I built my first budget spreadsheet the summer after freshman year of college. I’d read Rich Dad Poor Dad and caught the bug. Then came A Random Walk Down Wall Street, The Millionaire Next Door, The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need. Each book added a new tab to the spreadsheet. That spreadsheet lasted, in some form, for over a decade.
The Spreadsheet That Grew Up With Me
What started as a basic monthly budget slowly turned into a multiyear financial model. Income projections, investment growth rates, expense categories that actually reflected how I spent money. It grew alongside my career: Financial Analyst, then data and Power BI consultant, then FP&A Director.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. Professionally, I was building financial models for companies. Rolling forecasts, scenario analysis, multiyear projections with dozens of assumptions. Personally, I was still wrestling with a spreadsheet held together by nested IF statements and color coded tabs.
It worked. For a while.
When the Spreadsheet Broke
Life gets more complex. Buying a house. Changing jobs. Starting a family. Each milestone introduced variables that didn’t fit neatly into a single timeline. I needed to model events happening at different future dates. A career change in year two, a second child in year three, a refinance in year four. And I needed to see what all of those decisions meant together.
Too many tabs. Too many broken formulas when I shifted one assumption. The spreadsheet couldn’t answer the only question that mattered: what does this decision mean five years from now?
I’d built financial models that answered that question for companies. I just didn’t have the tool to answer it for myself.
Building the Tool I Wished Existed
When I discovered Claude Code, something clicked. The same feeling I’d had discovering personal finance books in college, or Power BI earlier in my career. Suddenly the gap between “I know exactly what this tool should do” and “I can actually build it” collapsed.
The result is PlanyFI. Build your financial plan, not just your budget.
It does what I spent a decade trying to make a spreadsheet do: multiyear financial modeling for individuals. Income, expenses, and investments projected across a real timeline, with events that happen on specific future dates. The kind of planning that used to require a corporate FP&A team or an expensive advisor, built for one person sitting at their kitchen table.
For People Who’ve Outgrown Spreadsheets
PlanyFI is built for people like me. People who take their finances seriously, who’ve been modeling and planning for years, and who’ve hit the ceiling of what a spreadsheet can do. People who don’t want to pay an advisor thousands of dollars to build the model they could build themselves, if they just had the right tool.
If that sounds like you, I think you’ll feel right at home.