Managing group finances can be tricky, but it’s all about clear communication and setting shared goals. Whether it’s splitting bills or budgeting for a project, transparency keeps things running smoothly. Have you ever had a financial disagreement that taught you something valuable?
In this special episode, I’m joined by Joshua Lee, Co-founder and CEO of Tribe Money Pools. We talk about struggles of managing group finances, from tracking contributions to avoiding awkward money conversations. To deal with these, Joshua introduces his app, designed to streamline group financial management, making it easier to collaborate, stay organized, and maintain trust within the group. Tune in, and learn more!
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Collaborative Solutions for Group Financial Management with Joshua Lee
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today is an important day for Action’s Antidotes because it is my 150th episode, that’s kind of a milestone and, usually, I don’t make these episodes or any of these episodes about myself. Usually, it’s about the guest I’m interviewing, but this particular interview actually pertains to an area of my life personally because I’m the treasurer of an organization called Toastmasters, not the organization International, if you’re familiar, but of a local chapter, I’m a treasurer, and as a treasurer of the group, I oftentimes go to the bank, facilitate transactions with a bank account, because groups like Toastmasters or any other group oftentimes require having a budget, and a lot of people have clubs like that or perhaps you’re out there thinking about what kind of club or organization you want to start. Well, when I go to the bank, I never know what to say to the banker about whether it is a personal or a business account, because it kind of treads that line kind of between the two. It’s not a business, we’re not trying to make a profit or anything like that, we’re just trying to organize all the Toastmasters activities and expenses under this account so that we can fund our operations with our dues and what we owe the international organization and stuff like that. Given that a lot of our pursuits and a lot of us are going to find ourselves in a situation like this, I want to introduce to you today’s guest, Joshua Lee, who is the co-founder and CEO of Tribe Money Pools.
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Joshua, welcome to the program.
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me today.
Yeah, thank you for hopping on. And so I want to start a little bit about what Tribe Money Pools does about these situations where, okay, you’re not a business but you’re also not a personal account, you’re kind of operating something together in a group.
Yeah, absolutely, and I think it would be a little helpful for me to provide a little context as to what Tribe Money is just very quickly. Tribe Money is a digital platform that helps groups share and manage their finances. What we’ve taken are the fragmented processes that occur in group financial management today, such as communication, facilitation, execution, and, most importantly, governance, which is all done with different applications or through different means and different channels. We’ve taken all that and consolidated it all into one platform so the actual financial management, the process of sharing and collecting finances with members of your group, whatever it might be, is much more streamlined, way easier and easier to track, and it’s much more secure than all traditional methods that really exist out there in the market today. So.
Most importantly, set rules and access controls to ensure that people can monitor who can spend, what members are as part of the group, and, all in all, just really make a place that’s a lot easier, that has a shared responsibility for the finances that are collected and no longer have all those responsibilities and burdens put upon a single person, a treasurer such as yourself. And what we’re really trying to hope is that what this application, this shared bank account, you have all the transparency, all the ledgers you need to be able to easily track the finances, very easily redistribute funds, collect funds, as well as also have all the P2P capabilities you may need to be able to quickly move money from one person to another or even just outwardly for the expenses of your groups.
In a lot of these clubs, these local clubs, the membership could vary anywhere from as low as 8 to 10 to as high as 25 to 30, depending on what kind of club, and sometimes the same club can vary up and down. People leave, people come in and stuff like that. So how would it work for a club like this where there’s going to be club president, there’s probably still going to be a club treasurer that kind of quality controls everything, but then as people leave and people come in, is it easy to kind of bring people on, take people off the account, and manage that whole variance in membership?
Yeah, absolutely. So, the way that the application works is that Tribe Money provides the facilitation of the finances based on the rules that these groups have set. So, for some of these more smaller organizations where you want a more decentralized style of governance over the finances where every member has access, you’re more than welcome to use the template of rules we attach to the group accounts to set those settings so that you can have full membership governance, everybody has access to the accounts. Obviously, as a creator, you’ll be the first one to set the rules but, of course, if people don’t really jive with what you put together, they may choose to opt out from joining that community until the rules are set to a point in which they actually all can properly manage the finances together as opposed to something like a club where you have officers, you can have them be the responsible, quote-unquote, “administrators,” give them the privileges to actually move the finances. Of course, with still some controls within the officer and governing body, where then you can have other members who aren’t as interested in actually partaking in those conversations but just want an easy means to contribute finances or even get the ability to pull finances to just be able to join very simply. And with the transition process, because these are virtual shared bank accounts, it’s very, very easy for people to give permissions that you had over to another member and then just leave the account. Of course, you can request the finances out if you individually contributed that, but that’s really up to the groups to decide and we provide the space to actually be able to do all that very simply.
And how did this business idea originate? What was your observation, your observation with your cofounders, that made you decide that this was going to be something that you’re willing to put your time and energy into?
