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Exclusions apply. See website for details. Today on Radical Personal Finance, I'm going to give you a way to juice up your personal finance spreadsheets and automate the most time-consuming aspect of that. A lot of you are going to enjoy today's show, and a few of you are going to be ecstatic about the tool that I have for you today.

Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets, and I'm your host. Today, we are talking with Peter Polson, the founder of Tiller, a spreadsheet system that automates the data as it flows into your spreadsheets. And like I said, you financial geeks and nerds, pay attention, because some of you are going to love this solution for you.

I try, as I'm out and about in the personal finance world, I try to just keep my ears open for new things that are going on. I try to keep my ears open for new solutions that are happening and just different options and opportunities. And that's exactly how today's interview came to me.

That's exactly how I became aware of the software package that we're going to talk about in today's show. I randomly bumped into Peter Polson at FinCon, and he shared with me the project that he's working on. I didn't quite grasp it at the moment, but as always, I checked it out.

And once I got home, as you'll hear in just a moment, I really checked this out. And it's kind of a fun solution. And if you like managing your personal finances with a spreadsheet, if you don't like the software packages, you don't like YNAB, you don't like Microsoft Money or Mint or Quicken or those types of things, and you just like a simple spreadsheet, many of you are going to enjoy this option that I have for you in today's show.

So stay tuned for the interview. Before we get to the content of today's show, let me just talk about our sponsors of the day. Sponsor of the day number one is Jay Fleischman. Jay is the host of the Student Loan Show. It's a podcast focused exclusively on student loans.

He is also a bankruptcy and student loan attorney. And because of his depth of knowledge in the student loan space and in the bankruptcy space, he's an incredible resource. He's been on the show twice. Those episodes that you will want to check out are episode 214 and episode 258.

Let me keep it simple. If you have student loans, you should talk with Jay, and you should listen to those episodes, and additionally, you should go and listen to his show. Subscribe to his show, the Student Loan Show, on iTunes or wherever else you listen to your podcasts. But if you have student loans, Jay offers a consultancy service.

He offers consulting on your federal student loans and also on your private student loans. And I would strongly recommend to you that if you have student loans of any type, reach out to Jay for a consultation and look to see if he can save you some money. If you've listened to those shows, 214 and 258, you can find them listed in the archives of the show.

If you listen to the shows, you'll see how and why he can save you potentially money. He can at least sketch out for you the best approach for you to take towards repaying your student loans. So check out his show. He offers a special package for listeners of Radical Personal Finance.

You can find that special package at studentloanshow.com/radical where you'll be able to find all the information. He offers listeners of this show a $25 discount on a federal student loan review via email. So it drops the price from $75 to $50 for listeners of this show. Go to studentloanshow.com/radical.

Sponsor of the day number two is SoFi. SoFi is short for Social Finance, S-O-F-I. SoFi is a modern and innovative company that is working to change some of the lending practices and where they'll be most helpful to you is with the question of student loans or personal loans. For details on SoFi, listen to episode 264 of the show, just three episodes before this one, 264, and you can hear an extensive interview with Dan Macklin who is the co-founder of SoFi.

SoFi, among other things, should be able to save you some money on your interest rates if you qualify. Now the best thing to do is first do a student loan review with Jay Fleischman. He will let you know if refinancing is the best option for you and then at that point in time, go to SoFi and refinance with their service.

The way to get there is go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/SoFi, radicalpersonalfinance.com/S-O-F-I, SoFi, and if you go through that link, not only will that track your business for me so that I get paid a commission based upon your using that link, but also it will get you a $200 discount on the refinance of a student loan or a $100 discount on the refinance of a personal loan.

So go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/SoFi. Check those links out. Big thanks to our sponsors for supporting the show and let's get into the interview with Peter. Peter, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. It's great to be here, Joshua. So we hooked up at FinCon 2015 and you walked up to me after my presentation and said--whenever you give a presentation, it's always a blur of the people that come up and talk to you afterwards, but I do remember you coming up and saying, "Hey, I invented this thing.

It's spreadsheets. It allows people to track their money, blah, blah, blah." And I said, "Okay, whatever," and then you emailed me later and I checked it out and I've been using your service for the last month and a half. I like to test different things out. And it's an interesting concept that you have.

So let's start with an introduction. What is Tiller and where did it come from and what do you guys do? Great. So Tiller aims to give people control over their finances. Not because their finances are most important, but so they can focus on the things in life that are the most important.

And we found the most engaged individuals who were managing their personal finances were using spreadsheets. Many of them were using an actual spreadsheet, ourselves included. And Tiller is focused on making that incredibly easy. Tiller links all of your credit card and checking transactions, all of your bank data and balances into a Google sheet and we keep it updated every day.

So you're pretty hardcore about the spreadsheet thing. And I'm interested to talk to you about this because I used to manage all my stuff with spreadsheets. I no longer do. I switched over to YNAB and use their software now a few months ago. But I used to do everything with spreadsheets.

And so I do have some background in this area. Why are spreadsheets so popular? Great. And actually, can I turn the table very briefly and just ask you can you share a little bit more about your experience using spreadsheets and what maybe worked or what didn't when you did use spreadsheets?

