Why I Built a Budgeting App After Moving to Spain

Three months after moving from the US to Spain, I had no idea how much money I was spending.

I had a US checking account with my salary in dollars. A Spanish bank account for rent and groceries in euros. A Wise account for moving money between the two. A US credit card for subscriptions I hadn't gotten around to canceling. And absolutely no way to see the full picture.

Before I moved, I'd been using RocketMoney. It was fine for tracking spending in dollars. But it's a US-only app, everything is in USD, and it can't connect to a Spanish bank account. The moment I had expenses in two currencies, it became useless.

So I went looking for something better.

The app gauntlet

I tried everything. Copilot, Monarch, also US-only. They couldn't even see my Spanish bank account. YNAB lets you pick one currency for your whole budget, which meant manually converting every euro transaction to dollars. MoneyWiz and Spendee supported multiple currencies on paper, but connecting to my Spanish bank wasn't an option. The multi-currency "support" was really just manual entry in different denominations.

Then I found PocketSmith. It actually connected to both my US and European banks. It handled multiple currencies. It worked. Sort of.

The UX was painful. The interface felt like it was built in 2012 and hadn't been updated since. And the budgeting tool, to this day I don't understand how it works. I've tried multiple times and still can't figure out what it's doing or why. I was paying around $200 a year² for the privilege, mostly just using it as a transaction viewer because the actual budgeting features were incomprehensible.

But it was the only thing that came close, so I stuck with it. For a while.

The category gap

Here's the thing I kept coming back to: this wasn't a personal failure. I wasn't bad at budgeting. I was trying to use tools built for a problem that wasn't mine.

Every major budgeting app, YNAB, Monarch, RocketMoney, Copilot, is built with the same assumption: you live in one country, you have one currency, and all your banks are in the same financial system. That works for most people. But not for the 4.4 million Americans living abroad.¹ Not for the millions of digital nomads and remote workers splitting time between countries. Not for anyone whose money lives in more than one place.

And even PocketSmith, the one app that technically supported international users, treated budgeting as an afterthought. The bank connections were there. The multi-currency conversion was there. But the core experience, actually understanding your spending and building a budget, was a mess.

The tools hadn't caught up to how people actually live.

I looked at this gap and thought: I'm a software engineer. I've built financial products before. I know exactly what I need because I've been living without it for years. So I started building.

What I'm building

Here's what I realized as I started working on this: the multi-currency problem is real, but it's not the only problem. Most budgeting apps aren't that good at the basics, either. They make you do too much manual work. They show you data without helping you understand it. They give you a blank budget and say "good luck."

So I'm not just building a multi-currency budgeting app. I'm building a really good spending tracker and budgeting app that also happens to work across currencies and countries.

Borderless Budget connects your bank accounts from different countries , the US, Canada, the UK, and Europe, and shows all your spending in one place. But the part I care about most is what happens after your accounts are connected.

Auto-categorization that actually works. My Spanish bank labels a grocery transaction "MERCADONA MADRID." My US credit card labels a subscription "SPOTIFY USA." The app categorizes both correctly without me doing anything. No manual tagging. No rules to set up.

Spending analytics that tell you something useful. Not just pie charts. Patterns over time. Recurring charges you might have forgotten about. Month-over-month trends that show whether you're spending more or less, and why.

Currency impact tracking. Last month I "spent more" in dollar terms. But I didn't actually buy more stuff, the euro got more expensive. The app breaks that down so I can see real spending changes versus exchange rate noise.

Budget generation from actual spending. Instead of starting from a blank budget and guessing, the app looks at how I actually spend, accounts for both currencies, and suggests a budget based on real patterns. I can adjust from there.

These aren't hypothetical features designed by someone who read about expats in a market research report. They're solutions to problems I hit every month managing my own money.

Why now

I've been building this for a while, and it's getting close. Early access opens in June 2026.

If you're an expat, a digital nomad, or anyone whose financial life spans more than one currency, I built this for you. Because I built it for me first, and I'm pretty confident we have the same problems.

You can join the waitlist at borderlessbudget.com. You'll get early access and 50% off when we launch. I also send occasional updates about what I'm building and why, no spam, just the story behind the product.

In the meantime, I made a free multi-currency budget template , a Google Sheet that handles exchange rate math for you. It's not the app, but it's a start.

And if you want to tell me about your budgeting setup, or how you're currently managing money across currencies, I'd genuinely like to hear it. Reply to any email I send, or find me on Twitter @borderlessbdgt. I read everything.

Related reading:

• 7 Budgeting Mistakes Expats Make (and How to Fix Them)
• How to Budget in Two Currencies Without Losing Your Mind
• The Complete Guide to Multi-Currency Budgeting