There was actually really a twofold reason why I originally started this business. So, for me, back when I was in my undergrad over at the University of Washington, I was the president and treasurer of a club as well during my time there, and managing the finances for 50, 60 members was such a painful process. I was the person who had to do all the bookkeeping, collect all the payments, communicate and facilitate all the different financial records. And it was just a very long and manual process that, just for me myself, I was just wondering why there wasn’t a solution that helped solve this. For the more informal clubs, they’re not incorporated, they can’t justify getting a business bank account, a joint bank account doesn’t really make sense, and I’m not going to pull my money together on GoFundMe, that doesn’t make sense, so everything has to go through me and it’s all through my name, and it’s hard to distinguish between personal finances sometimes as well as this more club-focused finances as well as everything sort of gets muddled. And so, for me, it’s incredibly important, and for the group as well, that I have very stringent practices in how I make sure all the finances are handled on behalf of the group. And so, for me, that was really just one of the biggest pain points I had during my time during undergrad, and talking with other treasures as well in different clubs, this was a very similar problem that many clubs had faced, and more on a personal aspect outside of that, I wanted a space where I could pool finances with my friends, my relationships, my roommates, just to make the whole financial experience a lot quicker and a lot more transparent as well. Having to bookkeep everything, it doesn’t matter as much for people when you trust them already, but now, when you start to step away from that inherent trust, it becomes much more important and really trying to provide those tool sets was for me why I started this journey about a year, year and a half ago.
And then what about condo boards and HOAs and these types of groups? Are they one of your key target customers?
I think there are people that we’re definitely looking into. I think the concept of shared financial management is very broad in scope but the requirements are a lot more specific for things like HOAs. These are more established, Incorporated organizations that we’re really –– and at least, initially, at launch, we are targeting more informal groups where, again, as I mentioned, a person has to step up as the volunteer treasurer, as the bank, just pretty much everything that has to do with finances for the group and they don’t really have a full system put in place. Small businesses perhaps that are just getting off the ground fit under this use case that we’re looking at as well, but more established businesses like Google, doesn’t make sense to have them use something like this, right? There’s just too many complexities that our application doesn’t look to solve so we’re really just targeting the people who want to start a community, who want to stay connected through their finances, or at least stay connected and then use the finances as an outlet to help them continue on with whether they’re throwing events or going out. We want to make sure that at least the financial aspect is very simplified so that they can really focus on doing what they want to do and not worry about not only managing the finances but the often unspoken part of the emotionally charged aspects of trying to deal with finances as well. As a treasurer, I’m sure there have been instances where you’ve had to front money and the request process to get money back is awkward, it’s slow, it takes time, and that’s what we’re trying to really just bring visibility to the transparency to it as well, but just speed up that process too as a whole.
And with clubs, a lot of times, the entire process involves collecting dues and each member’s got to pay a certain amount, and so, obviously, there’s going to be a lot of members who pay dues but don’t necessarily handle the finances, they just need to chip in their 20 bucks a month or whatever that cost is. What’s the experience for these members?
Yeah, absolutely. So, the way that our application works today is that anybody who wants to actually be able to access the finances within the account, who wants to see the all the ledgers and all the spending to have to be on the actual account itself to be able to use the application for its full capability, but for people who just want to drop off money that don’t really care as much about really understanding all the finances, that’s more of a value add for them, we are building a capability that will enable users to just not download the app but just drop off money, just making the collection process as easy as possible. And, of course, that will still land in the group account, everything will still be tracked upon, and if you have officers who specifically want to look at that, they’ll probably be on the application helping manage and facilitate and allocate the budget and finances to the responsible areas. But for run-of-the-mill members who just want to be a part of the general core experience of the group but don’t really care so much about the finances, that’s absolutely something that we’ve accommodated for as well in our application.
I mean, no one starts a club to be an accountant, right? Like every club, whether it be something you join, like Toastmasters, it’s been around since 1890, something, I don’t even remember how long, something that you just start up on your own, you have a passion and that passion rarely is, “I wanna be an accountant,” unless you’re some sort of an accounting major that wants to get their foot in the door and get a resume in with all these like, “Okay, yeah, I was treasurer here, here, here, there, and there, you should hire me as accountant for your company and then I can make some real money,” right?
