Every place has a burger sauce. In-N-Out has their spread. Five Guys has whatever Five Guys has — and look, I'm not taking out a bank loan for a burger, so I'll let you have that argument without me. The point is, every place has their thing. The secret ingredient that makes it hit different.
So what's Varen's secret sauce? What did I put together that doesn't exist anywhere else?
Forward-looking projections based 100% in reality.
Every finance tool I've ever used harps on budgeting. Give every dollar a job. Track your spending. Build a category system. These concepts make sense. I'm not here to argue with Dave Ramsey. But let me ask you something: who has a clean, consistent, predictable budget month to month?
I'll wait.
Nobody? Yeah. Exactly.
One month, three bills land right before your paycheck. The next month, school registration fees show up out of nowhere — and can someone explain why public school costs me another $250? Then it's taxes. Then car registration. Then that annual insurance premium you forgot existed until the email showed up.
It's never a straight line. It's never wash, rinse, repeat. Or warsh, as my grandma from Nebraska used to say.
This is what kept me up at night. Not overspending. Not bad habits. The simple, maddening question of: will the money be there when the bill hits?
In January 2016, I got laid off three weeks after we closed on our dream home. The house where we planned to raise our two kids through high school. Gut punch doesn't cover it.
I was the primary breadwinner. Jenn worked part-time. We had some savings — not nearly enough. I found a new job about a week after severance ran out. Lucky. But the habits that followed made everything worse.
Over the next two years, bad spending and worse money management buried us in $60,000 of credit card debt. The hardest part: I was running the finances alone, and Jenn had no idea. I kept telling myself I'd get it under control next month. There was never a next month. Just a rotating cycle of unplanned bills hitting at the wrong time and a credit card filling the gap.
In April 2018, we refinanced our mortgage. The debt came to the surface. There was a week where I wasn't sure our marriage would survive it. We emptied everything we'd saved, borrowed $10,000 from family, and wiped the slate clean.
And since April 2018, I've never once worried again.
I committed — fully, completely — to figuring out how to never have another sleepless night wondering if I could cover the car insurance. So I went to the platform where dreams go to die: Excel.
Column A: dates. Every single day for the next 18 months. Column B: paychecks — not estimated, the actual dates they hit our account. For a number of years our checks hit Thursday one week, Friday the next. That specificity matters. Then columns C onward: the bills. This was the cathartic part. The painful part. Listing every single thing I'd signed up for, committed to, promised, overextended on. By the time I got to column X, I'd captured everything. Twenty different companies, people, and — let's be honest — leeches, expecting money from me on a specific date each month, quarterly, semi-annually, annually.
They didn't care that my paycheck was coming tomorrow. They wanted their pound of flesh when they said it was due.
The most important column was Column Y: Balance. A formula that added income from Column B and subtracted every bill in every other column. The result: an actual daily balance view of our checking account. I added conditional formatting — black is good, orange is dangerous, red is a problem. Project it out a year, eighteen months, and suddenly I had a completely different picture than any monthly budget had ever shown me.
Column B became my lever. What do I need to deposit each paycheck to make sure every bill is covered and I can sleep at night? Adjust the number. Watch the projection. Find the amount where nothing ever goes red.
That's the whole system. It became 127 sheets and 2,600 rows of data. Ugly. But it worked perfectly.
Here's the part nobody talks about though. Even after I had the right deposit amount figured out, things kept going sideways. Because the account I was depositing into had a debit card attached to it. So Jenn and I would use it for Target runs, dinners out, gas — and suddenly the account that was supposed to pay the bills had way less money than it needed to pay the bills.
The math wasn't mathing.
So credit cards got used. Sound familiar? Robbing Peter to pay Paul. Either way, we're accumulating debt to pay bills and the bags under my eyes are getting bigger. This adulting thing, man.
The fix was stupidly simple. Capital One lets you open multiple checking accounts. One new account — called it Bill Pay Checking. Every bill set to auto-pay from that account. Direct deposit split so the exact amount needed hits that account every two weeks. No debit card. No exceptions.
Five minutes online. That was 2018. I've never missed a payment since. I've never wondered how I'm going to cover a bill — monthly, quarterly, or those brutal annual ones that show up like an unwelcome surprise.
Eight years. Zero sleepless nights.
After eight years of tweaking, the spreadsheet had so many circular references and antipatterns it was a hot mess. So I called up two friends — Claude (the AI, not a person, though at this point the line is blurry) and my Good Pal Tom — and said: let's make this a web tool. Let's remove the human error. Let's make this available to anyone who's ever had that feeling.
Thus Varen was born. The Solvency Engine does what my spreadsheet did, without the 127 sheets. Enter your bills, set your deposit schedule, and it projects 365 days forward and tells you exactly what you need to deposit each paycheck to never miss a payment — including the HOA, the annual insurance spike, and that car registration you forgot about.
One number. Fund the account, leave it alone, and go worry about something else. Like when the new season of Paradise is dropping. Whether Wrexham actually makes it to the Prem. Or, if you're me, two teen drivers in the house — oh my lawdy.
The Solvency Engine is just the start. Debt payoff calculators, income projections, net worth tracking, financial independence timelines — that's where Varen is headed. But it starts here: get your bills handled, get them out of your head, and free up the mental space — and the actual money — to focus on what matters.
Whether that's retiring in Florida in 15 years, starting a business, paying off debt, or moving overseas like Jenn and I are planning — you can't get there if you're lying awake at 2am wondering if the mortgage is going to clear.
Fix the foundation first. Everything else gets easier.
The Ledger
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