Gains App Explained: Why Sammie Ellard-King Built His Own Budgeting App

This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited for readability, it may contain errors.

[00:00] Sammie: Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to the Money Gains Podcast. Now, I just wanted to hop on the mic and first off say a huge, huge thank you for everyone for listening to this show, for giving us all of your support. I think the show’s coming up to just over three years now. Uh, I started it with a 30-pound mic in my bedroom with a dream of creating something and helping people along the way with their finances. We are coming up to the fifth birthday of Up The Gains. And as a business, as the whole thing, since we first started doing this, when we writing articles based on what people told us on a WhatsApp group, uh, to where we are today, uh, we’ve helped hundreds and hundreds of people get started with investing, get out of debt, save for emergency funds, get on the property ladder.

[00:48] Sammie: And it is absolutely incredible what we’ve been able to do in such a short period of time. But the culmination of this has really come down to something that we’ve put out recently, um, and that’s Gains App. And I wanted to jump on the mic today and just sort of take you behind the curtain about what it is, why we built it, um, and so you guys can just understand. And I want you to know that this isn’t a sales pitch. If you don’t end up downloading it, that’s totally fine. If you go to one of the competitors that we’ve got, that’s totally fine. We’re here, this show exists to help you guys move forward with your finances. So if you find a better tool and that’s what it does, then fantastic. Or just tell us and we’ll build it into Gains App and make it even better. How about that? But look, 20 years ago, I first basically went to university, was it 20 years ago, 18 years ago now?

[01:36] Sammie: And that was when my relationship with money really kicked off because I’d lived at home until that point, right? Obviously, I’d had a bit of money here and there, but this is where I had to fend for myself, and I started getting myself into a bit of trouble, right? I’m sure you’ve all heard the story, but I built up 24 grand worth of credit card there, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I was basically spending more than I can earn, peacocking it every turn, but I had no idea where my money was going. And back then there wasn’t apps, there wasn’t any funky things that really existed. And I needed to get myself out of it. So I built myself a spreadsheet. Um, some of you guys may have picked that up over the years as I’ve evolved it. Um, but I obviously had to get a handle of what was coming in and what was going out, right? So I could pay down my debt and then eventually start to move towards my financial goals.

[02:24] Sammie: I managed to obviously clear that debt in 18 months. Now, that was a momentous effort because I had to sacrifice a lot. But it what it did do, because I started putting side hustles and different things into play, is teach me a growth mindset, right? It taught me that one income potentially wasn’t going to be enough for me. I didn’t want to pay off my debt in seven years. That’s how much I calculated it was going to take me with my salary. And obviously, a lot of my salary was going on interest back then as well. And so, no, I wanted to increase my income to try and pay down that debt. And then obviously, once I started increasing my income and had these side hustles going, when I got out of debt, it could really kick me on to invest. But I had all of this money coming in from different sources, and I needed something that could track it and obviously see what was going on across multiple accounts because I use something called the three bank system.

[03:15] Sammie: The three bank system is very simply you’ve got one bank for your spending, that’s where you get paid into. The second bank is for all your bills and your subscriptions, and that comes out of there, and then your third bank’s for your savings. Now, this really helps basically mean that you’re proactively budgeting. So you know basically pretty much what your bills and subscriptions are going to be every month, right? Pretty much, give or take. If you’ve got a few variable bills in there, then fair enough. But you can work out an average and then just, you know, budget a little bit higher if you want. So all your money and your bills goes out into bank number two, that gets paid out. Your savings happens as well, like clockwork. So automating a lot of this because I have that spending brain, I need to basically try and keep myself out of it. And then what’s left in bank number one is it, right? I’ve got that much to budget with, and it just makes it a lot easier for me to do that.

