Newly-weds Ellen and Max entwine their lives (and budgets) with PocketSmith

A little about you guys!

We are a recently-married couple in southern California. We’re both under 30, and focused on making smart decisions together for our family’s financial future 😊

What do you primarily use PocketSmith for?

We use PocketSmith to track all of our monthly income and expenses, and also keep tabs on our growing investments.

How has PocketSmith changed the way you do money?

PocketSmith has been such a big relief. We used to have a lot of stress about our monthly budget: we were trying to track everything in Excel. It took a lot of work, and it was hard to see the overall picture of whether we were on track to meet our goals, and how decisions were affecting one another with our newly-combined incomes.

Now that we use PocketSmith, it’s easier for the two of us to collaborate with our budget and make sure we’re both making decisions that fit within our shared goals. We’d highly recommend PocketSmith for any married couple who is having trouble combining finances and is looking for a solution to streamline the process. Now, we can see exactly how much each person earns and spends, and track this relative to our pre-agreed on budget categories for the month. It’s a dream!

What pages/ features do you use most?

We toggle back and forth frequently between the Dashboard and Cashflow tabs to see what our overall accounts balances are, and then to look at how we’re doing on monthly spending in each bucket. Sometimes we see that we’re slightly over in one category, such as groceries, and we decide how to rebalance the monthly budget to make more room for buying great ingredients for home cooking and instead spend less eating out at restaurants.

How often do you log in?

About once every three days.

Any tips?

Be sure to link all of your accounts into PocketSmith. It’s best when you can see the complete picture of your financial activity, rather than just a snapshot of a few cards.

What is the best money decision you made for 2017?

Getting our monthly budget under control to make sure we are spending less than we earn every month.

This interview is part of New Zealand Money Week (NZMW) 2017. NZMW is led by the Commission For Financial Capability, and it involves events all around the country to encourage New Zealanders to talk about money and develop greater financial capability. To further the conversation about money we got in touch with some of our favourite Kiwis to get their perspectives on their finances.