In 2025, I was "presented" the opportunity to retire from the federal government early.
My wife and I had literally just purchased a house not 4 months earlier. Could we afford for me to retire? Did we have enough saved up? Would my pension be enough?
We had so many questions and my current budget spreadsheet wasn't able to nuance those answers. I needed something better. Something that could allow me to look at different scenarios. I needed to be able to start/stop income streams, increase mortgage payments, toggle on/off certain expenses, plan for car replacements and upgrades. We needed to be able to see YEARS in advance.
I got the spreadsheet working, but it was fragile. Any change to the mortgage payment, and you had to remember to undo it. It did the job, though. I was able to get our answers and retire early.
And as I contemplated going back to work a year later for a few more years, I found myself revisiting my old spreadsheet. But as I revisited, I relearned how fragile it was and how easy it was to corrupt the numbers.
Luckily, I'm a software engineer and don't have to live with such limitations.
Before I go on to point out all the things wrong with my spreadsheet, I need to acknowledge that I was able to accomplish amortization against multiple income and expense streams using it.
And that is a cool tool, however fragile it might be.
I loved being able to predict and project numbers into the future, but I hated the numbers changing without really knowing why. This caused me to waste time by making note of the date, then hunting for whichever field was impacting that value.
What would be better is to select the field and see the details. I wanted to be able to see all the numbers impacting that particular cell. I needed confidence in the numbers, and an Excel spreadsheet doesn't provide that.
There was no logic for the start and end dates of income and expenses. You could reverse numbers, bleed one start date into another, and do a plethora of other things that quietly messed up the projection. I'm human and I do make mistakes. But when it comes to finances and budgeting for the future, making sure the numbers are solid is the priority.
And comparing scenarios meant physically modifying a cell and remembering to revert it later. It's very fragile. Inadvertently leave it in, and I'm unknowingly looking at bad numbers (ask me how I know).
All income is not created equal, and so I had multiple income streams set up in my spreadsheet. Five different tables to be specific. A table for me (I was on a GS schedule with the government so I had scheduled step increases), one for my wife, one for Social Security, investments, and side incomes.
And each one of them had a start date and stop date which became part of every formula. A single month's income cell ended up looking something like =SUMIFS(Income!$D:$D, Income!$B:$B, "<="&$A2, Income!$C:$C, ">="&$A2) — five tables deep.
You might have the mind of a developer if you can follow the logic of a SUMIF!
This part was hard to get right in a spreadsheet. I needed to see everything month by month. I needed to be able to see YEARS into the future.
Formulas had to be crafted to prevent drift by locking references to absolute cells ($D$2) so a fill-down doesn't shift them, while reaching across tabs (Income!$D$2).
And a DATEDIF to get someone's age at any given date for every family member you want to track isn't exactly friendly either.
I needed to pull my mortgage amortization data from my Mortgage tab and retirement amortization data from my retirement tab, all the while doing an XLOOKUP on the specific date in the specific row.
There wasn't one. I couldn't look at a macro view unless I built another view. With the page being as fragile as it was... easy skip.
Let me first admit, there's probably a way to use a spreadsheet to toggle different scenarios on/off. But the time it would have taken me to get it right would have been counterproductive for the answer I needed to obtain. A nice-to-have, but skip.
Not a year after I retired, I realized I miscalculated. It wasn't a number or a cell miscalculation. It was a rule. The Rule of 55. I thought that I would be able to access my retirement account penalty-free when I turned 57 and a half. The fine print was that you had to separate from federal service during or after the year you turn 55 (57 being my FERS minimum retirement age). I separated before the year I turned 55.
This meant not being able to access my funds for another 2 years. A little longer than I projected. So, I revisited the spreadsheet once again and realized I wasn't so set for retirement. So I started looking for work.
During the job search, one particular job wanted a portfolio of the UI work that I do. I decided to use the spreadsheet to model the UI for a website.
At first, this was just for the portfolio. But as I got into the design more, I recognized this had some potential.
Every shortcoming in that spreadsheet became a line on the feature list. Numbers you can trust. Click any cell and see exactly what's inside it! Real start and end dates that can't bleed into each other. Scenarios you toggle on and off instead of overwriting cells and hoping you remember to change them back. A month-by-month grid that flips to a year view with one click. The things I skipped because the spreadsheet made them too expensive to build became the whole point.
So why the name? Because the entire plan chases one moment: the month your passive income covers your expenses. HoneyPlan marks it right in the projection with a little pot of honey: 🍯 the Sweet Spot. Everything else in the app (the grid, the scenarios, the accounts) exists to answer two questions: when do I reach it, and what moves it closer?
I built HoneyPlan because I had to make the biggest financial decision of my life, twice, using a spreadsheet I didn't fully trust. Life decisions are hard. And financial decisions that can impact more than just you (your family) are even harder.
So that's why HoneyPlan exists. To give you answers. It's an easy, friendlier way to answer your financial questions. And I'm making it available to you so you don't have to be a financial guru or a software engineer to do it! My goal was to make this as friendly as possible to use.
The biggest engineering feat: Scenarios that allow you to toggle anything on/off and instantly see the outcome for your finances. They deliver real, viewable answers.
You'll be happy to know, the spreadsheet is fully retired now. It earned it!
The full demo runs in your browser — no account, no email, no credit card.
Open the Demo