[04:02] Sammie: So back then I was just guessing, pretty much checking the banking apps here and there, checking my credit card statements and making sure they were going down, obviously, when I was getting out of there. And since then, there have been lots of these that have come on the scene. I’ve tried Snoop, I’ve tried Emma, I’ve tried multiple cashback apps, I’ve tried manually tracking in those spreadsheets, I’ve evolved that spreadsheet, and it still required such a lot of effort. I’ve used AI tools to help me with, you know, conversations around my finances, and I still do to this day because I think it’s fantastic. Um, but every single one of these did one thing very well, right? Snoop was fantastic at budgeting. Emma, personally, not for me, but I can see the draw of it. I find it a little bit complicated. I love cashback apps, you all know that I do.

[04:49] Sammie: Um, and manually tracking works for some people. I just wanted something that would bring it all together. And I kept thinking, basically, well, why doesn’t this just exist? Why doesn’t this exist in one place? Um, so I could see all my accounts, I could talk to my money through an AI, um, and I could get cash back as well, and also set targets for myself around particular areas of my spending. Because that’s what a lot of the budgeting apps do. They make you set these big long budgets. And people just don’t like looking backwards, especially when you’re budgeting, right? It’s what happened for past me, not what’s going to happen for future me. So I wanted to create something where what I saw was basically the gap is that everyone is working towards some sort of financial goal. And that could be to get themselves out of debt, it could be towards saving for an emergency fund, getting on the housing ladder, a new car holiday.

[05:38] Sammie: You’re all saving for something. I hope you are anyway. And what I wanted to make sure is that this app essentially allowed you to move towards that goal as fast as you could possibly get there. And that’s without like, you know, shutting yourself off from the world and living on baked beans. This is realistic in a way that can make you spot patterns in your spending and try and move money around and cut back on the things which aren’t providing you any value, being able to see that and going, oh, okay, yeah, well, you know, I did spend 240 quid on X, Y, and Z last month. You know, I could cut that to 180. Brilliant. That’s giving me 60 pounds more to walk towards my goal, to move me towards the goal, which I’ve said is more important than anything. So I set about doing this, and it’s also come from speaking to so many of you guys over the years, and many of you guys complaining about some of the tools which did exist, telling me the ones that you really liked as well, and that’s made a big impact on what we’ve built.

[06:34] Sammie: And so that was really why I started to think about this. But I’m not gonna lie, it is the hardest thing I’ve ever done building a fintech app. I’m not a developer, I’m a finance content creator, journalist, or you know, podcaster, whatever you want to call it. And, you know, I had to figure out pretty quickly how to build a fintech app. I can’t write a line of code. So that was a big, big issue for me. So we needed to bring in a team. We needed to raise some money to be able to afford that team. And we needed to put some of our own money into play. So, you know, we’ve put well over six figures of our own money uh into building this too. And we’ve now got investors, some of you guys are Crowdcube investors that we did crowdfunding earlier in, uh, back end of last year, and also we have some angel investors and a VC fund as well.

[07:26] Sammie: I know how crazy is this, all from a little idea thought up in a bedroom five years ago. But that has meant that we’ve had to do a lot of these different things. I’ve had to teach myself how to raise money, how to do legals, how to do FCA regulation, how to do open banking integrations, security requirements, all of these things which sound horrendous, right? And I’m telling you, they are. So we set out to build this pretty quickly. About uh April last year, we sat down in a hotel room in Marylebone and we had the idea and we sort of started fleshing out what we wanted to do, and we wanted to create this kind of uh spending tracking across multiple accounts, budgeting app that had cashback, bill switching all within it. And we were so naive and we thought, yeah, you know, we can do this in 90 days.

[08:12] Sammie: And we quickly realised that actually that wasn’t going to happen, right? So we set the target of November, and then there’s been some changes in the team, things like regulation, things like open banking integrations take a long time. So there’s been lots and lots of setbacks. So you just couldn’t, you know. And I am proud of everything that we put out from Up The Gains. Everything that goes out has got that seal of approval on it, and I just didn’t think that the product had it. And so we did have to push the launch back, but finally we are out. That has changed. But I just refuse to let this die. I could have given up and I nearly did a million times over. I just thought, you know, maybe this just thing isn’t for me, and there’s smarter people in fintech out there doing this. But I have that grit that I want to change people’s lives, and I firmly believe that this app over time will definitely, definitely do that.

