How I ended up with more than £27,000 of debt
During the Covid period I was made redundant and then became very unwell with chronic migraines. Work, health and everyday life all changed at once, and my finances became much harder to manage.
I have also always found it easy to say yes to the things my daughter wants when I can, and I know I can spend impulsively when I'm having a difficult time. Over time the debt grew to more than £27,000 and my outgoings were far beyond what I could realistically afford. I eventually dealt with it through a Debt Relief Order.
Debt found its way back in
I thought the DRO would be the end of my debt story. Later, after another low period and several holidays abroad, I found myself borrowing again. It was nowhere near the position I had been in before, but I did not want to watch it grow.
I spent a lot of time using ChatGPT to compare repayment approaches and work out how best to clear what I owed. Eventually I kept coming back to the same thought: there has to be a better way to see all of this.
I went looking for the app I wanted
I downloaded a lot of debt apps. Some wanted payment before I could really tell whether they were useful. Some were built around the US financial system. Others were packed with adverts or wanted more access to my financial life than I was comfortable giving them.
I wanted a UK-focused debt tracker where I could enter my own information, compare repayment strategies, see my progress and test what extra payments might do - without adverts and without connecting my bank.
So I built Clear Balance
Clear Balance is the app I could not find. The core app is free to use, your debt information is stored locally and encrypted at rest rather than uploaded to a Clear Balance account, and there are no adverts or behavioural analytics tracking how you use the app. Premium has a 7-day free trial because I want people to be able to use the extra planning tools before deciding whether they are worth paying for.
The aim has stayed the same from the beginning: make debt easier to understand, make progress easier to see and give people useful tools without asking them to hand over more data than necessary.
It was my first Flutter app
Before Clear Balance, I already had programming experience and was fluent in Python, but I had never built a mobile app with Flutter. I was studying Cybersecurity at university, including penetration testing, so privacy and security were already things I thought about seriously.
Building Clear Balance meant learning a new development stack as I went - Dart, Flutter, mobile app structure, debugging across iOS and Android, subscriptions, app store releases, the website and all the unexpected problems that come with turning an idea into a real product.
Studying penetration testing has also shaped how I think about Clear Balance. An app dealing with debt information should collect as little as it reasonably can, avoid unnecessary tracking and be clear about the services it does use.
Clear Balance has been built while juggling a pretty hectic life. I'm genuinely proud of what it has become, but the best part is knowing it has already helped people. Seeing something I built make a real difference to somebody else means a huge amount to me.
If you'd like to support my work
Clear Balance is independently built. If the app has helped you and you'd like to support the time that goes into developing it, you can buy me a coffee.