Read how Luan simplified life’s big moves with PocketSmith’s budgeting tools.
I’m Luan from Brazil, currently living in New Zealand — this amazing island — with my partner Gabrielle. I hold a degree in Business Administration and currently work as an assistant manager in the hospitality sector. I’ve always loved organising and managing things, especially in business, and during my degree, I developed this even further. Learning about tools that help me do this is my cup of tea, especially software like AIs and PocketSmith.
My partner and I share responsibilities. Usually, one of us researches the best option or solution, then we discuss it together to decide if it makes sense for both of us. One of my main roles is financial planning and expense management, which used to take a lot of time, especially because our financial goals are very important to us, and we value being transparent with each other. PocketSmith has made this much easier. It helps me explain where our money is going, create budgets, and visualise everything with graphs.
When I moved to New Zealand, I was looking for ways to manage my expenses and plan our budget. We were starting our life from scratch again — buying a car, renting a house, and other things — so planning was essential. I also wanted to stop spending so much time working with Excel spreadsheets, as I used to. That’s when I found PocketSmith, and it’s been perfect! It’s a Kiwi company, so syncing it with my New Zealand bank accounts was easy, and it now feeds our transactions automatically, saving me a lot of time.
I started using PocketSmith about a year ago.
Mainly to track our household finances and project our budget. In the future, I plan to add our investments, which are in other currencies.
Now we can easily see where we’ve overspent — usually on delicious food or coffee we love! Every two weeks, we do a quick check-in on our savings and discuss our next financial goal, like buying a car or planning a trip.
No doubt, my favourite features are the graphs and the automatic transaction categorisation. I love playing with graphs, especially when my partner wants to understand something in more detail — they make it much easier to explain. The automatic categorisation saves me so much time. Instead of doing it manually, I just log in, check if everything is in the right place, and then I can focus on the bigger picture and our budget.
Use the Make this a Category Rule function to save time. For example, if you often shop at the same grocery stores, tag them once and they’ll be categorised automatically. It also works great for recurring expenses like fuel, electricity, or internet.
Another tip is to create a separate profile just to experiment with features and tools inside PocketSmith — it helps you explore its full potential.
Moving to a new city here in New Zealand and starting a savings plan to visit our family in Brazil next year.