It often starts as such a nice concept of, “Oh, I just wanna bring people together. We have this shared interest,” but as you really start to go through the logistics and you start actually dealing with real money and it’s not just in the tens or hundreds but you start dealing with the thousands of dollars, now you actually have to become an accountant. You’re put in this position where you’re just like, wow, this is actually a pretty daunting experience. It’s not as easy as I thought. And it’s things that people don’t even think about, it’s like how will this affect my taxes? What does this look like, even? And everything’s coming through myself as the personal owner of this group, for instance, because everything’s under my name. There’s tax implications behind that and there’s a lot of complexities that hide underneath the surface. At the end of the day, we don’t want that to be the reason why we decide to discontinue whatever interest we’re following here. And it’s very oftentimes really easy to start stepping into that threshold. As a member of a group, if I was part of your Toastmasters, for example, and I saw that you weren’t handling our finances very well, there was no transparency, and I’m putting money in and I don’t know that, I probably wouldn’t want to continue my time in the club. Keeps me a little bit hesitant from providing more finances, at least, to continue to fund my admittance to this club or my membership to this club, just simply due the fact that I’m a member, I don’t have this transparency. I’m putting thousands of dollars. I mean, I don’t know if it’s to that extent but I’m putting in a good amount of money and I don’t know what’s happening to it, and, on both sides of the coin, as a treasurer, it sucks because you have to do all this, and as a regular member, if you don’t have this kind of visibility and the financial management is not very well managed or well handled, it can lead a lot of issues down the line, which is something that people don’t think about, I think, when starting off these passion projects, building these communities.
It comes from a good place but when you get to the logistics, that’s when it gets really hairy. Share on X
Yeah, and I even think about something along the lines of a fitness club, say, we’re all going to get together and I’m going to buy a bunch of equipment that I’m going to somehow have to maintain. Someone paying dues probably doesn’t even know what amount of money goes into anything like that, because you go in, you use equipment, no matter what equipment it is, and you just kind of count it always being there, and it’s the same thing like anyone that’s recently become a homeowner has recently learned, how much money it actually takes to maintain a home but you don’t think about it and you’re just like, okay, where’d all the money go? So that transparency can really help when someone will say, okay, even looking at prospective members, you’re looking at someone that kind of maybe came to visit and they’re interested in your club and you tell them, “Okay, the dues are $40 a month,” and then they’ll ask, “Well, why are the dues $40 a month?” and that’s a question you can answer because people want to know and people oftentimes worry about donating, like a lot to charities where there are some charities, I won’t mention specific names, that have gotten reputations for having excessive amounts of overhead and maybe not being the best stewards of that money.
Right, no, absolutely. And it really comes down to transparency when you really think about it. As a treasure today, if somebody wanted to know why they’re paying $40 per month, I mean, you can obviously tell them, just off word of mouth, but, oftentimes, showing them something that really associates to the spending, like an Excel sheet, is at least going to be a lot more helpful in navigating that conversation. But, in the midst of that, you don’t want to pull up a spreadsheet and then show them everything, show them the tables, it takes a lot of time and it also isn’t directly correlated to the bank account either. It’s what you put down and so it’s hard for people to validate that information as well. But, no, I completely agree with your point to that extent, yes.
So, when you were in college, you had the idea, you had the club, you were treasurer and you’re like, “Okay, we need a better solution.” Where did the conversation go from there? You said you had cofounders, is this something that you encouraged each other to actually move on as opposed to, because a lot of people have ideas out there and anyone can state an idea but you’re actually putting it together. What brought you to that point?
I think it’s just a funny story between myself and my cofounders when we first got started on this. My two cofounders, they were actually my peers at the University of Washington, and, for us, we always just wanted to build something that helped people’s problems and this was something that we faced on our everyday lives outside of the club that I was a part of. One of my cofounders was actually the followup treasurer after my time so he actually felt the exact same issues that I felt because I was one who trained him in everything that he did. But outside of that, this original idea, like I mentioned, it was built for what we call intimate groups, people who trust each other, like friends, families, roommates, maybe not roommates, social relationships as well, because people already have an inherent trust and we just wanted to build a shared space for collecting finances. But not only that but we wanted to give people the opportunity to stay connected through their finances. And that’s how we initially started that discussion. And then, obviously, for us, we had a little bit of extra time so we started just building out the projects, just trying to see if we can start to get it off the ground, and as we started talking to more people and just understanding that, wow, people really want this, people really need this, and people want to find a way to stay connected with their finances. They want the transparency, they want the security, but they don’t want to make a joint bank account. This was very common theme that we’ve heard and getting a lot of more positive support there, we realized that we were definitely building something that people have a problem with in their day-to-day lives and that’s when we decide to commit, take the leap and really just start building this out full time. And we’ve been doing this for about a little over a year now, since we started, and, honestly, no regrets since then. It’s been amazing.
And you said you talked to a lot of people that said that they wanted it. What were some of the more interesting conversations, if you’re willing to share?
