You type it
Every number on the page started as a number you entered.
Nothing is scraped from your bank. Nothing is pieced together from a feed of transactions. The balances are the ones you sat down and typed, in the currency you saw them in. That is the only input the product accepts, and the only one it trusts.
Everything else on the page is arithmetic on top of those balances. If you want to know where a figure came from, the trail leads back to something you put in yourself.
Native currency
Each account is kept in the currency it actually lives in.
A kroner account stays kroner. A rupee account stays rupees. A euro account stays euros. We convert when we need to show you a single household picture, and we are explicit when we have done so. The underlying account doesn't lose its own currency along the way.
That matters for households whose money lives in more than one place. The numbers on the page should look like your life looks, not like a single home currency has been forced over the top of it.
The honest split
What came from your saving, and what came from currency moves, are not the same thing.
A household holding money in several currencies sees its total move around for two very different reasons. One is the saving you actually did. The other is the world rearranging itself underneath you. Treating those as the same number flatters you in good months and frightens you in bad ones, and neither feeling is useful.
So we keep them apart. When a figure goes up, we want you to know which part was your work and which part was the currency. When it goes down, the same. The arithmetic exists so that the difference is visible, not so that it disappears into a single tidy line.
Conservative by default
Where the future is uncertain, we would rather under-promise.
Any picture of the future is a range, not a point. The honest thing to do is show the range and refuse to pretend the optimistic edge of it is the answer. So when the product gives you a figure that depends on assumptions, it leans toward the less flattering reading of those assumptions.
The unlucky case stays visible alongside the likely one. The point is not to scare you. The point is to make sure the plan you build still stands if the next few years are unkind. A plan that only works in the good case is not really a plan.
Numbers you can trace
Nothing on the page is meant to be taken on faith.
If a figure puzzles you, you can follow it back. The balances you entered, the assumptions in play, the moment in time. Nothing is hidden inside a black box, and nothing is presented as wisdom. It is arithmetic, and arithmetic has the decency to show its working.
The history is kept so that the version of a number you saw last year is still the version you can pull up next year. That continuity is part of what makes the picture trustworthy. You can argue with your past self instead of with us.
What we don't do
The product doesn't tell you what to buy.
It tells you what your numbers say, given assumptions you can read and change. It will not push you into a product, recommend a fund, or speak to the specifics of your jurisdiction. Those are conversations for people licensed to have them. What we do is keep the picture honest in between.
The same restraint shows up in smaller ways. Here is the shape of it:
- We don't optimise for daily engagement.
- We don't gamify your money.
- We don't send streak-loss anxiety.
- We don't compare you to other users.
- We don't make you feel behind for what you don't have.
A projection is a range of plausible futures, not a prediction. fjordFIRE shows you the shape of your money. It isn't financial, tax, or investment advice.
Want to see this on your own numbers?
fjordFIRE is in private beta. The waitlist is where you find out when the next cohort opens.