Writing
The question Finance Watchtower is trying to answer
I spent a few months building a financial awareness product. The more I built it, the clearer the real question became — and it wasn't the one I started with.
The original framing for Finance Watchtower was: most budgeting tools ask too much of you before they give anything back. Watchtower would fix that. Less setup, faster clarity, a lower bar for staying aware of your finances.
That framing was real. It still holds. But it was describing a solution before I'd properly named the problem.
The clearer version came from noticing what people actually asked when they found out what I was building. Not "can it track my subscriptions?" Not "does it connect to my bank?" The question I kept hearing was: "Will it tell me if I'm actually doing well?"
That is a different product.
The question breaks into two parts for most people I'm building this for — full-time employees who invest after work hours, self-directed, no financial adviser.
Part one is about saving. They have a number in their head — maybe $2,000 or $3,000 a month — that they expect to be putting away. But they're rarely certain they're hitting it. The bank balance moves up and down. Some months feel good, some don't. But the honest accounting of "did this month net out to my target?" almost never happens, because doing it properly requires pulling numbers from two or three places and doing arithmetic that nobody actually does.
Part two is about investing. They have ETFs, a high-interest savings account, maybe some individual stocks. They check their broker occasionally and see whether they're up or down. What they don't have is a normalised answer — their real annualised return, compared to what a simpler strategy would have returned. They don't know if the effort and risk is justified. They have a rough sense that they're "doing okay" but no honest benchmark to test it against.
The savings question and the investment question are really the same question at two different levels. Did I execute the plan this month? And is the plan working over time?
That's the shape Finance Watchtower is taking now.
The budget dashboard — which already exists — becomes the savings execution layer. The one-number view: here is your target, here is what you actually saved, here is whether you hit it. Not a full budgeting system. Just the answer to part one.
The investment portfolio view is a new section being built now. ETF holdings and your savings rate first, individual stocks as the first activation point from there. The output is annualised return per strategy, compared to the relevant market benchmark — the answer to part two.
Both answers on one screen. The question resolved.
This isn't a pivot away from what I was building. The infrastructure is the same. The user is mostly the same. What changed is the sharpness of the question — which changed what needed to be on the screen and why.
The archived version of the earlier builds page is here if you're curious what the thinking looked like before.