Let’s discuss! What’s a budgeting mistake you were making before Tiller that we helped you catch?
For me, I realized that even though I buy a lot of technology, I almost always resell it when I get something newer, so the overall cost per year was less than I thought. It made me think differently about how I ‘consume’ technology. I now view it as ‘renting’, and budget a certain amount per year towards that rent (eg. buy a new laptop for $1000, sell it a year later for $750, rent cost per year = $250 to always have a new laptop).
Budgeting life before Tiller was a lot of manual work. I was manually downloading and formatting my financial data and then adding them to my own spreadsheet. I stumbled on Tiller in a Reddit post and gave it a try. The automation of both financial data and categorizing gave me more time to focus on where my money was going.
I wouldn’t say that Tiller helped me catch anything, however, I needed to start budgeting and trying to actually track everything when I got divorced, and Tiller was perfect for what I needed. I had mint before, but it just kind of ran in the background, the data was there, but I didn’t really know what to do with it other than see some basics. Tiller makes me actually look and see what is happening. I am definitely more aware of where all my spending is going and am able to save more money.
Hilariously, this reminded me of cars and that while many people say you should by a car instead of lease, but because the average person switches a vehicle ~3 years it might be more prudent to lease vs buy/sell.
Yeah, very similar. Just goes to show everyone has a different use case and needs, which is why it’s nice to have such a flexible tool to track it all!
Biggest benefit for me (which was kind of a prior mistake) is the comprehensive, holistic view of all transaction accounts I now have in tiller. Before I looked at account by account – this amex, that visa, this bank, that brokerage…-- with the blind trust that everything would foot-out and nothing would get missed. Ha, ha.
The reason I did that , pre-tiller, was because it was too much of a pain to aggregate and error check all those separate data feeds. Now everything is in my transaction register, one way or another, so there are no pipes bursting in my plans. (I believe that economists have a technical term for this pre-tiller problem,: “leakage”. With tiller, my basement is dry as a bone.)