About the Project
by Justin Hwa
December 14, 2021
The first lines of code for CommonCard were written on September 19, 2021. I started learning Swift around July and over two weeks of spare time the original version of CommonCard was up on the simulator showing our Chase transactions.
My line of work at the time of writing this story is project management consulting. I look at projects and their budgets, see how they're being spent, and predict where the project will end up financially. Prior to this, I was a chef, and before that, a civil engineer. My wife and I met during the chef period in New York City. Cooking is only part of being a chef. Most of the time, I was managing logistics, and there were costs to just about every little part of it. I talked a lot about my business with my wife (then girlfriend). Perhaps because of how open I was in confiding the goods and bads of what I go through, we've never been shy about discussing our personal finances too. As soon as we started living together, she already had a Google Sheet to track our combined spending.
Sometime in 2018, we upgraded from Google Sheets to an app called Honeydue. We had a Bank of America Travel Rewards card that we used for shared expenses and trips. We continued using personal accounts for individual spending. Honeydue became the center of our couples financial life. Versus Google Sheets, directly connecting the app to our bank accounts was magic. Creating budgets and sorting expenses were quick and intuitive.
We married in April 2019 and decided it was time for a serious grown-up credit card like Chase Sapphire Reserve. At $600+ annual fees with an authorized user, we went all in on putting every expense onto the card. (It's a great card; we love it). That brought back the simplicity of using only one credit card ever, but made using Honeydue a little tricky without Google Sheet's help again.
For shared expenses, Honeydue made it easy to settle up different contributions, such as when I buy all the beer and liquor for myself on our grocery trips. However, that's not our only use case. With all the personal expenses we put on the card, we needed a tool to tell us our share of the monthly bill. That way we also don't need to settle up expense by expense anymore. Our solution for Honeydue since 2019 was putting individual spending in their own custom budgets. We'd then figure out what each of us pays in for the month between all the shared and personal budgets.
We learned a lot about managing family finances together over the years. The Google Sheets may have been tedious, a little nerdy, but the exercise that came with it, of spending time to talk about money, helped us keep our growing financial responsibilities under control. Money used to just be about living expenses, restaurants, and trips. It grew to include the house, investment properties, the baby, medical bills, in-laws, and a few more. While time spent to discuss money remains invaluable, perhaps the physical work of managing it can be quicker.
I bought an iOS online course for around $12 in July 2021. I first learned programming in high school and the skill only incrementally improved over the years. But with slow accumulation, I've learned and became proficient in a suite of modern technologies, mostly to make web apps. The idea to make our own couples finance app had been floating around since late 2020. The following summer, I gave it a go. I named the app CommonCard after our Chase Sapphire Reserve, our common card for everything.
From a technical perspective, the CommonCard app is pretty standard. It uses Plaid like many other financial apps to securely connect with account data. It doesn't approach budgeting any differently than all other budgeting apps. I put more thought into the design and user experience than anything else, because we personally use the app every day. For example, I thought carefully about how many taps it should take to do any task in the app, and keeping the bottom tab menu to no more than four items. I also designed the look and feel to be like an everyday Apple app (thanks, Mail and Messages...and maybe Health).
This is how we use the app.
The Accounts page is what we see first. It's a quick view on balances. We can also click on an account to see its transactions.
We spend most of our time on the Transactions page. Tapping on a transaction pulls up our categories list to assign it to a budget and user. We can also split a transaction between different budgets and users.
We peek in weekly to the Categories page to see how much we've spent this month and over the year. Tapping on the categories shows us the same information by category. This is where we do most of our spending discussions.
We come to the Splits page at the end of the month (after all transactions have posted). We get a simple total per account (in our case, just our credit card) of what we pay in. We don't carry over balances.
CommonCard launches on the App Store December 2021. I will be hard at work taking feedback, adding improvements, and making this the easiest couples/family finance app you've ever used. Thanks and happy budgeting.
