Ten years of scribbling
on notepads and spreadsheets.

I was 18 and earning £5.60 an hour. My first entry in a Google Sheet is dated 1st November 2016: weekly salary £213.90, debt balance £500. That was it. That was my entire financial picture.

I needed to know how long it would take me to get back to zero. Not to build wealth, not to invest, not to retire early. Just to get to zero. That was the goal. Zero felt like freedom.

With a bit of luck and a lot of budgeting, I cleared the £500 by 22nd December 2016. Seven weeks. I wiped myself back to zero and started fresh. I still have that Google Sheet.

Before the spreadsheet there were notepads. Actual paper, scribbled on, crossed out, carried around. I was manually writing down every transaction. Not even categorising them - just trying to see where the money went. What came in, what went out, what was left.

If you saw those early sheets you'd think it was the ramblings of a madman. Deadlines scrawled in margins, calculations double-checked and triple-checked, notes everywhere trying to make sure the numbers added up. But it worked. Knowing the numbers - actually seeing them - changed how I made decisions.

Once you start tracking what leaves your account, you start caring about where it goes. What is National Insurance, actually? How much tax am I paying and what does it fund? What are all these deductions on my payslip? Why does my April pay look different from January's?

That curiosity puts you on a path. Not a boring, mind-numbing, staring-at-a-spreadsheet path - a genuine interest in understanding how your money works. The mechanics of it. Once you see it clearly, you can't unsee it.

I know that for a lot of people, numbers are something to avoid. The cost of living going up at the rate it has means many people don't even want to begin thinking about it. I understand that. But I believe numbers don't have to be frightening. They're just information. And information is how you take control.

Time is the most valuable resource any of us have. No amount of money has ever bought even a second of it. Seeing the long-term benefits of boring, steady investing is something younger people are often blissfully unaware of. Even moderate investments at below-average yields reduce stress massively over time. One step closer to financial freedom - whatever that looks like for you.

Because it is different for everyone. Someone in Thailand on £1,000 a month of passive income, living by the beach - they're not too worried. It's all subjective. And if you're carrying debt right now: it is always manageable. Always. Don't let it become overwhelming.

Notepads became Google Sheets. Google Sheets became Excel. Excel became databases. Each time I outgrew the tool, I built something better. Ten years of iterating on the same problem: how do I see my entire financial life clearly, in one place, without it taking hours?

I have evolved beyond Excel, and I believe we all will over time. The spreadsheet was the right tool for 2016. It isn't the right tool for 2026. CoreFi is what those ten years of scribbling and iterating became.

All of my work - the Self Assessment tools, the tax calculators, the investment tracking, the debt payoff strategies, the projections - comes down to one thing: consolidating and simplifying numbers into actionable insights. Turning scattered data into decisions. Turning decisions into time. Buying my time back.

Those numbers have your time hidden within them. They just need to be brought out.

I'm 28 now. I know how far technology has come in the past ten years, and I'm excited to see where it goes in the next ten. CoreFi started as a Google Sheet with two numbers in it. I don't think it's finished yet.