There Were Months I Just Didn’t Look

By imani l williams Money & Awareness

I want to be honest about something that doesn’t come up a lot in personal finance spaces: there were months where I just didn’t open my budget. Not because I forgot. I avoided it on purpose.

Sometimes money was tight and I didn’t want to see exactly how tight. Other times, money was actually flowing and I felt like I didn’t need to check in at all. And then there were the months where life was just heavy in other ways, and opening a spreadsheet felt like one more thing I didn’t have the energy for. Whatever the reason, I would just not look. The spreadsheet would sit there, and I would keep moving.

What made this complicated was that even when I was consistent with it, I wasn’t really budgeting the way personal finance people talk about budgeting. I was tracking. If I wanted something, a concert, an outfit, a spontaneous decision that made sense in the moment, I would adjust the numbers and figure it out. I wasn’t blowing my budget carelessly. I was making intentional choices and updating the record to reflect that. There is a difference, even if it doesn’t always feel like one.

And honestly, even during the months when my finances weren’t in a great place, I still felt okay. Not because things were fine, but because I knew what was going on. I knew what I owed, who I owed it to, what was coming up, where everything was going. That visibility gave me a kind of confidence that I didn’t fully understand until I started losing it during the months I checked out. When I stopped looking, I didn’t feel free. I felt foggy. That’s what made me realize that the tracking itself was the thing keeping me grounded, not the budget.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, partly because I’m building an app around this exact idea, and partly because my reasons for building it have become a lot clearer to me this year. I’m in school for cybersecurity right now and working as an IT technician, and my schedule is honestly pretty manageable at the moment. But I keep thinking about what happens after I graduate. I’m going to have to show up somewhere at a specific time, every day, in order to survive. And I know that’s just how it works, and I’m not even sure I’ll hate the work itself. But the life I actually want, the one that feels abundant and free and a little whimsical, I don’t think a 9 to 5 gets me there, no matter how good the salary is.

The only version of that life I can see clearly is one where I have a business. Not one I’m micromanaging every single day, but one I built well enough that it runs. An app felt like the right answer: low overhead, no physical product, something that could actually help people and scale without me having to be everywhere at once. And the problem it solves is one I’ve been living with for almost six years.

I’d been using the same Excel spreadsheet budget since my mid-twenties. I tried every popular finance app I could find, Mint, Monarch, Origin, YNAB, and none of them gave me what that spreadsheet gave me. The flexibility, the granularity, the ability to make it reflect my actual life instead of some idealized version of it. So I stopped looking for an app and just kept patching the spreadsheet. The problem was, every time my life shifted and I needed to adjust my budget, the formulas would break and I’d have to spend time fixing it instead of actually using it. Eventually I just decided to build what I actually needed.

WellSpnt is built around one core idea: awareness is not the same as discipline. You can know exactly where your money is going and still make choices that go over your budget. However, that is not failure. The goal isn’t to be perfect. The goal is to be intentional, and you cannot be intentional about something you are refusing to look at. I’m building this for the version of me that avoided the spreadsheet. The one who needed something less fragile, less time-consuming, and less likely to fall apart every time life required an adjustment.

Because even on the months when things weren’t great, knowing still felt better than not knowing. I just didn’t have a name for that until now.