Yeah, because groups are so generic as a term, as we talk, when I talk about this and really try to explain this to people, we’ve got a very wide range of how people would use this in their personal lives, because groups mean something different to us in every different situation, different groups that we’re a part of, but one that really stood out to me was actually, there’s this concept in Korea called keh. It’s called keh in Korea but it’s used around the world a lot. It’s essentially where a bunch of families come together and they pool money together for once a month and then one family gets to take it out, that collected pool once a month for family emergencies or any upcoming events, they need that large lump sum of money, right? And then they take turns, family by family. This isn’t really practiced in the US, I’ve found, but in a lot of different countries outside the US, it’s very globally, talking to just a wide range of people, we found that actually that was a really large use case that people wanted to use our application for. They were saying that, “Hey, yeah, we pool this money together. It goes to one person. If we don’t trust this person, they could run off with our collected sum,” for instance. We have no way to actually see all the transactions that occur within this balance that’s accumulated together. We have no controls over it. We have no visibility. When I first started this, this wasn’t even something that I had even thought of, but we talked about group financial management and that just sparked interest in the person I was talking with. And talking to more people, we’ve actually found that this is still being practiced in the US to a certain capacity, of course, by a lot of the immigrant families who came over, my parents included. Even though my parents don’t partake in it, I heard about stories of our neighboring communities doing the same thing. And I didn’t even realize that that was a viable use case for it. That really made it interesting for me because it’s very different from what we were talking about earlier, clubs and groups. Here, there’s more of an established practice, I would say, in the financial management, at least somewhat, there’s some more organization behind it, and so I think that that was such a unique story for me that really caught my eye. I thought it was really interesting there. And then, of course, just the more broad use cases of people wanting to use it with their friends and people wanting to have something for their relationships as an example. If I’m not married to somebody, I myself am not, but I can’t justify opening up a joint bank account. It also seems very daunting, especially for the more newer generations, going to a bank, setting up an account, it feels like it takes time and we try to get everything done so quickly these days. We want everything at the tip of our fingertips. Going to a bank to open a joint bank account seems like a lot of work. Not only that, there’s no securities behind it as well so anybody under the name of the joint bank account can fully access it. But all in all, it was really interesting to see just the wide range of how people do group financial management and how our application can really be retrofitted with each of these different groups to really help serve their needs at the end of the day.
So in the case of a relationship, when you get to marriage, you’re probably going to have a joint account, at that point or established, but, say, two, three months into it, you want to have some finances together but, obviously, you don’t know if that relationship is going to go the distance because it’s only been two or three months, so that’s a situation where one of these solutions is a bit more appropriate.
Yeah, absolutely. This is something that you just download with your partner and then you use the application to just create –– shared virtual bank account, sorry. You create this shared virtual bank account, you set rules if you need, you can have it no rules, just a place to drop off your finances and collect money together and then you can just spend it together, if you would like. Obviously, with certain relationships, there might be a need to have certain controls for spending, still being able to request finances out of the account, for instance, but that’s, of course, very uniquely situated for each different relationship. And so what we want to provide is that intermediary solution until you get married and get a joint bank account because we, obviously –– for us, we’re not trying to replace joint bank accounts but we want the ability for people to share finances and have this shared experience on a much casual, much more easier basis, knowing that there’s still the securities in place should they look to reach for their need in this unique situation.
And is there a limited number of people on joint bank accounts?
Yes. So, although for us today, most brick and mortars typically do cap it at ten, the general usage is mostly around two to three users per joint bank account. Usually, you have yourself, one other person, and then perhaps some legal entity that’s helping represent for, in case there’s any disputes or any financial issues with the account itself. But, again, there still is a limitation. If you if you have a 30-member club, you can’t have all 30 members be a part of this joint bank account. And the biggest thing that’s a big differentiator is that, again, there’s no controls. Anybody under the name of the joint bank account could, in theory, use all the finances, run off with it, and there’s really not much you can do about it unless you have a really good legal entity as a third party in between there to help you out.
And so the controls, do they involve, say, spending limits, like, okay, you can only spend up to this much money a month for these people and stuff like that?
Yeah. So, at the very basic level, the way that we have it set right now is that with the shared account, if anybody wants to pull finances out, they have to make a request that’s voted upon by the other members of the group. So at the bare minimum, when you have the very basic level account, you don’t have any other additional rule sets, just simply how it’s put, you pool money together, if somebody wants to pull money out, you request it. Now, if you want to go into the more advanced rules, we are building out the capabilities so that people can have, for instance, set a daily spending limit that doesn’t require a request. We are also looking to build a group card for easier access to those funds in there with, again, spending limits. Do you have a threshold set at a minor transaction of $100 or where people can use it freely on a daily spending limit, for instance? Or would you set that to $50? The option is entirely up to you and how you want to navigate your group.
I see, and so same thing, you can navigate with certain spending requests requiring a unanimous vote of everyone versus just a sheer majority vote or something like that.
Of course, right, and then you can also set who are voters, right? If you want to have, again, like I mentioned, that decentralized, you can make everybody a voter. If you just want, for instance, if you’re a college club and you just want officers to be able to vote on that, you can set those people as the voters. It really gives you the options to really play around with the governance structure to a model that fits your unique group.
