We’re determined to solve our money problem, for ourselves (and you).
Happy Wednesday from Medean! The team and I are kicking off our new blog series with an introduction to how our company got started and what we think sets us apart. Tune in for our upcoming bi-weekly blogs for testimonials from our team, experts, and Medean users on financial lessons that they learned firsthand!
If you aren’t familiar with Medean, we’re a personal finance company focused on providing simple, engaging, and motivating financial tools. Our flagship product, the Medean mobile app, uses data-driven insights and financial challenges to help you accomplish your goals.
This week, I’ll be taking you behind the scenes of how my co-founder Matt and I created Medean and how it will help you to save more and spend smarter. In the coming weeks, expect topics such as “How I Ran a Marathon Without Running Into Debt,” “How I Cracked the Code on Improving My Credit Score” and “How I Planned An Epic Wedding on a Tight Budget”
The Idea
Medean started in my apartment at Indiana University. I was an MBA student at the Kelley School of Business and realized there was a major problem among my peers. They all lacked basic financial literacy and engagement. No matter your income, carefully budgeting, saving, and planning for the future is a challenge.
A lot of us face the same issues, ranging from the relatively simple, like figuring out how much we can afford to spend on rent, to the more complicated, like figuring out when (or if!) we’ll ever be able to buy a house. This confusion was amplified by the fact that saving is hard. People under 35 have a negative 2% savings rate, which means they’re just going deeper and deeper into debt. (Hello, student loans.)
When we decided to step up and figure out a solution, we weren’t sure where to turn. The big banks and credit card companies have shown, time and again, that they aren’t working in our interest. Matt and I both were spending wisely and saving a lot of money each month, yet our credit scores were not sufficient enough to get the credit cards we wanted. We never missed a payment, but were dinged for a lack of credit history and not having enough accounts (we’ll get to the whole credit score thing in another post, but for now just know that we were blown away by the fact that we needed to get more debt to improve our “creditworthiness” aka FICO.)
We weren’t going to visit a financial planner, given the fact that they can cost $1k and we weren’t sure if they would act in our best interest. That left the existing budgeting apps, which promise to do the math for you and then tell you when you’re overspending. We tried out a few but soon realized that connecting our accounts and seeing where we were blowing our budgets wasn’t enough.
We wanted…
- Something that was simple and engaging, not dependent on predatory credit card offers.
- Something that would provide guidance, not just the hard numbers that we already knew.
- Something that would motivate us to improve, not just make us feel bad about our habits.
So we built Medean.
Together in Saving
The new Medean mobile app makes your dollars and cents easier to understand with a comprehensive set of money management tools: we’ll get rid of the guesswork with insights that’ll save you money, incentivize responsible spending, and help you develop good habits that’ll last from job to job, milestone to milestone.
The results have been incredible — two-thirds of Medean users find they better understand their finances within the first minute and the average user saves more than $300 in their first month. As we continue to grow, we’ve kept our eyes on the goal of helping people across the world better understand their finances, which is why we’re excited to be launching our Android app later this year!
With Medean, your money is in your hands — we’re here to help you keep more of it. Now you can carry it with you in your pocket. We’re a financial planner, a motivator, and a guide all in one — with you whenever you need it.
We’re Medean. Stop tracking, start improving.