Yeah. I used spreadsheets primarily because of running--well, for two reasons. Number one, I used them to run my business. And the reason for that was because in my business that I was running, I had expenses that would come out before my paycheck. So I was working for a company called Northwestern Mutual, and I was paid commissions.

But I also had expenses. And so the way it would work is I would have gross commissions paid from the company, and then the company would deduct certain expenses. Northwestern, the larger company, they would deduct my health insurance costs. They would deduct various group benefit costs from my paycheck.

And then my managing partner and the office that I was under, they would deduct my rent costs. They would deduct my fees for using the copy machine and all of that kind of thing. And then I would get the paycheck. It would be a net paycheck that would go into my bank, and then I would spend off of that and run my other business expenses from that paycheck and then make a transfer over to my personal expenditures.

The challenge was that I was paid in that situation as with some of my income, I was paid as what's called a statutory employee. So I was a W-2 employee, but I was able to deduct all of those business expenses. And when I would try to set up programs, accounting programs to take care of it, it was challenging to make the programs reconcile.

And what I grew frustrated with was when using QuickBooks or things like that, everything needed to reconcile, and I could never get it to work how I wanted it to be. And so finally I gave up trying to--I quit trying to reconcile balances with spreadsheets, and I just used spreadsheets to track expenses.

And so I would reconcile balances with a checkbook register, and I would have just simply two checkbooks, one for my business account, one for my personal account, and then I would do my reconciliation on a-- I would just track everything on a spreadsheet without worrying about maintaining balances and accounts.

And at the end of the year, I would export spreadsheets, and of course, like most people, I'd be a little bit behind, so I'd go back and make up whatever the months were and make sure all my transactions were correct. And then I would just use a spreadsheet and parse everything out at tax time.

And that was the other challenge was that I would usually file three different individual Schedule Cs for three individual lines of business, and then I would separate out my expenses, and some of the expenses would be prorated out to different lines of my business. So some would be my investment business, some would be my insurance business, some would be my outside insurance business, some would be my Northwestern business.

And so it was a little bit complicated for me to do, and I would just do it best by doing it manually. What happened, though, is I would always get behind, and that was the challenge, setting them up, which is one of the major features that your product would have solved if I had been using it at that time.

I'd get behind on transactions, and I would have to do everything manually. So it had a lot of benefit. The downside of that system was I wasn't able to do any kind of forward-looking, proactive budgeting. And so finally when I tried the YNAB software, starting first a couple months ago, when I finally tried it, all of a sudden they had totally improved the software, and it solved the issues for me there.

So I switched. I stopped maintaining my spreadsheets, and I went to using the YNAB software, and that has been working for me well the last about, I'd say, four months that I've been using that. So that's my story with spreadsheets. That's a great story. What I love about that is it gives some of the nuances to the complexity of your finances and the reality is, and also what you were trying to do, your goals.

And we found that that story is common from one person to the next, where there's often some nuances and complexity to what they're trying to do. And stepping back to some of the origins, but I have spent a lot of time over my life helping people with finances. When I actually came to it originally, I have always been interested in computers and have spent my career working in technology.

And early on, 20 years ago, in the late '80s, I was in high school, and I was teaching people how to use the computer for the first time. And the tools I was using were, I was introducing them, and at first reach around with your left hand, turn the computer on, and then, you know, pre-internet.

So I would teach them how to use Microsoft Word and how to use Quicken. And over the years, I have been fascinated that the state of the art of money management hasn't evolved a whole lot from the model that Quicken presented. There's Quicken, there's Mint, which brought that into a web interface.

There's some other great tools out there. And for many people, some of those tools do work and work well. But the state of the art of money management hasn't evolved a whole lot. And what's happened since then is their spreadsheets specifically have come an incredible distance. And there are powerful tools like Google Sheets, which we can talk about more, that make it really easy and accessible.

But the missing link has been getting data into that spreadsheet. And that is something that Tiller specifically focused on. And really, we have found that there are certainly some people who prefer to have a solution with guardrails and that can guide them through a specific process. But the reason why many people end up using spreadsheets is because they are trying to look at their data this way, but their tool makes them look at it that way.

And they really are wrestling with those constraints. And so they end up going to a spreadsheet and using a spreadsheet. And that is something that is a common theme again and again. And that is a use case that Tiller is very focused on. Right. And it just helped me in that business when I was running these multiple businesses, filing multiple tax returns on -- they were distinct businesses, but they were in many ways the same businesses.

But they needed distinct multiple tax returns. And when I was reconciling accounts, the other thing that was nice about spreadsheets is I could be account agnostic. Instead of trying to balance this and then having the transfers from checking account to credit card and then this credit card here and I would keep different credit cards for personal expenditures and whatnot, I could just bring all those expenses in.

I could label them as personal or business. If they were tagged as business, I would tag them as either all the businesses, in which case it would be prorated, or if there were something specific, okay, this is an investment license renewal, that's going to go against the investment business.

This is an insurance renewal, that's going to go against the insurance business. And it was just -- once I knew the concept, it was simpler for me to handle it. And by not having to balance anything, that made a big, big difference. And the reconciliation process of not having to put in and run some QuickBooks menu where I put in these six transactions before the paycheck, I could just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, put them all in, all the ones that were before the fact, after the fact, and then just do a quick select and view the balance to verify the net income was correct and I'd entered it all correct.