So if you had a club and you had a treasurer that was just going to be the person whose approval you need, and so as treasurer, someone will say, “I wanna spend $500 on new ribbons,” or something like that, I, as treasurer, then would have be the person that would need to approve it.
Correct, yes. And if that’s how you like to set it, you’re more than welcome to do so. Say you have a few partnered officers with you that also need, say the president needs to also be able to approve it, you can also set them as that. Set the voting threshold to 100 percent so only you two can vote and that requires your two unanimous vote before any transaction can occur and those funds can be moved out.
Nice. And what is the overall impact that you’re hoping to have with this endeavor? You mentioned not wanting this to be a reason why someone stops doing what they’re doing.
I might have mentioned this a little bit earlier, but I think we really want people to be able to be connected through their finances. I think one thing that I’ve also seen and I think something that’s really unspoken is that I think we like to keep our finances very close to our chest, for the most part, at least our own personalized finances, and it becomes very difficult, that line gets grayed out as you start to step into groups, when you have the shared finances and how you communicate about it, how you actually want to manage the spending. It becomes a lot harder to have those conversations and what we wanted to do is provide a space where people don’t have to worry about the emotionally charged moments of trying to handle finances with other people. Because whether we like it or not, there are going to be moments, unless everything is perfectly smooth and everyone is on the same page, there are going to be moments where you have those emotionally charged moments, whether you’re asking someone to pay you back, and even as a requester, if you have to ask two or three times, it starts to become a painful process. And as the person who is getting nagged on, if you don’t have the finances readily available as well, it becomes a stressful moment as well for those people on a personal level, and we just wanted to remove that emotional friction but also bring trust to a place where trust might not exist.
Especially in a financial space, it’s so important, trust is the deciding factor whether or not people will be able to actually provide the finances to help fund or help continue the lifespan of a club or any interest group Share on Xor even just a friend group, something even as simple as that. And we just wanted to provide that space at its core. And, of course, with that comes all the additional benefits of not having to worry about your finances so you can focus on what you’re trying to do. There was a study done that showed that groups with bad financial management lose up to about 13 percent of their annual funds to lost funds due to missed reimbursements, missed expenses, and even just painting a picture on the college scene, in 2022, that accounted for about $600 million across the US of lost funds for how much money is going into these clubs and universities.
Oh, wow.
That’s ultimately what we’re really trying to provide, just from a very, I think, conceptual perspective. In practice, of course, we want to make sure that this application helps streamline your finances with your groups and just makes the whole process much easier and quicker and, therefore, making all club activities much more efficient as a byproduct of that as well.
And then you said that there’s going to be an app, right?
Yes, correct. So this is coming out as a mobile application. We are launching in January. We have been in beta testing since September so anyone who’s interested could check out our website at tribe.money, but we have a wait list there for anyone who wants to try out the product once it gets released, but we are planning on releasing in January. And, with that, we also want to start building out additional finance features based on what the users need. And so start to take a step away from the problem from our end and see really what the people need to ensure that they have that streamlined financial management for their groups.
And in the conversations that you had with people as you’ve kind of been sorting out the idea, did anything surprising come up in some of these conversations when people were describing their use cases of what they’d be looking for?
I think the thing that really surprised me at the time, and it’s one of those things I didn’t really think about before starting this whole process, was how much trust actually is the basis for all our finances with others. It’s something that I think is very unspoken, you either trust someone or you don’t, but if you don’t trust somebody, you don’t usually say, “Oh, I don’t trust you. I’m not gonna be a part of this group,” it’s just more like, “This isn’t the right fit for me,” and never really explains why the problems really lie there. And, for me, it’s really interesting to find out how many people lost interest or didn’t want to partake in a group because the financial management was not up to par and they didn’t trust how their money was going to be used, even for something as simple as, okay, the membership dues is about $20 a month, this is going out to eat one time, if not, even less, and even that amount, to be able to be a part of this community, they don’t want to be a part of it, even though they have all the right interests. And, in theory, they could be a great member, they’ve enjoyed some of their time there in the few instances that they were a member, but the biggest problem was that lack of transparency, lack of trust in the officers who were managing the finances, made them want to leave and this is something that was actually pretty consistent across the board. Whether it’s relationships, whether it’s friend groups, when there’s a lack of trust there, it really does bar people from being able to go out and do things and it actually makes a really large impact into our day-to-day lives. And I think, for me, that was so shocking. When I started this process, it was really just, “Hey, let’s help people stay connected,” but getting really deeper into the problem and interviewing people, I found out how much of an impact it actually really does have, that unspoken trust that people need to be able to transact and have financial interactions with another person.
Now, on this podcast, I often talk about what’s referred to as the loneliness epidemic. Is this issue of trust one of the factors driving this whole like why we’re so lonely and isolated in recent years?
