Hello all. I had a nice moment with Tiller today that I wanted to share. I hope it doesn’t sound too sycophantic, but it really brought home why I’m so happy I moved to Tiller and away from all the other “apps.”
My wife and I started going to a new financial advisor who shall not be named (not like Voldemort, just for privacy.) Anyway, we found someone who is fee only and charges a very reasonable hourly rate close to home. They had a number of questions about our financial situation and some of those questions required data. I made a list and when I got home I jumped into my spreadsheet and started writing queries (with the help of Perplexity, lots of help if I’m honest) and i got exactly what I was looking for. Now could I have done this in Simplifi or Monarch? Sure. But would it have been fun and interesting and formatted exactly the way I wanted it? No chance. Did it all work perfectly? Nope. But it’s so much fun to iterate and find ways to solve the problems. Who knew that a personal finance tool could bring out such joy in me?
Enough blowing wind up Tiller’s proverbial skirt. With the hundreds of vibe coded copy cats of YNAB coming out every day, I just felt Tiller deserves a shout out for being different.
PS This comment was written completely by me. No AI…
Yes, the flexibility of Tiller with spreadsheets is wonderful. I’ve been using AI to write scripts to make my budget even easier to manage. Glad Tiller is working out for you.
@MelonCollie Tom, what a great post. Thanks for sharing. I was wondering what percent of questions would you say you were able to answer directly from your Tiller spreadsheet versus digging deeper into the data with Perplexity? Was there any thing that would be helpful to have in Tiller for ongoing communication with the advisor?
It’s a good question Clint. I’m one of those people that keeps my Tiller interface very clean. I like to have the Transactions (obviously) tab, the Simple P&L, Balances and a couple custom sheets visible. So, about 20% of the questions were answered by the Balances sheet, another 20% by the Simple P&L and the rest I generated through Perplexity and my pea sized brain. As mentioned, I enjoy the ability to build custom stuff to answer questions on the fly, and when I’m done, I just delete the page. To me, that’s Tiller’s superpower. Having the transactions labeled and categorized exactly the way I want them provides me the platform to build the reports I need. Thanks for asking though! That was nice of you.
lol the irony of the statement above. As you’ve noticed with your usage, AI is a tool; whether expense or cheap, problematic or not just depends on everyone’s usage; like the internet and cell phones.