It was -- once I figured it out, it definitely worked better for me than all of the software tools. Exactly. The analogy that I think of as you tell that story is kitchens. And my wife and I, we love food. My wife is the best cook in the family, but we both do some.

And if we were to be given a kitchen that had a specific layout and the spices were in one place and the knives were in another, we could work in it. But the reality is in our kitchen, we work best when we configure it to the way we like to cook and to the things we use most often.

And so we have optimized our kitchen. The goal in our kitchen, we enjoy preparing and cooking food, but the goal in the kitchen is to get to the meal where we sit down, and whether it's with family or friends, where we're sharing food together. And so the kitchen is designed to be efficient, and the kitchen is ultimately -- the organization of the kitchen is a reflection of how we think and work.

And that's going to be very different from how you organize your kitchen and someone else organizes theirs. And the same thing is true in a spreadsheet. And ultimately, we want our users to get in and out of their spreadsheet as quickly as possible. And with the way that spreadsheets are designed and the way Tiller works, users can come in, they can quickly touch and categorize a dozen new transactions since they were last in there, and take a quick look at the reports and analysis that is most important to them, some of which they've built in their spreadsheet perhaps, and then they're done.

They're out of there. And so it's really the fact that people can design their spreadsheet around their workflow and around their goals and around what matters most to them is the magic of spreadsheets. And that's why we've found that many of the most engaged people are using spreadsheets. Yeah.

And I can totally see the value of the product at this point just based upon solving that data entry issue for me. And that would have been worth -- I mean, I've been using and paying for your product the last couple of months, kind of testing it, but that would have been worth it to me in that day just to solve the data entry problem because that's the problem with spreadsheets is data entry.

It's a pain to go through and do it. And so if you can have that done automatically, once you become a spreadsheet master or at least a mid-level competent journeyman, then they definitely are useful. But most people, I think, are super intimidated by spreadsheets. I know I was until I learned.

So we'll talk more about this, but I want to know the story of how and why you started building this tool. Sure. It came -- so Tiller really came out of my own personal frustration with the state of the art of money management. And as I mentioned earlier, we were -- as we looked at how we were managing our finances, we realized that -- my wife and I -- that we kept coming back to using a spreadsheet.

And Tim, who is my -- on the founding team here with Tiller, he also found that he kept coming back and was using a spreadsheet again and again. And as we were realizing how can we help the state of the art of money management, we realized that the riddle that we wanted to and needed to solve was to make that easier, to make it easier for people to manage their finances in their spreadsheet.

And the data entry was the biggest challenge there. The other thing is that, you know, we want to make Tiller -- our users are our customers, and we are very focused on helping our users get set up and get started. A lot of that right now, we are very quick to respond when customers email us via support.

And we also are building some tutorials. We have some that are on the website and more that are coming with each day. And we really want to make it easy for people who are at any stage of the experience curve with spreadsheets. But I'll tell you that the most important thing is you don't have to be a spreadsheet ninja to take advantage of a spreadsheet.

And so the typical workflow that we recommend for someone, if they open their Tiller sheet, they're going to see a list of all their transactions. And the first thing they do, it's very easy. We have a template that's built. They can go -- they can enter their categories. We're not pre-populating with 100 categories that we think they should have.

We're asking users to think about their goals and priorities and their values with regards to spending and to put down their categories. And often that might be 5 or 10 or 15 categories that reflects the spending buckets where they put their dollars to work. And we make it really easy for users to create those categories.

The second step is then we have a transaction tab where we list all of our users' transactions. And every day we update that with the latest new transactions. And based on the categories they've entered, there's a simple drop-down option next to each transaction where they can categorize that transaction.

And it's quick. It's easy. You can actually even do it with keystrokes if you're quick on your keyboard. Literally, if you have 20 transactions, you can get through it in 10 seconds. And it's that easy and it's that quick. That simple process alone of touching every transaction again, which is a core tenant to how Tiller has been designed, creates an awareness on its own.

Even if you do nothing with that data, just going back and touching that data again, touching that transaction again, has an incredible impact on the awareness about where our spending is going. Because when we swipe, when we click, so much of our spending happens effortlessly and also almost subconsciously that it's easy for the money to flow out and we just don't know where it goes.

And so going in, touching every transaction again and categorizing creates that awareness. Tiller then has several reports that show people how their spending is trending based on their categories over periods of time. And it's easy for users to keep tabs on that. But, period, if that is all users do, they're going to build very quickly over time an awareness about where their money is going relative to the categories they've defined and how their spending in those areas is trending.

And if they do nothing else, their spending is going to start aligning with their values because they're aware and their head's not in the sand, they're actually aware. From there, there's endless directions users can go and we have more advanced features in the template. We have lots of stories of users who have done interesting things beyond that as well.

But that, as a starting point, is a very powerful place to go and it's going to quickly build for a user an awareness about what's happening with their spending. And it is useful. One of my favorite things as I've played with it for the last two months has been how easy it is to integrate multiple accounts.

So let me just add one bit of description for somebody who's working to visualize it. In many ways, the basic function is that transactions tab. And so you've got a Google spreadsheet that's set up and it's through Yodlee, right? That's right. Okay, so through Yodlee, which is a large, very common money management interface where they handle the encryption and the connection between different financial institutions.

