What a kakeibo is
A kakeibo (家計簿) is a household ledger you keep by hand. Your bank app can already tell you where your money went, and it has not changed anything, because it arrives weeks after the money is gone. A kakeibo puts the noticing back at the moment you spend.
Where it comes from
Hani Motoko (羽仁 もと子) was the first woman to work as a newspaper reporter in Japan. In 1904 she published a ledger for ordinary households, who had no statements, no charts, and no way to see their own money.
It was not a budget. It was a notebook and four questions, asked once a month.
- How much have you got?
- How much would you like to keep?
- How much are you spending?
- What do you want to keep doing?
We changed the fourth one. It is usually translated as "how could you do better", which takes a position on the month before you have said a word about it, and which can only be answered by finding fault. Ours is answered from things that already happened.
What you would actually do
- Every day, four seconds
- The amount, one word, and one tap for why: Need, Want, Grow, Unexpected, or Give. No total shows on that screen while you type.
- Every Sunday, three minutes
- What went out, by reason, in a fixed order. Any word that has nowhere to sit yet, which is usually none. One optional note.
- Every month, twenty minutes
- The four questions, the month drawn as its days, and one decision about the month ahead. The following month puts what you decided beside what happened, and leaves the subtraction to you.
- Every year, an hour
- Every cost that renews itself, in one list, each with what it has cost you over twelve months. Keep it, shop it, or drop it.
What you type is the day to day. Your pay goes in once, on payday, and each deduction is itemized there rather than typed again. Costs that come round every month are remembered, so the figure is waiting when they do.
The arithmetic that checks it
Earn and Burn are flow: they only mean something over a stretch of time. Own and Owe are what you hold, today. The two are connected, and the connection is the check.
What came in, less what actually went, should match the change in what you are worth.
Suppose a quiet month. You wrote everything down, what you own went up by four hundred, and the book makes it three hundred and eighty. That twenty is not a mistake to hunt down. It is the part of the month with no entry behind it, and the book shows you what it is made of.
The check only works if Burn means money that is gone. What you set aside is still yours, so it is not spending, and a ledger that counts it as spending will tell a household that saves well that it is going backwards.
Two people, one book
You say how your household keeps money: everything in one pot, one pot with personal money kept aside, or mostly separate. That answer decides what each of you can see.
Personal money stays personal. If you change your minds later, the past does not change with it: what was personal in March is still personal.
A shared entry stores no author. Nobody can ask the book which of you bought the groceries, because the answer is not written down anywhere.
The separation is enforced in the database rather than by the pages, so a mistake in the part of the code that draws a screen cannot show you somebody else's figures.
What we refuse, and why we could not do otherwise
- We never connect to your bank
- There is no field for a bank password and no code that could use one. That also means no aggregation, which is the strongest argument anybody could make that we are doing something a ledger should not.
- We never sell or share your data
- There is no advertising, no tracking script, and no third party who receives anything from inside your book. One cookie, which signs you in.
- We never state a number that needed an assumption
- A mortgage payoff is arithmetic on figures you gave us. A projection of what something might be worth later needs an assumed rate, so it is not computed at all. There is no setting for it.
- We never compare you to another household
- Another household's figures are not reachable by the code that draws your pages, so there is nothing to rank you against.
- You can take all of it out
- One click, any time. Every table, as a file you can open in a spreadsheet. No reason asked and no delay, because you are about to type in a year of your own life and nobody should do that into something they cannot leave.
We are a ledger. We never hold, move, or touch your money, and there is no mechanism here to do it with. Nothing on these pages is advice. Read the terms and the privacy notice.
What changes
Yutori (ゆとり) is the Japanese word for room to breathe. Not more money. Room.
It does not arrive as a number, and it does not arrive in week one. Somewhere around the third month you notice you know roughly where you stand without going to look it up, and the end of the month stops being a surprise.
$96 a year afterwards, or $9 a month. No card to start.