I think that there’s definitely a large impact that does come from that. One thing that we’ve seen, COVID was a very economically difficult time for a lot of people and it affected a lot of personal finances. A lot of people were getting laid off, people were losing jobs left and right, unable to find new ones, the economy was definitely at a hit at the time, and because of that, leaving out of COVID, not only do we have that, “Oh, I was so used to staying in at home for the last two years, but now there’s been a huge uptick in these activities and now it’s harder for me to finance these things as well. Now, how do I have these conversations with the people around me?” Talking about personal finance, especially when you’re going through financial hardships, it’s a very difficult conversation to have. And as people, I think we try to be more avoidant in having those conversations and as a byproduct, people don’t realize what the real underlying issue is. People just think that, “Oh, this person is just not somebody that we jive with,” to put it simply, when in reality, it’s much more complex and much more complicated than that as a whole. And I think that that, because how difficult it is to have those conversations or to be open about that narrative, it does also drive in and instill and add to that factor of that loneliness, as you mentioned earlier, as a whole.
Obviously, the more open we are with the people around us, it makes it much easier to get out of that shell. Share on XBut, again, with finances, it’s always one of those things that’s very difficult to bring into conversation.
And especially one of the things that I’ve come to realize about any social circle that I’ve been involved with before is how much effort it takes, especially –– I mean, I’m sure you’ve been involved in some social circles where one or two people tend to be the organizers, even the people who start the group text, the people who, okay, I’ve identified this particular event and I’m going to invite everyone to come, and that takes effort, that takes energy, that sometimes early in life, I didn’t always appreciate. And so one of the things I think about sometimes when I think about what’s driving loneliness is what people face when they first start deciding, “Okay, I wanna be in touch with this person. I wanna be in touch with that person, but when and where, what are we going to do together?” So these people that organize kind of can be a little bit of, especially after COVID, unsung heroes in the sense that they’re taking the effort and the energy, and so when we talk about making sure that person doesn’t also additionally take a financial bath on whatever they’re organizing or even whether or not those people deserve to, I don’t know, even get paid a little bit of money for their time and effort, is that an open and honest conversation that most people can have?
At least for this topic, I’ll speak a little bit more on my observations and opinions, doesn’t mean that’s necessarily true, but I think that even then, it’s just a difficult conversation to have. “Hey, I’m starting this out of the betterment for us,” but it takes a lot of work, I have to do, figuring out the logistics aren’t easy. Not only is organizing the group itself and managing the group, and then dealing with the finances, it’s a lot of work. And I think that even asking, “Hey, can I get paid a little? Do you know how hard this is?” it’s hard to bring that up as a conversation, because then, oftentimes, reactions are, “Okay, well, then why did you start it in the first place?” and it’s because it came from a good place. I mean, I didn’t do this because I wanted to take on all this additional work. I did this because I care. But then again, when you bring up finances, it’s like when you say, “Hey, I put a lot of work here,” people say, “Good job,” here’s a high five, here’s like a gift as a token of my appreciation, then when you switch over to, “Hey, would you be willing to pay me for all this extra work I’m doing?” well, at least from my opinion, I found that it’s a very difficult conversation to have, especially when you start segmenting it away from the financial conversation. When you’re having a financial conversation, it might be easier to slip it in there, but you’re not talking about your finances every single day with the rest of your group, you’re collecting finance, you’re collecting the money, you’re organizing events, you’re thinking about how thinking about how to manage the group that oftentimes that conversation never gets the opportunity to occur. And, as a whole, I think that what we want to bring around with our application is at least getting the conversations going. You have a place where you can talk about the finances, those group accounts that you built together, and, from there, at least you have the space to bring up these kind of conversations and, therefore, not have to worry about those emotionally charged moments that come with it.
I just can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been involved in events where one person forks the money up and then asks everyone to Venmo them cash and so even if it’s, I don’t know, just like one of the most basic examples, I live in Colorado, is, say, a group white water rafting excursion. And white water rafting can be a little dangerous so I like to go with the guided tour and so you get a group together and there’s one fee, and then everyone needs to pay that one person and there’s so many situations out there like that where someone has to pay that one person and it becomes like, okay, you’re trying to look through your PayPal history, your Venmo history, and then maybe the one person that gave you cash to figure out who’s paying ––
Who paid, who didn’t.
Yeah, and conference is another great example of that when someone buys tickets.
