Why I built Telemetry

Telemetry started as a personal problem. For years I ran my family’s money out of a spreadsheet, and every month I spent an evening I didn’t have piecing the same picture back together by hand. This is the story of why I stopped patching that spreadsheet and started building the tool I actually wanted.

The budget spreadsheet that ate my weekends

It always began the same way. I’d open the spreadsheet, then open a stack of browser tabs, one for each bank and card, and start copying transactions across. Categorize this one, split that one, fix the column that broke when I pasted. By the time the numbers reconciled, the evening was gone and I still didn’t trust them.

The worst part wasn’t the effort. It was that the picture was stale the moment I finished. A spreadsheet is a snapshot of a day that’s already passed. I wanted to know how we were tracking to our budget right now, this week, not how we did three weeks ago when I last had the energy to update it.

No single view of what we were actually worth

The budget was only half of it. The other question I could never answer quickly was the simplest one: what are we worth, all in, right now?

The pieces were scattered everywhere. Checking and savings at one bank, a mortgage at another, brokerage accounts, retirement accounts, the value of the house, the car. To get a real net worth number I had to log into all of them, write each balance down, subtract the debts, and hope I hadn’t missed anything. I did it maybe twice a year, which meant I was mostly flying blind about the one number that sums up whether we’re moving in the right direction.

I wanted a single screen that pulled it all together and showed me the trend over time, without a data-entry ritual every time I wanted to look.

The wheel broke my spreadsheet for good

The thing that finally pushed me over the edge was options. I trade the options wheel, selling cash-secured puts and covered calls to collect premium, and it is genuinely hard to track by hand.

A brokerage statement shows you a cost basis, but for the wheel that number is a lie. Every premium you collect lowers your real break-even, and the statement never folds those in. To know what a position was actually earning I had to link a put, its assignment, and the covered calls that followed into a single cycle, then roll every premium into a running cost basis. In a spreadsheet, across a few tickers with rolls, that bookkeeping fell apart fast.

One tool for all of it

At some point the pattern was obvious. Budgeting, net worth, and options weren’t three separate problems. They were three views of the same thing: what my family has, what we owe, what we spend, and what our money is earning. I didn’t want three apps and a spreadsheet stitching them together. I wanted one.

So Telemetry answers three questions in one place:

How is my spending tracking to my budget? Transactions come in automatically, get categorized, and roll up against a budget you can actually keep current.
What am I worth, and which way is it trending? Every account and asset in one net worth view, with the history behind it.
What is my options wheel actually earning? Legs linked into cycles, premium folded into a real cost basis, return measured against the collateral each position ties up.

I built it because I needed it. If you’ve ever lost a weekend to a finance spreadsheet that was out of date before you closed it, I think you might need it too.