She Called It Nerdy. So I Ran With It.

I built Pocket Nerd because I needed a quick way to enter transactions and keep my wife, Andrea, on the same page with me about our money.

How much do we have? What have we spent? What does that mean for what’s coming up?

Those were the questions I wanted us both to be able to answer. I wanted a shared picture of where we were and what our future looked like, with a simple way to keep that picture current.

I’ll admit it, I’m a numbers nerd. I enjoy accounting and keeping track of financial accounts, and I can get pretty deep into that stuff. That’s the recipe for over-engineering.

An app for Andrea and me needed to be simple, and it needed to be something we would both actually use.

I knew Andrea wouldn’t want to use it if entering something was more involved than opening the app and typing a quick number. That gave me a pretty clear goal: make that part as quick and easy as I possibly could.

It’s a useful question when you’re building something for yourself and another person: how much work are you asking them to do just to keep the information current? Every extra step is something you’re asking someone to bother with, every time.

As a joke, Andrea brought up that it is kind of nerdy, like pulling a calculator out every time you make a purchase. (To be fair, she suggested the name Pocket Nerd, and it seemed pretty fitting.)

So I decided to run with it.

That’s where the fun elements came from. The practical need came first, and the personality grew around it. If I was already making a nerdy little money app, I might as well enjoy myself along the way.

The money side of it is still serious. Knowing where we stand, understanding what we’ve spent, and being able to look ahead together were the reasons I started building it. The playful parts should make it more pleasant to use while keeping that quick entry quick.

That’s the origin of Pocket Nerd. A number I needed to enter, a person I wanted to keep in the loop, and an observation from my wife that I probably took a little too far.

I tend to grab on to things and run with them.

How do you keep everyone in your household on the same page about spending? What makes your current approach easy to stick with, and where does it get in the way? If you could change one thing about the tools you use, what would it be?