So you pass your info in, it pulls all the data out of your credit cards and out of your bank accounts and everything, and then just dumps it all in one spreadsheet. And I really like that where it dumps all the accounts into one sheet automatically and then it can be manipulated from there.

And it does a really nice job. On the category topic, this is one of the benefits I see of spreadsheets also, is you can easily create custom categories. And in some advanced accounting software, you can do that. But I'll give you a simple one. If I'm doing meal and entertainment business expenses, I have always maintained a category that's a 50% deduction category and 100% deduction category because the majority of meals and entertainment, as a financial advisor, that would be the majority of my costs, entertaining clients, taking them to meals, things like that.

Those are only deductible on a 50% basis, but yet there are expenses that are 100% deductible. If I hosted a party or an event or something like that, those are entertainment expenses, but they can transition over to be fully deductible. And so I've always maintained those two different categories, and it's one of those little tweaks that makes it easy to do once you have your own spreadsheet.

But it's one of those little tweaks that saves you a few bucks in tax at the end of the year. And so once you get very granular with your categories and your knowledge of your different categories, you can more easily isolate them. Here's the question though. How do you compete with -- in many ways, there are a bunch of really great free backward-looking systems out there for personal finance people.

Personal Capital has a really, really beautiful one. Mint has a good one. Both of those are free for users. I'm sure there are others out there, but those are probably the two big top dogs. How are you planning to compete with these other options that are free and that are a lot prettier than your spreadsheet?

Sure. And Tiller's model is it's a subscription service. It's free for the first month, and then it's $5 a month after that. And you're right. Users are going to compare it to other free options, and they do. We've interviewed lots of users in creating Tiller, and certainly there's a lot of awareness around Mint, and Mint works for some folks.

We actually find that Mint also has a very high churn, and there's a couple things that drive people nuts about Mint when it doesn't work for them. One is that it's guessing every category for every transaction, and it gets many of them right, but it doesn't get them all right.

And the interface doesn't exactly make it easy to go and change those categories. And so if you're not going into every transaction, you can't really be confident in the report that you're seeing from Mint, but it doesn't -- so that's a real hassle. People get wrapped around the axle with the categories with Mint.

It also starts users with over 100 categories, and so users -- and you can't delete them, but you can add your own. So the categories can quickly become a bit of a jungle. We believe that it's really important for users to categorize everything from -- and because it's a spreadsheet, it's so quick.

Literally, you start typing a key, the category pre-populates, you hit "Enter," you're on the next transaction, boom. And because the reality is, if I'm at the hardware store and I'm buying a sled for my nephew's Christmas present, that's a very different transaction than if I'm buying some paint for the kitchen.

And there's no way that any algorithm is going to be able to tell me that a hardware store purchase is always one thing, because it's not. It really depends on what was my intent. And so we want people to categorize, and a key part of Tiller is making that easy.

The second thing is that a big tenet for us is that our customers are our users. Ad-funded platforms, inevitably, the customer is the advertiser. That's how they make their money, and the user is how they sell those ads. And we decided, no, we did not want our data, our customers' data, to be used as a way to sell them stuff.

And so there's no advertising on Tiller. Our customers are users, and we're entirely focused on helping them to manage their finances. And so that's -- and then the final thing is, it's really philosophical. There are people who really do want a system, a tool with certain guardrails on it that does a few things.

And some of these web tools do have pretty pictures, as you point out. But if anyone wants to change the way that a chart or a report is working, or if they're looking for an analysis that cuts differently than the standard stock analysis that's available, they're stuck. And so we often -- and it's not just backwards-looking, it's forward-looking.

You know, most -- there's a reason why most businesses, small or big, use spreadsheets to create their forecast. It's because it's a very powerful, flexible tool to do that. And so we want to start every Tiller user with some reports and analysis that they'll find helpful. But it's also really easy -- for example, if you are coming up with a report for your accountant, and I'm talking to your example about work expenses and what's deductible at 50% and what's deductible at 100%, in a spreadsheet it's really easy if you have that data but you realize, ah, I need to make a few changes to it.

You copy that data, you put it into a new tab, you quickly format it and come up with the subtotals you need for your accountant and send it off. And the fact that the data is so accessible and you can copy and paste it, move it around, makes it really easy to just come up with a quick analysis on the fly if you want to look into something.

And so that's the reason people use spreadsheets. All that said, our biggest goal is making sure people are tracking their finances and are on top of their spending. And whatever tool they use, that's their choice. We just found there are plenty of people who find spreadsheets helpful. Many of the most engaged people are using spreadsheets.

And so our whole purpose in life right now is making their lives easier and making that really, really easy. So if I hadn't found – and I want to talk about backward-looking versus forward-looking – but if I hadn't found and switched all of my stuff over to YNAB before Tiller, I would without doubt be an immediate client and just using the spreadsheet to do it.

I've got both of them going and I've been playing with it, saying, "Okay, is one better than another for me?" But the major weakness I see in spreadsheets is that it's all backward-looking data. And that is really useful when it comes time to reports and creating and working at reports.

