One author · real numbers
Notes from building ClariFi
Essays on budgeting, fees, and retirement math from the one person who builds ClariFi. No content farm, no ghost-written listicles — if it's published here, I wrote it, I ran the numbers, and the numbers are reproducible.
-
Why budgets fail (and what a Flex budget does differently)
Most budgets die the same three deaths: too many categories to maintain, no home for non-monthly expenses, and a moral framing where every reallocation feels like failure. This post walks through each failure mode and shows the design answer ClariFi shipped — three buckets instead of forty envelopes, a dedicated Non-Monthly bucket, rollover, and guilt-free mid-month reallocation.
Read the essay -
What a 1.86% fund fee actually costs you over 30 years
A 1.86% expense ratio sounds like rounding error; on a $14,109 portfolio it's about $38,100 of forgone growth over 30 years against a 0.20% index fund — more than the portfolio itself, twice over. The post shows the math line by line, explains weighted expense ratios for multi-fund portfolios, and introduces the A–F fee grades ClariFi's analyzer uses.
Read the essay -
Semi-monthly bills: the pay schedule most budgeting apps forget
Semi-monthly (15th and last day, 24 events a year) is not biweekly (every other Friday, 26), and the difference quietly breaks budgeting apps: bills drift, “monthly” totals wobble, and the last-day-of-February case exposes who actually modeled the calendar. This post explains the two schedules, the edge cases, and why ClariFi models semi-monthly as a first-class recurrence instead of faking it with “every 15 days.”
Read the essay
The calculators these posts lean on live here.