Ramy Serageldin, Co-founder and CEO of Honeyfi, and his partners are building a platform where couples can share financial information, communicate openly, and track progress towards savings goals.
Serageldin explains it simply, “Honeyfi at its core is an app to help couples manage their finances together.” He realized firsthand that a platform to collaborate on and communicate family finances did not exist.
“My wife and I were [living] in New York with two kids, and found out a third was on the way.” The apartment that once felt big no longer seemed so spacious. The Serageldins started to examine where they wanted to live and where they could afford to live.
They thought about the tradeoffs of moving out of New York City and commuting into town for work versus staying in the city and paying for private school for their children. “We started to have a conversation around it, and we realized that we hadn’t ever actually fully merged our finances.” They looked for tools to help them with this but came up empty handed.
He and his wife ended up moving their family to Charlotte recently with this issue in mind. Now he and his two partners are in the process of building HoneyFi as the solution.
Despite being fairly early into the venture, which is currently in the alpha stage, the Honeyfi team’s plan is to provide the solution in three phases. “The first phase is helping people understand their spending capacity and understanding where their spending goes” – similar to a personal financial management tool.
This is more than just a day-to-day budgeting app. It’s also about communication and transparency.
The Honeyfi team noticed that typically one person in the relationship takes on the role of the ‘home CFO’. “We’re understanding how we can help the home-CFO communicate to the non-CFO, and encourage them to share everything they should be sharing to have an open and honest conversation.”
The second and third phases are to help couples save towards financial goals – a first house, new car, family vacation, etc. – and to connect them with partners that will facilitate those purchases. “We are in the process of identifying a bank partnership to help not only set up goals but to be able to pull money from your checking accounts into your Honeyfi savings accounts.”
“We really want to be that end-to-end budgeting and communication platform, savings tool, and financial tool purchase.”
This isn’t only for married couples. It’s useful in each part of the relationship life-stage. “We are really trying to help couples bridge the communications gap they often have especially early on in the relationship where they may not be ready or comfortable to merge all of their finances.”
It’s Honeyfi’s goal to help customers through the relationship life-stages, starting with those who have just moved in together and are in a serious relationship – “they are starting the conversation around bill sharing and understanding debt.”
The vision is that they’ve built a platform that helps customers really take the stress out of managing their finances. Honeyfi wants to provide simplicity even as financial decisions become more complex through engagement, marriage, and having kids – 529 accounts, life insurance, etc.
It’s the fact that the Honeyfi team works on something every day that is going to help people is the thing that drives them through their challenges.
“For any entrepreneur, the passion has to be there for what you’re building, because otherwise, you will burn out. Anyone can ride the highs, but riding the lows is the hardest part of being an entrepreneur.” During the lows, passion is the only thing that kicks you back up.
For the aspiring entrepreneur, Serageldin has one piece of advice. “There’s no time like the present to take the risk.”
He’s worked for the University of North Carolina, Ernst and Young, Bank of America, and for startups. In his opinion, jobs at startups are the best. “The ability to know that what you’re working on is going to make a difference to the company and to the people’s lives that you’re building the product for is very difficult to get at a bigger corporation.”
Honeyfi is looking for Beta testers very soon and would love to grow the Honeyfi community here in Charlotte. If people are interested in signing up – it’s free.