But from the perspective of personal finance data and actually managing, the weakness with any kind of backward-looking data is it's not actually managing the decisions. It's only giving you a view of what you've done. And so for the last five years of my life up until a few months ago, that's all I did was to use backward-looking data.

I didn't do any proactive budgeting for the month ahead because none of the – I had a variable income and none of the budgeting systems work. My budgeting system was just simply to pay attention to what's gone on in the last month, pay attention to the – keep my checkbooks current, and then kind of just go with the – and have a big picture of what was going to happen in any month based upon the balances.

YNAB solved that problem for me on a forward-looking basis where it made it super, super easy for me to budget this month's expenses and then also look forward and say, "Okay, how much cash is in my bank account? How is that going to go forward over the next few months?" And I could go ahead and here as we record this – this will probably be released in January, but as we record this is November the 3rd.

And you can already be saying, "Okay, I need to set aside the budget for Christmas." And you could have been doing it all year long. Is there a way to use – so I'm kind of picking on you and talking about all your competitors, but is there a way to use Tiller as – in a forward-looking capacity?

Sure. It's a great question. So forward-looking is key and I agree with you on that. And right now one of the things people do is it makes it very easy to project out trend rates with spending and with income. And I will say for us our income can be lumpy.

And so we have a very simple model that is in a sheet that we built that uses the Tiller data and models out, "Okay, here are expenses which are not as lumpy and here is some income which is lumpier and let's map those two together to see how we traject out." And we have some additions to the template that we're building that make that even easier and that also are going to help people track their balances within an account where they have an account that they are saving for certain goals and they're essentially virtual accounts within an account.

And to make it easy for people to allocate and track those. And that's something we've been testing and depending on when the show comes out, that may be out available very soon as well. And I will say the last thing to answer this question about forward-looking, and this is also something that we are going to start sharing more, is some of the Tiller stories because while we have a point of view and we have built a template that we want people to have to get started, we also realize there are some fascinating things that our users are doing with their spreadsheets.

And so we are also going to be sharing some of those stories and in some cases sharing some of the templates that some of our users have built to showcase what they're doing with their spreadsheets because they're often ideas, even formulas and models and bits of analysis that people will find inspiring or may even want to pull from directly into their own Tiller sheet.

As they build it. Because everyone, again, everyone's people want their sheet to reflect their goals and their needs and the unique elements of how they want to plan for their finances. And so I completely agree and that's definitely something that is both possible today, it's also an area where we're investing further right now.

I would love to see those templates because I know we spreadsheet junkies have to stick together. I've had people email me and ask for my and say, "Hey, can I see your spreadsheet?" And I've tried so many times to help other of my fellow financial advisors. I just couldn't believe, I mean, it's like the tailor has no shoes when it comes to financial advisors.

So many of the financial advisors that I used to work with, they just didn't have any good personal financial management systems. Just like with most people, you have a 20/80 probably breakdown. 20% are nerds like me and 80% of people, they're not focused on those details. But looking at different spreadsheets and approaches, I've always loved looking at other people's how they'd approach it.

There was a user and I'll send you, I'll put a link in the show notes. But there was a user in the Money Mustache forums who was just a spreadsheet wizard. He is an early retiree, really focused on early retirement. He built this beautiful spreadsheet that tracked every single transaction, tracked the exact dates to retirement, tracked every single percentage ratio of income versus expenses.

He had everything, years of assets built up in terms of expenditures and whatnot. I loved his monthly updates. I worked to try to build a spreadsheet for myself that would do something similar, track my savings ratio every month. Mine, when I was using the spreadsheet system, I had it set up where at the bottom of it, I had programmed it all so that it would track my percentages, it would track percent of gross income, percent of money given away.

It would put all the averages. I would set it up in a matrix where it would keep my monthly averages and my annual. I really loved using it because I could keep a dashboard on all those percentages. That was really helpful for me to see what percentage of my income is coming from these different scenarios.

It was a spreadsheet junkie in me coming out. That's where I've thought about, "Okay, how can I take this tiller data and rebuild some of those things?" because those are some of the things I can't do with YNAB. If I'm trying to save this percentage, YNAB is really cool with forward-looking budgeting, but I can't build in my percentages and years to financial independence and all of that stuff.

Do you have people who are tracking those types of ratios? Absolutely. Tell me about some of their spreadsheets because that's really exciting to us junkies. I would say, Joshua, we should build and/or you should refine and share that spreadsheet that you have. It would be great. I can help to connect the plumbing in so it's working with tiller or you can too.

It's so easy. It would be awesome to share that with your audience at some point, either concurrent with the show or at some point in the future. I think that would be really neat. It's really motivating, and I'll tell you why. Here's an idea, and maybe we can do this with a tiller spreadsheet and collaborate on it somehow.

Years ago, I met with a guy from – the company is gone now – but it was a company called You First Financial. They were selling at that time – they had a product that they were called their Money Merge account. I thought it was a total scam, but I met with the guy and I was talking to him.

The way it worked was they sold this big $3,000 piece of software, and they had you put a HELOC on your house, and you put all your money into the HELOC, and then you paid your bills out of the HELOC. But basically, they made their money on the software sale was the best I could figure it out.

