The world is full of personal finance apps. You can search your phone’s app store to find 100’s of them all competing to be your go-to app for managing your finances. To make things even more interesting, there appears to be a recent upswell of exited founders like myself who have decided that the world needs more of them.

So why does the world need another personal finance app? Building and launching a new app is hard, not something to be taken lightly, so I thought I’d share my perspective on why I, myself, am frustrated with the current apps out there and why I believe it’s worth the time and investment to launch a new one.

The Origin Story

I am a serial startup founder from the UK, now living in Silicon Valley, who’s been fortunate to have a couple of exits that have enabled me to accumulate some wealth. I’m married with two kids, and since moving to Silicon Valley, I’ve seen my expenses shoot up by almost 3x since moving from what was supposed to be an expensive city, London.

In 2001, I read the famous book “Rich Dad Poor Dad” while doing an industrial work placement. Although I’m not Robert Kiyosaki’s biggest fan (I sometimes feel that he’s too focused on making money and getting rich), the principles in the book resonated with me, especially around achieving financial freedom through passive income. While reading the book, I also witnessed a round of layoffs at the company I did my placement at. I saw 40+yr old engineers stressing out about losing their jobs, paying their mortgages, and maintaining their current lifestyle. It was clear that hardly anyone in the office had done anything to protect themselves from the worst-case scenario of losing their jobs, and I never wanted to be in that position myself.

For me as a founder, financial freedom has always been vital. My worst nightmare is not being able to quit my job to pursue a new idea I’m excited about. I want to choose to have a job, not need to have one, and the experiences above shaped me to focus on saving and investing to ensure I always have that freedom.

However, since having kids and moving to the valley, we’ve seen our living expenses shoot up so high, I’ve found being able to keep our expenses low and not dive into my savings extremely hard. I’m still fortunate that I could choose to leave my job if I wanted to, but the cost and risks of doing so have become significantly higher now, especially when you have enough experience to know the reality of startups, the risks involved, and the high failure rates.

So I started having to track our income and expenses far more vigorously since moving here and employ a CPA to reduce the significant tax burden that eats at our income living in California. On top of that, I’ve had to do it collaboratively with my wife, who has less interest in tracking and managing our finances.

Fortunately, I’ve been using personal finance tools since 2001, starting with Microsoft Money before it was discontinued. I’m actually quite proud that I can track my total spending, investments, and net worth going back 20 years in my current app. The trouble is the current app, which is the best out of all the apps I’ve tried, is good but not great.

For one, it doesn’t allow me to share and collaborate on my finances with my wife. Despite being married five years now, we only just got our first joint bank account a few weeks ago. Hence, until then, all our finances were in separate accounts and institutions that needed to be manually merged to get a holistic view of our finances and spending. I believe as couples get married later in life, most couples today are in this situation, bringing all their separate accounts and assets into the marriage and not necessarily consolidating all of them into joint accounts.

On top of that, most apps are built for the American market. They either don’t fully support foreign institutions or think “multi-currency” support is just multiplying your foreign transactions by today’s currency exchange rate, leading to reports that fluctuate every time you open them. As a couple with accounts and assets in several countries, multi-currency support needs to be a well-designed first-class feature.

They also mostly seem to be Cloud/Mobile-first solutions too. As someone in the industry, who knows just how often Cloud services are compromised, and laws like the Patriot Act can be used to subpoena customer data by the US government, I would never put my personal financial data into a Cloud service. And mobile-only apps don’t provide the screen real-estate I need to properly view and manage my finances or export to Excel like a Desktop app.

And finally, almost all of them are focused on budgeting. If you are bad with money, living paycheck to paycheck, or need to pay off debt, then perhaps a budgeting tool is what you need to get started. But once you start building wealth and passive income, the focus quickly changes towards financial planning, which nearly all the apps out there don’t provide.

With all this in mind, and countless days spent putting together an Excel spreadsheet that could track our finances since we got married and moved to the US, I decided that it was time to build a personal finance app that actually worked for me and hired a small but incredible team to help me build an app that actually addressed all these problems, and would help people like myself save significant hours trying to manage and plan their finances, to ultimately achieve financial freedom for ourselves and our families.

The Vision

I suspect one of the reasons some exited founders have also decided to build another personal finance app recently is when you have some wealth, you inevitably end up being approached by or going to financial advisors. For my self-service generation who are used to doing things by ourselves using software, it can feel a little odd to have a human, who essentially uses some proprietory software themselves, to model out your financial plan and investments. They usually also want to take 1% of assets under management, a fee that can add up significantly over time as your assets grow. It feels like an industry ripe for disruption as software continues to eat the world.

Hence the primary goal of the Angelfish is to become your personal but virtual financial planner. While many of the features will be familiar to anyone that’s used a personal finance app before, albeit with some significant design and UX improvements by someone who’s been using these tools regularly for 20 years, it will not be another budgeting app. There are 100’s of those already. Angelfish will be for people who’ve reached the next stage and want to build wealth to achieve financial freedom, where their passive income is greater than their expenses and having a job becomes a choice.

While this is an aspirational goal for most people, I fear that it will become a necessary goal for most of our generation who will see their wealth deteriorate with current monetary policies, technology automation, and increasingly underfunded government programs that will not provide the safety net most people have been promised. Those who take control of their own financial future will thrive, unfortunately leaving a large number of people behind.

Angelfish’s vision will be to help anyone who wishes, regardless of their current financial status, take control of their financial future and achieve financial freedom at a scale and level of personalization only software can provide.

To begin with, it will start by tracking your cash flow, income and expenses, across all your institutions and accounts. It will allow you to see where your spending is going, whether expenses are critical like housing and food, or optional expenses you could cut back if needed, like vacations in a worst-case scenario. With this baseline, it will track your passive income and give you a view of how far or close you are from achieving financial freedom.

However, beyond that, it will also provide a planner where you can model the impact of making financial decisions easily and build a plan to achieve financial freedom by a specific date. For example, should you buy a house or rent, lease or buy a car, put your kids in private school? These are all examples of significant decisions we’ve had to make personally, which all impact our ability to save and build the wealth required to become financially free.

It will also become a single pane of glass to manage all your assets and investments. I’m a huge crypto fan, and we plan to integrate Angelfish into crypto platforms to protect and increase users’ wealth and generate yield to increase their passive income.

But most importantly, it will be built secure and private. We don’t plan to host any user’s data in our own Cloud service. Unfortunately, we cannot connect and sync bank accounts without using 3rd party Cloud services like Plaid, but users will have a choice if they want to use that service to connect and sync their accounts. However, the app’s data will be stored in a way where no one, not even our team, can ever view or access your data using some of the latest decentralized technologies starting to appear. Only yourself, and any users such as your Spouse or accountant, with your explicit permission, will be able to access and view your data.

Where We Are Today

We’ve been working slowly in the background for a few months now on the designs and an MVP of the app, focusing on getting the user experience and core features completed for early adopters to test later this summer. It will be built initially as a stand-alone desktop app that works on Windows, macOS, and Linux, so your data is kept secure and local to you. However, as the decentralized technologies we are investigating mature, we will quickly add them to the app later this year to enable the multi-user, multi-device experience we envision without putting any of your data in the Cloud.

Until then, if you’ve resonated with our vision and want to become an early adopter to get first access to the app and provide feedback when it’s ready, sign up to request access here, and we’d love to have you onboard!