It started with a spreadsheet, more than twenty years ago.

On paper, I was doing well — earning above-average money, the kind of income that’s supposed to mean you don’t have to worry. And yet I kept running into the same wall: shortfalls. Moments where the money wasn’t there when I needed it, even though I couldn’t understand how that was possible. Each one brought a wave of stress, and that stress led to exactly the wrong decisions — patching one gap by creating another, leaning on debt I didn’t fully see coming, and slowly falling further behind. The harder part wasn’t the money itself. It was not seeing it coming.

So I built myself a spreadsheet. Not to track what I’d already spent — every tool did that — but to look forward. To project where my balance would actually be in two weeks, in a month, and to catch the shortfall while there was still time to do something about it. That one shift, from looking backward to looking ahead, changed everything. The surprises stopped. The stress eased. And slowly, the habits that had kept me stuck started to change.

For two decades I refined that spreadsheet — through real life, real mistakes, and real lessons about how money behaves and how people behave around it. FundsSentinel is the result. It’s everything I learned, rebuilt into something simple enough for anyone to use.

The deeper story behind those lessons is one I share in my book, Seeing the Road Ahead: A Memoir About Money, My Father, and Learning to Look Up. While FundsSentinel helps you see your financial future, the book explores the experiences that taught me why looking ahead matters in the first place.

I built it because I needed it. I’m sharing it because I know I’m not the only one who’s ever stared at a decent paycheck and still felt that quiet dread of not knowing if they’d make it to the end of the month.

— John Soares, Founder of FundsSentinel