But as I'm talking with the guy and looking at the software, I started just looking at it, and I said, "This is awesome," and the analogy that I compared it to was – I said, "What if you had a fork?" I've been overweight since I was 12 years old, and so people who are overweight, they're always thinking about, "What is this next bite of food that I eat?

What do I actually do with it?" It's hard because the impact of our decisions is often deferred. So I thought, "What if you had a fork that when you picked up the bite of chocolate cake, that fork would say, 'Oh, every bite of chocolate cake is taking off 11 and a half minutes off of your lifespan and is adding 0.04 pounds, and so congratulations, in the last five minutes, you've just gained two pounds because of what you're eating.'" Or if you have flipped it around on the other side and said, "You just had steak and asparagus, congratulations, you've just extended your lifespan by 12 minutes," that instant feedback.

Now, I don't think it's possible with food, but maybe somebody can. But with finances, when I was looking at that software that they used to sell with the Money Merge accounts, and it was looking at how long to debt freedom based upon every expense that you made, and I thought, "How powerful," because what's missing a lot of times in personal finance decisions is we're missing the immediate feedback loop.

So if I go out to dinner and I take my family out to dinner, we've decided, "Okay, we're going to go out to dinner," but then I choose not to order a soft drink, I've just saved $6. And it would be really cool to be able to see the impact of that $6 savings on my retirement funds and to be able to program in what I would do.

And I didn't get this done, but what I would love to do is be able to demonstrate, "Hey, I saved $6," and automatically immediately compound the $6 over the next 30 years and say, "Oh, by the way, Joshua, you're now $267 richer at retirement," or model those things. And so that's what's missing a lot of times in personal finance is the impact to see this month we made a really good decision, we saved a bunch of money, and look, we are now two months closer to financial independence because we watched our grocery bill really carefully.

And you can do that with a spreadsheet in some way, but I never figured out how to actually make it happen. So if we could build that, that would be really, really cool if we could build that for people. Absolutely. And that reminds me of two things. One is I have actually in my sheet a column that I have sometimes included next to my transactions that is the future value of each line item that I've spent.

So what is the future value of this spend in 30 years? The other variant I've used is what is the -- if I were retired right now and I needed -- how much would I need to have saved in order to allow me to safely withdraw the amount to pay for this item?

Let's say it's a meal or whatever. And it's like, "Wow, okay, how important is that item to me, that piece of gear, that meal, that food, that whatever?" And having that literally next to each line item is a very powerful -- it helps to connect the dots. And it's like, "Okay, yeah, this is the future value of money." We're very bad -- humans are very bad at thinking in different time senses.

And that future value is a very powerful number. It totally is because -- and that's -- once I learned that some years ago, it changed how I thought about everything. When I took a monthly expense and just automatically -- and I've done shows on this. If listeners haven't heard them, go look in the archives.

There are shows on this. But if you take a monthly expense and you just automatically multiply every monthly expense by 300 and you say, "Well, what's worth it to me? Is it worth it to me to take this expense and have to earn this amount of money and save it, net of tax and fees, so that it can provide this for me ever or cut this expense?" It radically -- if you're focused on financial independence, it radically affects your decisions.

And the big decision that we have to face is the future value of money, the opportunity cost. If I spend this money now, I am by definition giving up my ability to spend this money on other things. And what I'd love to see is a good -- is a quick feedback loop.

I love that idea of just having it programmed in of the future value. And you could definitely program a formula to age -- let's just say age 65. At 65, here's how much wealthier I'm going to be or less wealthy because that transition will change. When I'm 30, I'm going to be very, very frugal because I've got lots of time coming forward.

But at 55, the future value is much lower, so I'm likely to go ahead and loosen up on the spending and the future value is not as compelling. So it is exciting to see some of that custom stuff in here. And to me, that's where -- that's a huge value for we nerds of this spreadsheet system.

That's right. And you know what's interesting? There's a change in the family dynamic too, and one of the powerful things about a Google sheet for anyone -- I think many of you in your audience are probably familiar with a Google sheet, but it has incredible collaboration features. And we've had some interesting stories from our users in how they have put that to work.

So in most families, there's someone who is the accountant who keeps track of the bills and the financial planning and where things are. And there's someone else who generally doesn't but is looking for some guidance. Should we be spending more or should we be spending less? And sometimes, in fact, the person who's not the accountant, that can play out well or poorly depending on how effective the communication is between those two.

One of the things Tiller can do is every Google sheet is really easy to share securely with one or more other people. And so we have users who've shared their Google sheet with a spouse. So, for example, this is a user I was talking to recently. He said for the first time his wife actually is part of the financial conversations in a way that she never has and has a sense for where their money is going.

And he simply -- he shares the sheet with her. He includes her in in the whole categorization process. So he's told her, "Hey, when you have a moment, go in and categorize each transaction and I'll do the same." And simply having us both in there, we're going to be categorizing and we're going to be keeping tabs on things.

And so that process has helped to build some awareness in both of them as a shared sense of where our money is going. And then the other thing is he's built a tab that's a dashboard that's what are the high-level things that we're tracking together relative to our goals.

Maybe it's a vacation next year or maybe it's retirement or maybe it's college savings for the kids. And so that there's a dashboard where they can both look always to see how they're tracking to their goals. Now, there's a whole lot to that spreadsheet that he's built that goes deeper than she wants to go.

