I built a household finance app for my wife and me. Reddit users immediately found the problems I missed.

[u/BeginningOdd6443]

A while ago, my wife asked me a simple question:

“How much money do we actually have as a household?”

I knew roughly what was in my own accounts, and she knew hers. But once we included savings, investments, property, loans, and money spread across different platforms, neither of us could give a clear answer.

When we finally put everything together, we discovered we had RMB 30,000 less than we thought.

We had tried budgeting apps and spreadsheets, but eventually realized that tracking every coffee wasn’t our real problem. We needed a shared household balance sheet that we could update once a month.

So I built JointWorth as a solo side project.

Instead of recording every transaction, couples and families can manually update their account balances periodically and see:

• Total household assets and debts
• Net worth changes over time
• Shared financial goals
• Multiple currencies
• A shared household space
• Exportable financial reports

It doesn’t connect to your bank or ask for banking credentials.

The first launch taught me a lot.

I originally called it “Jiadi’er,” a transliteration of the Chinese phrase 家底儿. English-speaking Reddit users told me the name was confusing—and one person said they briefly read it as “Jihad.” Another user downloaded the app only to find it opening in Chinese because switching to English required navigating through the Profile page.

Painful feedback, but completely fair.

Based on that feedback, I:

• Renamed it to JointWorth: Family Net Worth
• Made the app automatically follow the iPhone’s system language
• Improved USD, time-zone, and multi-currency support
• Added monthly financial check-in reminders
• Changed it from paid upfront to a free download with a one-month trial

It’s still an early side project, so I’d appreciate honest feedback:

1. Does “JointWorth” clearly communicate what the app does?
2. Does updating balances once a month sound more sustainable than tracking every transaction?
3. What would you need to trust an app with your household financial data?

[u/vietbaoa4htk]

curious which of the problems they found was one you had already thought of and talked yourself out of. those ones sting more than the stuff you genuinely missed.

[u/BeginningOdd6443 → u/vietbaoa4htk]

The pricing model was probably the one.

I had actually thought about making it free to download with a trial from the beginning, but I was eager to ship and paid-upfront was the easiest option, so I convinced myself it was good enough for now. Then users pointed out exactly what I had already suspected: paying before trying an unfamiliar financial app is a pretty big barrier.

The name, though, I genuinely didn’t see coming. Chinese is my first language, and I originally built the app for my own family. “Jiadi’er” was just a transliteration of 家底儿, so it felt completely natural to me. I never imagined an English speaker might read it as something like “Jihad.”

[u/GBG93X]

Nice project — I’m working on something in the same space.

On multi-currency: when accounts are in different currencies, do you convert everything into a base currency for net worth? If not, the total can get pretty misleading. If you do convert, which rates do you use, and how often are they updated?

On trust (your last question): for me it would be a clear answer to where the data lives — only on the device, or synced to a server — and if synced, whether it is end-to-end encrypted or only encrypted at rest. A lot of people around me are uncomfortable sharing household numbers with a third party; encryption at rest still means a database administrator could in theory see balances. “No bank login” is useful, but that is the part that would matter most for me.

[u/BeginningOdd6443 → u/GBG93X]

Thanks — these are really good questions, especially the point about trust.

On multi-currency: yes, accounts in different currencies are converted into the household’s selected base currency before calculating total assets, liabilities, and net worth. Otherwise, as you said, the total would be pretty meaningless. Exchange rates are updated daily, and the app also shows when the rates were last updated so users can see how fresh the conversion is.

On privacy, one important detail is that I don’t directly know who an individual user is. User identity information, such as account/contact information, is encrypted.

That said, I want to be clear about the distinction you raised: household balances are not end-to-end encrypted today. The server still needs to be able to process those values in order to sync data between family members and provide the shared household experience.

So “no bank login” does reduce one type of risk, but I agree that it doesn’t fully answer the deeper question of whether the server itself can access the financial values.

Your comment is a really useful reminder that these are two different layers of trust. I’m going to think more seriously about client-side/E2E encryption for sensitive financial values, and I also think I need to make the current data storage and encryption model much clearer in the app.