[09:02] Sammie: So, why do we do this? Well, the real reason is managing money is broken, right? Managing money is broken. Most people don’t do it, um, they don’t budget, and honestly, I totally get it, because as I said before, traditional budgeting is looking backwards. You’re staring on what you’ve already spent, and then you start feeling guilty about it because the budget for last month is not going to be the same for this month. You’re making different decisions at different walks of life. You might be in the pub more in the summer than you are in the winter, or vice versa, or you know, who knows? But you get what I’m saying. You’re spending on different things each month. There’s things that come up: birthdays, holidays, all of these different things. So proactively budgeting ahead is very, very difficult for most people. I say for most people, because some people do it very well and they’re good at doing it, but some people find it very, very difficult.

[09:48] Sammie: So that’s a massive, massive problem. And the numbers back that up. So it feels like homework to most people, and most people don’t enjoy doing homework, let’s face it, right? And the other problem was that nobody had real visibility. We’re living in this digital age where a lot of people have different bank accounts, right? So they’ve got, the average person has 3.2 bank accounts. And I’m not just talking different, you know, current accounts, I’m talking current accounts, right? So you’ve got joint accounts, personal spending accounts, you’ve maybe got a Revolut account over there, you know, you’ve got a Monzo account over there, and a credit card with a different provider, and it becomes extremely difficult to know what’s going on, where you’re spending money, because it’s spread across all of these banks. So you’re trying to sit down and work that out. And let’s face it, printing out three bank statements and trying to go through each line is a nightmare, and that’s why manual budgeting just fails, right?

[10:36] Sammie: But people needed to see what was going on with their money so they can make smarter decisions. As I said before, it’s like, oh, you know, I’ve made, I’ve potentially spent 200 quid on that. Um, and I’ll call out my partner, but I love her to bits. But you know, she had overspent on clothes in the last month. We did a budget on Gains App together, it’s called Targets on Gains App. And she was like, “Cool, no, don’t let you see that.” Because she’d spent a little bit and fair play, she’d come into some money and, you know, you know, she wanted to buy herself some nice things. Absolutely right, right? But what that meant was, what I’m trying to explain is that she’d seen that she spent that amount of money on some clothes last month. And that just being able to see it there, then meant that she goes, okay, I’m gonna bring that down this month, and then I want to make sure that I’ve got the X amount going to X goal that I have right now for my savings, right?

[11:22] Sammie: So that was a decision by just being able to see it. So awareness was a big, big factor, visibility. So what actually worked was, instead of tracking every single penny, because that’s not sustainable, what I wanted Gains App to do was target basically two or three categories of your spending that really actually matter to you, where you could pick your own battles and set a target and track around those. So if you’re trying to get out of debt, build that emergency fund, or save for that house, or save for that wedding, you can move towards your goal by tracking certain little things where you feel like you can win on, right? It’s not about winning on every single penny because we are fighting a wrong fight if we’re trying to do that, as we explained previously, right? But you can target in certain areas, picking what matters, and basically not ignoring what doesn’t, but you kind of know that your bills and your, you know, your rent and your all of that jazz are gonna stay pretty much the same.

[12:15] Sammie: But you can still see that if you really want to as well. So that was a big factor. Then we wanted to essentially not just build in something which saved you money on your spending, it was actually cashback as well on your spending. So you could earn some money through the app. So cashback is working like this on Gains App. You buy what’s called an instant gift card, and let’s say, for example, you’re spending £100 in Tesco’s and Tesco’s gives you 5% off. Well, you’re gonna earn five pounds cash back into your Gains App straight away. And you can withdraw that out and move it towards your savings goals, which is gonna get you there a lot faster. And we do run some calculations on your own spending to help you do that. But for this to really work, we had to layer in something called open banking. And open banking sounds very scary.

