PocketSmith Helps Theo Budget as a Team With His Wife

Read how PocketSmith helps Theo turn household budgeting into something proactive instead of reactive.

Tell us a little about yourself?

Hi! I’m Theo. I’m from Christchurch, New Zealand. I’m a husband, a software engineer, and a keen musician. I like to play and record music in my spare time (I play violin, piano, bass and a bit of guitar), and I also enjoy biking and various coding/tinkering projects.

How would you describe your role in your household?

I’m currently working as a software engineer at a local fintech business, while my wife is currently between jobs and doing a bit of freelance work on the side. I tend to be the more numbers-focused between my wife and me, so when it comes to our money, I’m more involved with the planning and regular usage of PocketSmith to keep on top of our week-to-week finances. That being said, our financial decision-making and monthly budgeting are something we do as a team. We integrate all our accounts into PocketSmith to help us achieve our financial goals with a great level of visibility and transparency.

What drew you to PocketSmith?

I first came across PocketSmith after hearing about it on an episode of a podcast called Cheques and Balances. The thing that interested me was that it was a New Zealand software company, and in the past, when I had looked into using a financial tracking app, a lot of them had not been geared very much towards integrating with banks in New Zealand.

How long have you been with us?

I have been regularly using PocketSmith for about a year now.

What do you primarily use PocketSmith for?

We primarily use PocketSmith for its budgeting and forecasting capabilities. This helps plan our money ahead of time and stops impulsive spending from taking the reins when you have no plan.

Another key feature is looking back in time on our transactions in previous months, to help better understand things that could be improved in the future and where we might be able to save extra.

How has PocketSmith changed the way you do money?

PocketSmith has been the first dedicated application I have used to properly budget, which has made it much easier and more powerful than just using a simple spreadsheet or budget template from online. The ability to search through all your transactions and create so many of the universal financial reports like net worth, income/expense, cash flow and spending trends makes tackling how your finances are going a lot easier in my experience. I love that you can have a live feed synced with your bank account so that your transactions can be automatically added and categorised to your PocketSmith account, ready for you to analyse without you even thinking about it.

What are your favourite features?

I spend most of my time in the Dashboard and Budgeting pages. I like that you can pick and choose from many different widgets to customise the dashboard to suit the way you want to view your money. A widget I use all the time is the balance graph, which helps me see future budgeted spending and earnings super easily, in turn helping me see how our savings stack over time.

A few other features I like are:

• Being able to allocate debts and assets to get a good picture of your overall net worth.
• The Trends page for each budget category you can set up. This allows you to see how your budgeting vs. spending stacks up and can sometimes be quite an eye-opener into how much you’re spending in a particular category.
• The Calendar page, where you can easily shuffle your budgeted spending around when plans change or bills move.
• The burndown chart you can use to see how your spending in a particular category is tracking over your budget period.

Got any tips?

I would recommend sitting down at the end of each month and creating a monthly budget on the Budget page for the coming month. This is something my wife and I do to make sure we have set the direction of our finances each month, so things don’t slip through the cracks and we end up spending more than we want to.

Then, throughout the month, check on PocketSmith at least once a week to see how you’re tracking against your plan and if things need adjusting. We find that this gives us a great peace of mind because we are able to effectively forecast the month ahead and don’t have to think about how our spending for the month might affect our financial situation.

PocketSmith have a ton of documentation on their support website, as well as a really great support team that is able to answer questions you have. I’ve emailed them a couple of times in the past to get advice on how I’m using different features, and they’ve been able to point me in the right direction.

What’s the best money decision you made in the past 12 months?

Comparing and switching to different service plans for electricity and mobile. For electricity plans, you can sometimes be hundreds of dollars better off just by making a simple switch of providers to one that truly fits your usage and has better rates. As I discovered, plans that include free hours of power sometimes stack up to be much more expensive than regular plans if you can’t make the most of those free hours.

For your mobile phone, it’s sometimes worth looking around at what other providers are offering. I saved us around an extra $150/year just by switching to a different plan that suited us better.

It’s small savings on services like these that can stack up in the long run.