Someone Emailed to Say My Fee Numbers Were Wrong. He Was Right.

On Tuesday morning a user emailed me. Far more politely than I'm about to put it, he said: the fund fees in your app are off. Not wildly. Just off enough to notice.

I read it twice hoping I'd misunderstood, then went and checked. He was right.

The annual fee MFFT had stored for one of the most widely held all-world ETFs in Europe was 0.19%. The real figure that day was 0.14%. An emerging-markets fund from the same provider: my number said 0.22%, and the truth there was also 0.14%. On a €100,000 portfolio that gap is about €50 a year. Small money. Completely unacceptable anyway, because the entire point of a tool like this is that you shouldn't have to go and check it yourself.

The cause was boring and entirely mine. I had a hand-maintained list of fund fees. Hand-maintained lists go stale and nobody notices. Mine had no expiry date and no memory of where any number came from. Nothing ever went back to check it.

That's fixed as of Wednesday. Every fee now carries a receipt: the source it came from, and the date it was last confirmed. A nightly job re-pulls 3,660 European fund fees. The longest you should ever wait now is about a day. A fund house cuts its fee, and roughly 28 hours later you're looking at the new number, rather than the old one forever.

I didn't expect the next part. I ran the fix through a second, deliberately adversarial review before shipping it, and that review found nine more problems, five of them real. My favourite is that a US fund and a European fund can share a ticker symbol, and my matching code was perfectly happy to hand one fund's fee to the other. Nobody outside would ever have caught that. It's also why I now distrust any number in this app that can't tell me where it came from.

Every one of those percentages now comes from a dated source instead of my memory.

The rest of the week

You can sign in with Google now. One less password invented at 11pm and forgotten by Thursday.

There's a new card on the dashboard that shows where your net worth actually stands against people your age in your country. It also tells you which level that puts you on, and what the next one needs. I built it because "am I doing okay?" is the question everyone actually has, and the honest answer is usually more encouraging than people expect.

Anyone tracking a Czech pension or investment-linked life policy has a far better chance of finding it now. That list went from 186 funds to 324. Polish IKE and IKZE accounts, the local tax-advantaged wrappers, got their ING TFI funds added. And if you hold a bond, you can finally correct its coupon rate instead of deleting the thing and typing it in again.

The phone got a proper pass too. Pages that scrolled sideways for no reason, a planning page that tore while you scrolled: gone.

The country selector matters more than I expected. The same net worth lands very differently depending on where you live.

The biggest piece of work won't show up in any changelog. The FIRE projection no longer draws you one confident line into 2050. It runs a spread of possible futures instead. Your real milestones sit along the timeline. You can see what your retirement "paycheck" would look like month to month. And at the end it tells you in plain words how those futures actually turned out. The old single line was comforting and slightly dishonest. The new one is neither.

What I'm on next

Connecting your bank directly, so transactions arrive on their own and you stop exporting statements at the end of every month. It's the oldest open item on my board and the one I most want finished.

After that, a module for the part almost nobody builds for. Actually living off the money. Every tool obsesses over getting to the number. Very few help you spend it down without lying awake.

If you've been here since the first post in this corner of the blog, you'll remember I said I under-tell my own story. Turns out the fastest cure is a user emailing you about a number you got wrong.

Next week's post should have fewer confessions. No promises.