I usually live in the Transactions sheet, but my spouse doesn’t get numbers very well, so it’s nice to be able to easily show her graphs and charts. How about you? In what way(s) has Tiller helped you and a spouse or partner understand/manage your finances?
Tiller has been enormously valuable to me as I formulate our budget each year and review our expenditures over various categories. My spouse, on the other hand, has always been happy to leave budgeting and expenditure tracking to me. He’s a “big bucket” guy whose primary concern is the bottom line. He occasionally looks at the balances in our checking and savings accounts, and is very involved in decisions about big expenses like our purchase of a new home last year and the home improvement projects that have followed, but otherwise he leaves money matters to me.
My wife is plugged in on the overall financial picture with investments/net worth when we have meetings with our Financial Advisor, but not so much with the day to day. It’s just too overwhelming for her at that level, so we just have monthly or so checkpoints where I tell her how we are trending/doing. I actually tested Copilot (Apple product) with her because she’s on Mac and it provides a more friendly GUI, but even that was too much and led to more frustration than with me just verbally updating her, so I quit that experiment.
My situation is very easy. My wife just wants the bottom line, no details. I have accounted for this by adding into our estate plan detailed financial and digital asset documentation for her and/or our estate executor.
We have some shared accounts (checking, credit cards) to pay the mortgage and shared household expenses, and we each have our own accounts for personal spending and savings. I manage the shared accounts and my personal accounts in Tiller. She manages her personal accounts using her old familiar ways.
Annually I run a Category Rollup Report for our shared accounts. We look at that to decide if we need to make changes for the coming year. At any time throughout the year if we have significant unusual expenses that affect our cash flow for paying bills, I’ll show her the Tiller reports and we make adjustments.
I have to say, these conversations are usually not great. I’ve walked her through our situation using Monarch, Simplifi, LunchMoney, and various other tools depending on what was most helpful at the moment. However, when I showed her the P&L sheet in Tiller, she really seemed to get it. I am not sure if the spreadsheet was less intimidating, but for the first time in a long time, it was a productive conversation.
I think the user interface on those other tools can be overwhelming for someone who isn’t deeply interested in tracking transactions, categorizing, or all the other stuff we use on a regular basis in the app tools. I would say that Tiller has fundamentally changed how we discuss our finances, and for that, I am very thankful.