The four apps on my phone
I'm 27 and on track to be a millionaire in my 20s, and I do it with four apps. Not four budgeting apps plus three trackers plus a spreadsheet — four, total. Every time I talk about this, people expect a longer list, and there isn't one.
- SoFi — checking, savings and my net worth tracking, all in one place.
- Public — investing.
- ChatGPT — thinking out loud about big money decisions.
- Ditch — debt payoff, and full disclosure, I helped build it.
Here's what each one actually does for me, and why I've never felt the need to add a fifth.
Why SoFi is the hub of my everyday money
Most of my day-to-day money lives in one app, and that's on purpose. My checking sits there, and so does my high-yield savings account. I also got my home loan through SoFi, so the second I open the app I can see everything at once instead of hopping between three logins to piece together where I stand.
The feature I use most is buckets — you can split savings into separate labeled pots inside the same account. One bucket is my emergency fund. Another is my sinking fund, which is just money I'm setting aside for things I know are coming in the near term, so a car repair or a trip doesn't turn into a crisis. Same account, but the money has a job, and I'm not doing mental math to figure out what's spendable.
The other thing I lean on is the free net worth tracker in the app. I can pull up my whole investment portfolio across all my different accounts in one view. Watching one number move over time keeps me honest in a way that staring at individual balances never did.
Where I invest
Public is where my brokerage account lives. In my opinion it's one of the simplest, most user-friendly investing apps out there, and that matters more to me than it sounds like it should — the app I actually understand is the app I actually keep using.
I don't need my investing app to also budget, track spending and send me confetti. I need it to let me invest without friction. That's the whole job.
How I use ChatGPT for big money decisions
This one surprises people. I don't use ChatGPT to manage my money — I use it to think.
When I was deciding whether to buy my house in the fall, I used it to run through scenarios: rent versus buy, what each path looked like, what I'd be trading away in either direction. It's basically a way to talk through a decision out loud until my own reasoning is clear, and to catch the angle I hadn't considered yet.
It doesn't make the call for me and it doesn't know my life. But for a decision big enough that I was going in circles about it, having something to structure the circles was genuinely useful.
The debt app I helped build
I have to be upfront here: I helped build the Ditch app, and I've been with the company since the beginning in 2023. We built it to help people pay off debt — to turn a pile of balances into an actual payoff plan you can follow.
My only debt now is my mortgage, because I paid off everything else. So I'm not using it on myself the way I use the others every week. But it's helped a lot of people knock out a lot of debt, and that's the part I'm proudest of.
Why I keep the stack this small
Every app I add is one more login, one more notification, one more thing to check before I feel like I know what's going on. Past a certain point the tools stop helping and start becoming the hobby.
Four apps means I can see my full picture in a couple of minutes. That's what makes it repeatable, and repeatable is the only reason any of it has worked for me.
Whatever stack someone lands on will look different from mine, because it depends on what they're actually trying to do with their money. Mine is built around three things I care about: where my savings sit, whether I'm investing consistently, and whether my net worth is moving in the right direction.