I've spent my whole career in banking. And I don't actually know how many streaming subscriptions our household is paying for.
Netflix, yes. Apple TV, yes. HBO Max, I think. There's Disney+ to watch the Mandalorian. Prime is bundled with Amazon, I think, because I needed something delivered super-fast one time. Oh, and there's the 'short-term' use of another one so that my son could watch the Champions League. It would only be for three months, he said. I don't know which one that is - and I'd actually forgotten about it until writing this article.
They're the ones that get you - the quiet ones where you sign up to watch a single thing and forget about it. And the renewal then sneaks through because it's tied to a credit card I don't look at in as much detail as I should.
If you asked me how to find out, I could answer in about thirty seconds. Check the banking app for recurring payments. Match them against the mental inventory. Cancel what we don't use. It's the kind of thing I know I should do.
But I haven't done it. I won't do it this weekend either. And the odds it gets done by the time this article is published are worse than I'd like to admit.
This is a gap almost nobody in finance talks about properly, and it's the one I think matters most.
Knowing isn't the problem
We tend to talk about personal finance as if the issue is information. People need to know more. People need better data. People need clearer dashboards. People need financial literacy.
All of that is true as far as it goes. But it is missing the part where it all breaks down.
I know what to do about these subscriptions. I've always known. I'm even writing about it. And I still haven't done it. The information's there; the mechanism to do something about it exists; I am a reasonably organised person; I know about money management. And still. The gap isn't between me and the information. The gap is between me and the doing. Call it the 'doing gap'.
What I actually did about budgets: I stopped
I've always secretly admired those people who have their money under control. Spreadsheets. Budgeting tools. I reckon I must have tried to set a personal or household budget half a dozen times in my life. And failed every time. Not because it was impossible. Or maybe even very hard. I know perfectly well how a budget works. On each occasion I'd spend a bit of time on it, get into it, feel pleased with myself... and then one of two things would happen: I'd give up before finishing; or I'd give up using it after finishing.
Stuff always seems to get in the way. Life. Other priorities. And you have to be pretty diligent. Keep on top of it. Or it gets out of date and then the job of bringing it back up to date becomes too much. Within a month the budget becomes a document you avoid, because looking at it feels like admitting it hasn't worked. Within two months you've quietly stopped.
That's what happened to me: I stopped. It wasn't that budgeting was too hard to understand. It was that budgeting required ongoing attention. Work. Every spreadsheet or budgeting tool I have ever tried has the same quiet assumption built into it: you only get out of it the effort you put in. You have to come back, every week or two, to review, adjust and update. And the truth is most of us don't. Not because we don't care. But because nobody is watching the budget except us, and our attention has twenty other things pulling on it.
Why this matters
Traditional money tools are built to deal with information complexity. They respond by adding elegant dashboards, powerful features, multiple ways to slice the data, more categorisation, etc. The assumption is that if you give people enough visibility into the data, it turns into useful information, and if they have the right information then they will act on what they see.
I don't think most of us do. I don't, and I am about as motivated a user as you are ever going to find. Of course, I'm aware that some people genuinely do stay on top of this, but in my experience they are the exception.
The missing piece is not another dashboard to watch. It is something that watches for you. Something that notices when a subscription has been renewed for the fourth time, and maybe reminds you. Something that flags the budget category that has silently drifted two months in a row. Something that catches the bill you forgot was due on the 19th. Not because you couldn't have found it yourself. Because you just weren't going to.
That shift, from a tool that expects you to come back, to a tool that reaches out when something needs you, is not a UX refinement. It's a different kind of product. The difference between a spreadsheet and an agent.
Which is what we're building
This is the premise behind Lucie Money. It's not the only one, but it's the one that sits underneath most of the design decisions. An agent that watches over your money, understands your situation, tells you when something needs your attention and helps you address it.
Of course, the obvious risk in any tool that reaches out to you is that it adds to the noise rather than cutting through it. Push notifications and dashboard alerts have promised to solve the same problem before, and mostly haven't. Cutting through without becoming part of the problem is one of the hardest design questions we are working on.
But that's our ambition: an agent that solves the 'doing gap', not the 'information gap'.
I don't want to oversell this. Lucie is pre-launch. We have not yet proven that a proactive agent solves the 'doing' problem for real people over time. You could describe it as a bet. But it's the most honest response I can think of to the problem I see, based on my own experience with money and on the conversations I have with other people about theirs. The failure mode isn't our ignorance. It's our inattention. And the solution has to come from a tool that pays attention for us.
If you recognise yourself in any of this, I'd be interested to know. Particularly the subscriptions thing. I'd be curious to know whether I'm the only one who has no idea what the number is.