From the first formula in a Google Sheet to the site you are reading right now, The Ninja Budget is me.
My name is Laurent, and Web Wild West is the name my wife and I publish our tools under.
How The Ninja Budget started
In 2022, we closed our company. And at that point, the household finances got tight. Very tight.
It is a subject we talk about very little in Europe. In the United States, an entrepreneur who has failed will readily tell you what happened, what they learned from it, and it can even become an asset later on. Here, that culture is far less common.
I am not going to reopen that debate. Let us just say that at the time, we needed to know exactly where we stood financially, month after month, without being able to afford much guesswork.
Several accounts, payments falling due on different dates, income that had become irregular… I needed something simple, but above all reliable. I tried budgeting apps on mobile and on desktop. They were very good at telling me what I had spent the month before. Except that was not really my question.
I was not trying to find out where last month's money had gone. I wanted to know how we were going to get through the next one. Same story with the spreadsheet templates I downloaded: almost all of them started from the same assumption. A salary paid every month, one main account, a year starting in January and fairly predictable income. Nothing like my situation.
Since I am fairly comfortable with digital tools and spreadsheets, I ended up building my own.
The weekly quarter of an hour that changed everything
Fairly quickly, I realised the file was not the only thing helping me. What really made the difference was also sitting down in front of it once a week and looking at my accounts.
I know, that is not quite the promise you hear everywhere today. Most budgeting apps explain that all you have to do is connect your bank: transactions are imported automatically, spending is categorised automatically and, in theory, you have nothing left to do.
It is convenient… But precisely because there is nothing left to do, you sometimes end up not really looking any more. And after a few weeks, the app just sits there… without you opening it very often.
The Ninja Budget takes the opposite approach. Let us be clear from the outset: allow about twenty-five minutes to set it up, then a quarter of an hour a week to enter and check your transactions. I would rather tell you now than sell you the idea of a magic tool that does everything for you.
That quarter of an hour is not a chore I failed to design away. It is precisely the moment when you really look at your accounts, when you understand what is happening and when you take back control of your budget.
My personal template became The Ninja Budget
At the start, there was no commercial plan behind any of this. It was simply my file, on my Drive, with our accounts, our spending, our due dates and our forecasts.
Then I started giving copies to people around me. To family, to friends, then to a few people who were interested. And something struck me. Those who really started using it gradually managed to put money aside.
The file itself did not really deserve the credit, and even less to me. They had simply started looking at their numbers regularly. Seeing what they could actually spend, what was coming the following month and where they had room. Information they had never really had in front of them until then.
It was watching them use the template that I started thinking it might be useful to others. I let the idea mature for a while. Then I went for it.
Because technology has changed
Building a good template is one thing. Offering it in several countries is another. You need a site in several languages, visuals, documentation, articles, social media, customer support, invoicing… and all the infrastructure that goes with it.
Only a few years ago, putting all that together on your own would have been almost impossible. You would have needed an agency for the site, a designer for the visual identity, translators, someone to produce the content, someone else to publish it…
In other words: a lot of people and a lot of money. And money was exactly what I did not have. What has changed since is not really my budget. It is the tools we have access to.
I built the site myself. The mascot you come across here and there was born here too. I set up the systems that let the blog content be adapted and published in several languages. And the whole infrastructure runs on a server that costs less than a lot of phone plans.
That does not mean everything happens automatically. Quite the opposite. You have to learn, test, start over, automate what can be automated and accept that it takes a lot of time. But in 2026, one person who knows how to use these technologies can do things that would have taken a whole team a few years earlier. And above all, that person can build a serious product, keep improving it and offer it to users in several countries without vast resources.
The Ninja Budget was born
So The Ninja Budget grew out of a very personal need: understanding what was going to happen in my accounts before it happened. The template I had built for us has become a tool that others now use to do exactly the same thing.
Anticipate - Understand - Decide
And spending fifteen minutes once a week on something we too often tend to avoid: looking our budget in the face.
That, in the end, is where The Ninja Budget comes from.