No, no, exactly, and I think a big thing too that’s a problem with how things are put in practice today is that if you front the money for this white water excursion, as an example, it’s up to you to collect the payments from everybody else. If a few people are lagging behind, and I’m sure you’ve had occurrences where payments are lagging behind, you have to remind them several times, like, “Hey, when are you going to reimburse me? I fronted this with my own personal finances, and you got to enjoy the event, that was a month ago, please pay me back.” Today’s process puts that entire burden only on you. Even though everyone got to enjoy it, unless you’re going to call them out in a group chat and say, “Hey, you didn’t pay me,” and outs them, which more likely than not, people won’t do for these sort of conversations, they want to keep it more personal, then the problem becomes that now, if you don’t get paid, you get screwed in the long run. Even though you hosted the event, you did all the organizing, you even front loaded the money, and it becomes your problem, and it becomes such a manual process that all the burden befalls upon you and I think that that’s definitely an issue that we have in practice today. And so, again, we’re really just trying to help promote a space where those conversations don’t seem out of pocket. If you guys are collecting funds to go and budget for this excursion in advance, you can see who settled up. If somebody hasn’t paid for something, you can always make a request in the group for that person right there in the visibility of everybody and it doesn’t feel like you’re ousting them in a group chat where different sort of conversations typically would occur, as opposed to, since it’s all in the financial space where that group account lives, now, that conversation is much easier to have, it’s easier to promote those different thoughts that you want to have with the different group members without sounding like, and I apologize for the language, like an asshole.
Well, I definitely can see how that could help make people less lonely because I imagine someone’s like, “Okay, I took the effort and then I got screwed. Someone just never paid up,” and then the next time, you’re just like, “I just don’t wanna do it again. This person’s gonna –– or someone’s gonna not pay, someone’s going to say something else about the exact location, the venue,” all those things that get in people’s way. Now, toward the beginning, you also talked about starting a business as a use case so kind of these early days when you have a couple of cofounders and you’re putting your money together. What does that use case look like?
Yeah, I think that even with a small business, especially for a small business, we felt this a lot as a startup right now ourselves, but it’s very important to be able to keep a good track over the finance that are put together, especially if you’re self-funding a business. If you’re starting it from the ground up and you have a few partners, you’re putting money together collectively to really fund your business, bootstrapping it as you as it were, it’s very important that you have a tight leisure, you really understand how the finances are being used because every cent counts. And when you have three, four people funding things separately from their own accounts and you’re trying to reconcile all the different payments and transactions that occurred, there’s a very likely chance that you miss a certain expense, for instance, or you don’t really know exactly how the finances are moving the health of the business as an overall understanding as well because you don’t have the ability to be able to reconcile easily. You have to do everything still from a manual basis, then that reconciliation process still takes a lot of time. You might have somebody who’s in charge of that but then, for that person, it becomes a very manual process, and because maybe you’re not incorporated yet and you haven’t opened up a business bank account. Even starting a business, as a legal entity, takes a lot of time and a lot of work. There’s a lot of legal work that needs to go into starting a business and sometimes that’s daunting. You just want to start something, get it off the ground, just figure out where you can go and, eventually, when you become more established, the finances that you had been using there, you can move that over to the business bank account, with the right controls to help actually guide a business in the right direction. But when you’re starting things more informally and just you got an idea, you want to get something off the ground, you didn’t get money from investors, you just need a space to share the finances so you can really call those business expenses at the end of the day because you still need to be able to separate that from your personal finances, that’s really what we’re hoping our application helps with these smaller-sized businesses. Obviously, as you incorporate and become a much more legitimate entity, you’re going to want to move towards the solutions that are catered for that but we’re looking at more of those informal groups that haven’t really established themselves yet but still need a space for their shared finances.
Yeah. So envisioning, like you have, like, say, two cofounders just to ––
Yes.
–– and you just want that ledger there to look at all the expenses, like what all did each person put into it and so that when that conversation comes about, when you’re incorporating, when you’re starting a business bank account, you can actually see how much money and then obviously you can talk about time and energy that people put into it to see, I don’t know, if you’re gonna have an equity agreement once you incorporate and just be like, “Okay, you’re 50 percent, you’re 30 percent, you’re 20 percent,” but that’s actually proportional to some real data.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. Actually, the weird thing is that you’ve kind of touched base a lot on how this kind of can almost ruin relationships of all kinds, whether it be family, whether it be personal relationships, whether it be business relationships, or even social circle. I even think about, I don’t reference this show that often because I don’t really reference TV that often, but I do remember an episode of the show Friends where the group has this like argument about they’re going out to dinner because some people were ordering more expensive things than others and that’s a common situation we’ve seen a lot. So it is interesting to see how often this does get in the way of relationships and cause people to have falling outs.
I think at its core, because, unfortunately, nothing in life is free, everything we do has some financial implication, for the most part. I mean, going on a walk with, like, your friends, I guess that doesn’t really count, but if you’re actually doing anything that’s more than just what’s right there in front of you, it’s going to cost some form of finances, whether it was beforehand or maybe after the fact, whether you’re budgeting or splitting expenses or you already had all the necessary tools. Doesn’t cost me money to play pickleball but it does cost me money to get all the equipment to play pickleball, especially if I’m playing with a group of friends. And it’s all these little things that, because nothing in life is free, everything that we do in life does also directly connect to our finances, to a certain capacity, and if we’re not very open and transparent and we can’t accommodate for each other’s unique financial situations and have those conversations, it really can muddy the waters in those relationships. Even though we don’t see it that way directly, it actually does have a really strong underlying impact at the end of the day.
