Why I'm building Ralphy

To everyone who's ever white-knuckled it to payday,

Most money advice assumes you have spare discipline, a taste for spreadsheets, and some savings already. I don't think that describes many people.

I built the first version of this for my partner, who wanted to budget without it becoming a second job. Reading bank transactions is what I do for a living.

Then I asked friends how they handled money. The ones without a spreadsheet kept their credit card balance under the credit limit, the one spending number anyone ever hands you. It tells you what the bank will allow. It says nothing about what you can afford.

Every year the Federal Reserve asks Americans whether they could cover a surprise $400 expense with cash. More than a third can't (Federal Reserve, 2025). That's not a budgeting failure. Money arrives in lumps, leaves in a hundred little pieces, and nobody is watching the road ahead for you.

Knowing what you can afford shouldn't take a finance degree. It should take five seconds: one number in the morning, then put your phone down.

Ralphy is early, and you'll see it get better week by week.

Stephen, building Ralphy 🦙

The experiment that changed the brief

Common Cents Lab and Irrational Labs randomized 9,035 people. Some saw a single spendable number, some saw full category budgets, and the rest saw neither. Spending did not fall in either treatment group.

I read that as a design constraint. Ralphy has to do more than display a number: it has to watch the days between paychecks, show its math, and speak up when the week changes.

Randomized controlled trial · Common Cents Lab and Irrational Labs, with Clarity Money · 2020 · n = 9,035

Why I am the person working on it

For six years I have built machine learning models from bank transaction data for lenders and insurers. The recurring work is recognizing what a charge really is and which deposit is a paycheck, the same raw problem underneath Ralphy.

That experience does not make a forecast automatically right. Ralphy shows the receipt behind its number, keeps the bank connection read-only, and tells you when the data is stale so you can check what it knows.

See the idea work through a week.

Use sample money in the browser. No download and no bank connection.

Try a morning →Read the master plan →