But the two things that she checks always are the dashboard and she goes in and she categorizes stuff. And for the person who's the non-accountant, that's a great way to pull them in. And suddenly, two people are collaborating together on their finances. And we've heard that story several times.

And we've also heard it intergenerationally where there's a child taking care of an elderly parent's finances. And the power in Google Sheets to be able to collaborate together, even if one person is a spreadsheet wizard and one person isn't. Google Sheets make it so easy and that's a great way to pull that other person into the conversation.

Yeah, and you definitely need to share some of the screenshots. Obviously, wipe the data or change the data, but you definitely need to share some of the screenshots of these things so that we can get more ideas because that's going to be a big deal for your sales of the spreadsheet.

As just a spreadsheet, great. I mean, you can download that from your transactions and build it. But real-time reports, I've wanted to build some stuff for my investment accounts and investments and be able to build real-time reports that would be able to give me a snapshot that's beyond what the software programs do and demonstrate and pull some of the data in.

And ultimately, I don't think this is entry-level stuff, but you get to a point where you get frustrated with the tools that are entry-level. And you want it custom. You want it to show exactly the data that you want so that you can monitor things on an ongoing basis.

Question about Google Sheets versus Excel. I'm not nearly as comfortable in Google Sheets as I am in Excel. And obviously, the formulas are the same. But I struggle because a lot of the keyboard shortcuts, I find a little bit slower. So do you recommend building everything in Google Sheets, even all of the dashboards, the templates, the charts, and things like that, and keeping it all in there?

Because I haven't built that on my own Tiller sheet yet to see. Is it able to do that, or do you think the data should be exported over to Excel? Great question. Google Sheets has significantly closed the gap with Excel in terms of features and functionality. They're different, and someone who's spent their life in Excel will find Google Sheets to be a bit different.

But in terms of the functions and the capabilities, Google Sheets goes really deep. And Google Sheets has some elements that are unique and aren't available with Excel, including the ability to do a SQL-type query into your data. So anyone who has experience in queries can write really fascinating data queries that go far beyond what's possible with a simple pivot table.

For people who don't know what a query is, don't worry. You certainly don't need to. Don't worry about what a pivot table is either. If we want to go deep, it's really an interesting opportunity. The shared element of a Google Sheet, and frankly, it makes it really, really easy in a robust way for us to connect our back end securely with each user's sheet.

And even if a user happens to be in it at the same time that we're updating data with new transactions, which happens several times a day, Google Sheets handles that really elegantly. And so architecturally, there are a lot of reasons why a Google Sheet makes sense. And so we really do encourage users to embrace Google Sheets.

We've found certainly some of our users are native Google Sheets users and love that it's in Google Sheets. We've also had a number of users who are Excel users, and sometimes they do start copying the data over into their Excel sheet. But often we find they end up getting more and more comfortable with Google Sheets, and then that's where they live.

And that's what we recommend, but certainly both are options. Yeah, I could see that happening. I could see myself getting comfortable. It's just a matter of pressing through and learning its values, so getting comfortable. I could see that happening. And definitely having it stored in the cloud, having it accessible, having it shareable, being able to export some data into probably a different workbook or a different sheet that you could share and make a widget out of in some way to share with other people could be really cool.

And those functionalities are available in the cloud, and they're not available in other scenarios. So it's just a matter of me building my skills with Google Sheets and being comfortable with it. What have we missed, Peter? You know, we talk a lot about spending, and obviously Tiller helps you focus, helps you track your income and your expenses.

It's not just the expenses, but I will say philosophically that one of the things that underlies how we approach Tiller Sheets and how we think about finances is spending is such a key riddle to getting to freedom. And, you know, if you – income is – more income makes everything easier, of course, and there are dials everyone has in their life to increase income, but those usually take some time to dial up.

And also many people have specifically chosen a career or a path through life where they're not optimizing for income, but they're making enough. So income matters, but it's not something that people are making decisions about with their behavior every day. Assets and investments matter, and making sure that your investments have the right allocation or if you have debt, making sure that that's – your debt is in the lowest rates possible and that you're paying down that debt.

That is certainly very important. The day-to-day decisions we make around spending we think are the most important. And the difference – there are many people who live on modest incomes, who live lives of financial freedom where they can focus on the more important things beyond their finances because their spending is in check.

And there are certainly many stories and we read about them in the paper whether they're athletes or others who – individuals who make millions and blow it all and it's because of spending. And so in everything we do, we think that the whole picture matters, but spending is a key riddle to helping people to get to financial freedom.

And so that's why – that's inherent in the design of Tiller. That's why we really encourage people to go in, open it if not every day, every week or several times a week, touch every transaction again and to see their spending and to look at their spending, to touch their spending again.

And I think that's just philosophically a really important point for Tiller that I would say again. And we would love to hear from radical personal finance listeners about their experiences. And if they have done something interesting with their Tiller sheet, we'd love to see it as well. They can remove their data from it and share their formulas, share their empty template with us and we'd love to see it.

We, of course, can't see what's happening in any user's sheets because we've built the system very securely and everything's encrypted and there are no humans at Tiller who go in and look at any user data. But we would love – we regularly get stories from users and we would love to see.