Yeah, and perfect example here in Colorado where I live also is like something like a backpacking trip, where you’ll say, okay, we all are going to bring whatever equipment, whether it be your tents, whether it be our backpacks or whether it be some of the food that we’re going to eat, etc., but oftentimes we think of it as a relatively inexpensive experience because you’re not, say, spending 300 bucks a pop on concert tickets or going to a really fancy meal or something like that, but each person had to bring that equipment and each person had to eventually, at some point, purchase it.
And even on the small scale, right, even like a backpacking trip, you share some snacks, you get food afterwards, maybe, or even beforehand and even though it might not be $300 like a concert, I’m not a very avid concert goer, maybe go once every three months, perhaps, but like a backpacking trip with friends, it’s something that you could do every week, every other week, and it starts to add up very, very quickly, especially if you’re the person who fronts a lot of the payments oftentimes as well out of the goodness of your heart. It does add up. You hit that $300 threshold actually surprisingly quickly. The finances always do add up, and not only that, but the emotions behind it get built up as well, whether you have to front finance all the time or have to be requested or you’re the requester. I think that it’s really important that we do think about how much impact it does have on our personal lives, even though it’s very unspoken, I think, at the end of the day, because, again, finances are something we keep close to our chest, at least when it comes to personal finances but, unfortunately, there’s a very large bleed over from our personal finances into all the group activities and anything we do with anybody else outside of ourselves.
Yeah. And then one final thing I wanted to ask you about before we finish up is, as you were having these conversations, you had your idea, you were bringing it to people, did you receive any negative feedback or challenging feedback and how did you respond to that?
Yeah. Honestly, I think that when we were first starting this application, we were very starry eyed thinking that, “Oh yeah, we could solve this for everybody. Everyone has shared finances to some capacity and, therefore, this is an application they have to use in almost all situations.” Well, we’ve come to find out that that’s not even necessarily true. We found that certain clubs that we’ve talked to as well during up at the University of Washington, the more well-established ones, the ones that have been longstanding for a while that have actually incorporated as an entity or they’re part of some national organization that is already incorporated, they think that using these kind of tool sets, although albeit it could be helpful, just would be too much of a pain to migrate their current finances to reconcile. I mean, and, of course, that migration process is something that we’ve taken into a lot of consideration since then and we are hopefully going to solve at some point in the future but it really made us understand that there is still like a barrier of entry for us to be able to serve all groups, and I think instead of trying to focus on everybody, we just want to really help out the specific group that we see now who really has this pain. And that’s ultimately how we ended up shaping up the use case that is why we have Tribe Money available for today. But, for the most part, I think that it has been very positive reinforcement to what we’re trying to provide. Again, the negative reinforcement really was just that, yes, these systems are difficult, they’re complex, but we’ve been doing them for so long but it just is going to be a hassle for us to switch over and completely fair point as well. It’s something that for us as a business, it’s an opportunity for us to really work on helping people better on that end. But I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who said, “No, my finances are all just me. I don’t have any group finances whatsoever,” that’s never, at least, been something that’s come up, thankfully, so at least we know that, to a certain capacity, we are on the right track there.
Yeah. I mean, when people already have an established practice, there’s always that additional barrier because, as they say, in order for someone to change the pain of staying the same needs to exceed the pain of changing ––
Exactly.
–– and so people have to do all kinds of migration. I even think about anyone making decisions like, “Oh, I’m gonna move from AWS to Google Cloud, adopt a certain tax software,” or whatever. There’s always going to be some sort of migration, there’s always going to be some kind of a move, and people are always going to –– I mean, you’d rather not have to do that if you don’t have to, right?
No, yeah, exactly.
Joshua, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes. I wish you all the best in getting everything launched as well as just your piece in helping make people a little bit less lonely and a little bit less hesitant to kind of bring people together in a world that really, really desperately needs that.
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me today.
Definitely, and as always, I want to thank everybody out there listening, whether you’ve listened to all 150 episodes or whether this is the first one. Hope you got some great insights, hope you have some motivation to not only start your own business but maybe motivation to start whatever social circle that you want to start knowing that there is a tool coming your way that will help you manage the finances.
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About Joshua Lee
Co-founder and CEO of Tribe Money Pools, Joshua Lee is an innovative entrepreneur with a passion for simplifying financial collaboration. Before launching Tribe Money Pools, he gained valuable experience as a product manager at Zelle. Based in San Francisco, California, Joshua is a 2022 graduate of the University of Washington, Seattle, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics.
Learn more about Tribe Money Pools at https://www.tribe.money/.