Read how Mike and his wife have greater peace of mind when making financial decisions and confidence that they’re meeting their goals with PocketSmith.
Tell us a little about yourself?
I have worked for an NGO throughout my entire 35-year career. As a result, I’ve had the opportunity to travel to many different countries and learn how to conduct business across various cultures. I enjoy helping others achieve their goals and fulfill their vision. I met my wife during our first year on the job, and we’ve been married for 33 years. We have four adult children and a grandchild who live in different parts of the United States.
How would you describe your role in your household?
As a husband and father, I see my role as being a leader who loves unconditionally and sacrifices for his family. Although my wife and I are equal partners in everything we do, I’m responsible for leading our family and setting the tone, standard, and moral compass in our home. I lead by loving my wife and children unconditionally, regardless of their actions or responses. And I serve them sacrificially as a servant leader.
What drew you to PocketSmith?
For the first half of our marriage, I managed all of our finances. We had a simple philosophy of only spending what we had, except for our initial home purchase. I managed our spending through intuition and by keeping a written ledger of our expenses. When our children grew older, my wife wanted to be more involved in our financial picture.
This led us to create a budget based on spending categories. Since we were frugal and hadn’t used a financial management tool before, we wanted to find a free and straightforward tool. We began using Intuit’s Mint tool to categorize our spending and track our budget.
This helped us gain insight into our spending habits. However, we were frustrated by the built-in ads and confusing features of Mint’s layout. The challenge was that we didn’t want to learn a new system or lose all the historical work we had done.
When Intuit stopped supporting Mint, we realized it was time to find a better solution. That’s when we discovered PocketSmith. We’ve been using PocketSmith for only a few months, and we can say that it’s easier to accomplish all the same tasks, the interface is much more intuitive, and we were up and running in a short time.
How long have you been with us?
We have been using PocketSmith since October 2023.
What do you primarily use PocketSmith for?
We use PocketSmith to track our home expenses against our budget. The ease of categorizing expenses, splitting transactions across multiple categories, setting automatic rules, and carrying budgets across different periods has made tracking finances a straightforward process.
How has PocketSmith changed the way you do money?
We have greater peace of mind when making financial decisions and confidence that we’re meeting our goals. We can quickly see where we’re spending our money, which allows us to make decisions about reducing or changing spending habits before they become a problem.
What are your favorite features?
Since we’ve created a budget based on our goals and historical spending habits, we love the ability to see current trends in spending and how they compare to our budget.
Got any tips?
PocketSmith’s automatic categorization needs to be trained to know how you want to categorize expenses. It will suggest a category, but you can teach it by setting rules for expenses as they occur. I found it helpful to use PocketSmith’s suggestions for a couple of months to set those rules. This made it easier to introduce the tool to my wife because it was tuned to our way of categorizing.
What’s the best money decision you made in the past 12 months?
We love to give to charity. The best decision we’ve made is to set aside our charitable giving from our regular budget in real time. We move money from our regular bank account into a separate account after each paycheck. We have greater joy in seeing how much we have to give.