You have an interesting group, Joshua, of people who – you talked about sort of getting nerdy and getting into the details in this and you do that in all the topics you cover. And which I find interesting and I know that your users have an appetite for going deep and I would love to see what they do with their Tiller sheets if they want to share that.

We'll make sure that we hook up with that guy on the mustache forums who is super hardcore and let's see if we can get something going with you and he and me and kind of the radical personal finance community. And see if he can share some of his stuff because his spreadsheet is beautiful.

Again, I'll link to it in the show notes. But his spreadsheet is so beautiful and we could create some cool templates for the nerds in the audience. One other thing I wanted to compliment you on about Tiller that I do really love, I love your daily update. And other services can offer daily updates, but your daily update is perfect.

It just simply says new transactions across all the linked accounts and current account balances. And I generally try to filter as many emails out of my inbox as possible, but that one is really useful because it comes right into my email. It comes right in, it comes right into my email where I can just take a quick look.

I can make sure all the transactions are good. I don't have to go log into bank accounts and it's simple. It doesn't have a bunch of fluff. It doesn't have a bunch of ads across the bottom. It's just deep transactions and balances. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

And it's super, super useful. So I really like how you built the daily update. And I think from an automation perspective, another person you should connect with if you haven't, you need to connect with Ari Mizell at Less Doing. Are you familiar with his work? I'm not. Okay. His website is lessdoing.com, but he is an automation freak.

He loves to build these little formulas and whatnot. And as you guys continue to build, and I know you've got a – I'm sure you've got a build list a mile long. But there's probably some cool stuff that we could do with IFTT, or it's called IFNOW, with some IFTT rules.

There's some cool stuff that we could do in using your platform to integrate, I don't know, just some other cool things. So connect. Make sure that Ari Mizell at Less Doing is familiar with your work so that he can be aware. And he's a very kind of forward-thinking guy that might have some really cool ideas of how to integrate this with other apps, other solutions.

But your daily updates are awesome. Thank you, Joshua. And we talk a lot about nerds. We welcome nerds. But we also – there are a lot of Tiller users who this is the only time they use a spreadsheet. They don't use spreadsheets. But Tiller is easy, and they use a spreadsheet when they use Tiller.

And they aren't spreadsheet novices, but they still enjoy the way – how easy this is, how fast it is, and the flexibility of a spreadsheet. So I just will make that point. It's not just for nerds. We certainly welcome nerds, and some nerds do some fascinating things with it, which we love hearing about.

But spreadsheet novices are home at Tiller, too. And because we're a subscription service, we can spend some time with our customers. So when people email us at support, we're eager to help. Right. Absolutely. Well, cool. So we're setting up a Radical personal finance affiliate link. So the deal is it's free for the first 30 days, and it's $5 a month after.

And so we're going to set it up at tillerhq.com/radical, right? That's right. All right, cool. So if listeners of the show want to sign up for an initial – for a trial, free for 30 days, tillerhq.com/radical. And then if you choose to buy it, I get a commission for that.

So that's hugely appreciated. And I'll continue checking back. At the moment, I'm using these two things as – I'm using these two – me personally, I'm using YNAB and Tiller concurrently. And I'm excited about some of the possibilities that I see with Tiller, and I'm using that for tracking and kind of dashboard functions and some of that.

But it's up to users to – or listeners to make their own decision, try different options. And ultimately, that's going to make everything better and just figure out what works for you with your mindset. So the website, tillerhq.com, and sign up for a – download your free trial at tillerhq.com/radical.

And, of course, that link will be in the show notes. Peter, anything else you want to add? Joshua, thanks. Really appreciate the time and great to chat today. I'm glad you came up and snagged me after the presentation at FinCon. I'm glad we followed up. So thanks for coming on.

I think at least a few of you will see the possibilities that Tiller offers, not for everybody, but perhaps it might be for you. There's certainly a lot of potential. Just to be clear, I don't think it's the best move from a budgeting perspective. I still think that YNAB is the best solution for a proactive budgeting tool.

But those of you who are a little bit past that and looking for some fun and just to be able to create some simple spreadsheets or to use spreadsheets in other functions and capacities, check it out. After the interview was recorded, I corresponded with Peter. He changed his offer, and he agreed to go ahead and offer two months of free access to Tiller for listeners of the show.

So I'm running this here at the end of 2015. Now is the time. Go ahead and check it out. Go to tillerhq.com/radical, tillerhq.com/radical, and you'll be able to get two free months through that link there. And then set it up. And if you choose to buy, we set it up so I get a small commission on your purchase of software.

But check it out. Check it out for two free months. See if it's useful. Now is the time in 2015 to be practicing your budget. We're coming up to the end of one year and the beginning of another one. I love the change of a calendar year. It's a good time to assess the successes of 2015 and to look forward to the possibilities of 2016.

So if you have any interest, please use the link tillerhq.com/radical and get two free months of access to the system. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's show. I will be back with you very, very soon. A special thank you to those of you who support the show on Patreon.

A number of people have recently left the Patreon support. No problem there. Thank you for those of you who have been supporting for a while. What that means is that if a number of you want to jump up and fill their place, I would be indebted to you. You can find all the details of that at radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron.

Radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. Peace out, y'all. See you soon. Bye.