[13:01] Sammie: A lot of people were like, well, can’t you see my login details and move money around? And no, that’s not what it is at all. It’s regulated by the FCA. So we have FCA agent status on Gains App. And what it is, it’s read-only access to your transactions. It can never move money, can’t access your accounts, it can’t do anything at all. Your bank has approved this and you connect it through your own bank’s security, not through us, right? So we don’t actually facilitate that. We use something called TrueLayer that allows us to then take your transactions and show them in a way that makes sense to you. So without this, you’re manually inputting every single transaction, and we all know what happens there. You do it for a week, two, you get a bit of motivation, and then you stop doing it over time, and then you come back to it in six months when you get a bit more motivation again.

[13:49] Sammie: So connections means that all of this is automatic and it’s in real time as well, and it’s giving you visibility and it allows us to then make predictions for you and help you make your own predictions as well around your money so we can move you towards your goals faster. Now we connect to 99% of UK banks. If you have a bank in this country, then chances are it works with Gains App. There are a couple that we are working on at the moment to get over the line, but most of them are on there. And once you’ve connected them, everything updates automatically. You don’t actually have to do anything at all. So you’ve got the spending breakdown, you’ve got the targets, all of this is running off your own data. Now, without that connection, you are guessing, and we don’t want you to be guessing in any walk of your finances at all. So, what Gains App actually does, it essentially allows you to track all of your accounts in one single space, as we’ve just discussed.

[14:42] Sammie: You can actually talk to your own money through an AI assistant. Now we use deep layers of security and guardrails, so all of your transactions, before it goes over to the AI assistant to have a look at, are completely anonymised. It doesn’t know who you are, your name. It could be anyone. Anyone’s just spent £42 at Tesco’s. It’s just looking at the overall transactions and making, and helping you make decisions around those. So you can literally talk to it too. You can say, “How much have I spent on eating out this month?” And it’s going to fire it back to you instantly. “How much have I spent on my holiday recently to Greece?” and it’s going to tell you straight away. So it’s about having like a smart kind of budgeting best friend in your back pocket, which you can ask questions to around your money. But you can also ask it, you know, how am I doing versus my spending on last month? How am I tracking towards my savings goals this month, X, Y, and Z, right?

[15:31] Sammie: And this is gonna really, really help you get answers around your money quickly. Then we have that spending breakdown by every category. You can literally see every transaction already pre-categorised for you. And if you want to move things around and set up your own custom categories, you can as well. So it’s quite intuitive in that way. And the whole thing takes literally a couple of minutes here. This isn’t two hours in a spreadsheet and three banking statements printed out. You can do a budget sitting on your throne in the morning if you really want. That’s the bar that we’ve set here, right? By the time you get off that toilet, you will be budgeted and rocking and rolling on Gains App. So the reason why we don’t want to uh focus solely on budgeting as a whole is that targets aspect. You don’t have to track every single category.

[16:16] Sammie: You can pick the ones that matter. You can set yourself a target. So I spent 500 pounds last month on eating out, and this month I want to bring that under control and spend 300 pounds. You can set that up on Gains App. You can see what it’s like with a 5% and a 10% reduction. And you can see your goals moving up in real time by the decisions that you’re making. So it’s about picking your battles and not micromanaging every single pound. And then we have cashback, as we mentioned, at 160 plus retailers. We’re talking Tesco, uh, ASOS, JD Sports, Gymshark, Hotels.com, Morrisons, Etsy. There are loads of different providers on there, and I am addicted to it. Once you get started with cashback, it really starts adding up. Yes, it’s four quid here, eight quid there, seven quid there, but over a year, we’ve calculated that’s roughly between 700 and 1,091 pounds back in your pocket if you were to spend on an average UK salary, which is just absolutely mental.

