tags it on a monthly basis.

Katie Welsh [18:42]
Well and I like how it shows you how you’re doing, and according to your budget, and how much you have left, and it shows us these nice graphs and everything because I’m very visual, looking at a spreadsheet. It’s hard for me, but I really enjoy the monthly budget view. Yeah, that is not as overwhelming.

Denis O’Brien [19:2]
Yeah. And it also tells you like your cash flow. And there’s also an annual budget as well, if you also want to see one holistic level and see where you’re spending money, obviously, like historical data is a little bit trickier. So I think they pull 90 days or so worth of transactions, okay, which is okay to start. But if you are moving from another budgeting tool, you can obviously just import that and really see where you’re at.

Katie Welsh [19:28]
Very cool.

Denis O’Brien [19:29]
Yeah. So

Katie Welsh [19:30]
So what is our goal with this is this to help us really track where we’re spending our money even better to help us grow our net worth. Because you kind of came home you’re like, I found this new great budgeting tool. And I synced everything and, and we actually really haven’t talked about it. Yeah. So what what are you thinking with this?

Denis O’Brien [19:50]
Kate I think this is going to give us better control over our money. And you know, like, talking about budgeting as well, I think it’ll help us reviewing our money and our budgets on a monthly basis. And we’ll be able to really know where our money is going in a better way, and work towards long term goals. And because it’s in spreadsheets, and I like really, I’m a spreadsheet nerd. I’m able to like forcast stuff and do all sorts of fancy things, which I think will be able to utilize to plan our money a lot better.

Katie Welsh [20:11]
I will say the other day when you were, you know, kind of playing around with Tiller before we recorded the podcast. You looked so happy you’re you’re like oh I can really analyze everything and You know, I can do this and this and this. And, and I think that’s awesome. Yeah. Because people do need to be into the habit of tracking where their money is going instead of like, I don’t know.

Denis O’Brien [20:46]
Yeah, exactly Kate and you know, the more of a habit you get into and the easier it is for you to track something, the more likely you are to do it. And I think that, you know, being able to see your money in a holistic view in the way that you want to see it and what works for you is what’s important. And look Tiller may work for me because I like spreadsheets, someone else may prefer a web app that’s a little bit simpler, right? Someone else may, you know, like, they want to be a bit more old school and use like a notepad and try and figure stuff out and plan that way. At the end of the day, you should be using whatever works for you. And I think that will do quite well for this.

Katie Welsh [21:21]
Yeah, I agree. Because budgeting is a very, it has to be something that you can keep up with and something that you are going to do if you get overwhelmed, then you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re not going to be using it and you’re not going to be tracking it. So I think I appreciate the fact that you touch on the fact that everybody budgets a little bit differently. There is no right or wrong way.

Denis O’Brien [21:46]
Right cool. Well, if you guys would like to check out Tiller head out to their website, it’s tillerhq.com and let us know on Instagram what your thoughts are, it’s @chainofwealth on Instagram. Alright money clan, we’ll catch you next time on another episode of Chain of Wealth.