[17:17] Sammie: If you’re a bigger household and you’re spending a little bit more on food and things for the kids and stuff like that and experiences, then my god, it can literally be in a thousand. So it does really start to add up. So you want to gamify that process with yourself. And just think of it like this: if that same item was £100 over here, but it was £95 over here, and you choose to pay the £100 for the exact same item, then that is what you are doing by not using cashback. You are paying the full price when you do not have to. So putting this into play can make a massive, massive difference. Now, what is coming next? We are building something else into Gains App, which I really, really want to talk about. We’re building um bill switching, which is where we can look at your transactions as well and help you flag where you’re overpaying and help you switch providers to lower down your bill costs.

[18:07] Sammie: I know bills are a massive issue for the people in the UK right now. We’re talking energy, broadband, car insurance, the stuff that auto-renews and potentially gets quietly more expensive over time. We’re also building in a financial wellness score, which is a single number that shows you how you’re doing. Not just your savings, but your overall financial health based on your salary, your debt levels, your savings that you have, your goals that you’re working towards, your overall level of financial health. We want you to be able to have a score and then potentially try and work on things to improve that score over time. Then we’re also building in an education hub. So thinking about things like Duo, think Duolingo, right, for money. So you’re going to be learning as you go, little bite-sized lessons that build up as you grow an app with rewards associated for doing so.

[18:54] Sammie: Um, because essentially getting better with money shouldn’t require a 300-pound, uh, 300-page book, sorry. You want something which is quick, bite-sized here and there. Today I want to learn about X, Y, and Z, and it’s broken down and really nice, and you can quiz yourself at the end of it. Okay, yep, I’ve got it. Now let’s move on, right? That’s what learning about money should be, because it is not complicated when it’s broken down in the right way. So we’re building not just a budgeting app. This is the place where your entire financial life can live. It’s one app, one place for everything. And that is the vision for this. I want to layer in savings accounts, investment accounts, current accounts within the next year. So you can really start to use it for absolutely everything if you want to. And it is very exciting. As you can tell, I’m extremely passionate about this.

[19:42] Sammie: And you can give it a try right now. It’s out in your app stores today, and there is a uh free plan, which is very generous. You can connect your banks up to that. Um, and then there is a premium plan as well for connecting more banks because yes, we do have costs when you connect banks, it costs us money, so we do have a premium version for connecting more banks, but there is a generous free plan. You can do all the cashback, you can use the budgeting tools, the spending insights, all of the calculators that we’ve built in as well. We have a debt snowball calculator, which essentially is going to help you get out of debt faster. We have a net worth tracker, we have um multiple salary calculators, uh, house affordability calculators. You name it, it’s on there. All of the tools that you’ve probably Googled once in a while is now in Gains App, already embedded in, and we’re improving it all of the time.

[20:32] Sammie: So, yes, there is a free plan, and there is also a premium plan too, if you want to get your hands on that. Now, I wanted this when I was deep in debt. I wanted visibility around my money. I wanted to feel better about things. I wanted to see that I wasn’t actually doing as bad as I thought I would. And a little bit of awareness just makes a lot of things go away. Like most stress-related illnesses are related to money, and I firmly believe that a large part of that can be solved with awareness around what we’re spending and making some plans. They say that you’re 43% more likely to hit a savings goal once you write it down. So that is a number which we are backing. We want to push that and we want to make your life better off financially. Look, if you’ve been a part of following the journey of Gains App since we started building it and you’re on it already and you’re listening to this, thank you very much.

[21:24] Sammie: If you haven’t joined us yet, there is a download link in the description below. Just jump on there, check it out, check out the free plan, have a mess around. And if you do want to upgrade later, you’re more than welcome. But again, the free plan is very generous. If it’s your first time hearing about this, I hope it was useful for you to hear about this. And yeah, if it helps one of you guys listening today get a grip on your money, then it was worth the millions of sleepless nights I have had and are still having by developing this. But thank you so much. Uh, it’s a real pleasure to serve you guys, and yeah, I massively appreciate you putting your trust in us. Um, it’s been real fun today. Thank you so much for listening, and I’ll catch you on the next one.