For the past two weeks, I’ve been treated to advance access to the Topia financial independence planning app. Could this be the end of wealth-tracking spreadsheets?
Check it out – Topia has been featured in The Times newspaper! Their story is behind a paywall. Posers. For real journalism and superior quality content, read on.
Full disclosure up front
For this review, I was given free and unlimited access to the iPhone app, Topia. I’ve received no financial benefit from them other than advanced access, and we agreed that I needed to be free to write an honest review.
What is the Topia app and why should we care?
Topia is a mobile app that uses freaky open banking technology to help you plot and track your own financial independence campaign.
As I’m using my work phone but don’t want work to connect the dots between me and this blog, I’m having to upload some photos taken on another device, rather than using screenshots. Stand by for more expert photography blurry pictures.
The app is still in its early stages and at the moment is only available on iPhone. I had to sneakily trial this on my company phone as I – like many other financial independence campaigners – use a budget Android, but it’s early days for the app yet.
Yes, I did nag Topia for an Android version. My understanding is that it was easier for them to build the app for Apple first, make sure it works, then port it across to Android later.
Unlike Monzo, which tracks your day-to-day budget spending, Topia tracks your investment accounts and uses this to work out how far you are on your campaign, giving you the warm fuzzy feeling of progress as your investment portfolio grows.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll appreciate a bit of data porn as this shows you how many days of freedom your current portfolio could buy you.
Oh, yes, one more very awesome thing: it includes a “tinker” section, so that you can play with the planning assumptions and see how it affects your plan. More on that later!
Setting up and getting going with the Topia app
Setting up the Topia app takes a bit of time. There’s a cool quiz at the start which I thought sold financial independence pretty well, and starts you off with the premise that if you just saved a bit more per month you could retire “X” years earlier… It’s a solid first touch.
I really liked this choice in the opening quiz. This reminds me of that bit in The Matrix. You know: do you take the red pill or the blue pill?
You have the option then to fill in various categories of accounts and assets so that Topia can start giving you access to its features. There’s the option to either enter details in manually or to grant the Topia app access to your open banking data and connect your accounts that way.
Connecting accounts does take time and there’s no way around connecting each account individually. Perseverance here is rewarded later.
Using open banking with the Topia app
I initially entered things in manually, as I don’t really want my work to notice that I’m plugged in to FIRE. Sadly, the tinker section only really works if you connect through open banking. I decided to risk it for the benefit of this review and now hope that IT don’t notice.
The open banking connection is pretty decent. I managed to connect up to Trading 212 without difficulty. I did have problems connecting to Monzo, but I suspect that’s Monzo’s software which added challenges here.
Like I said earlier, perseverance here was rewarded, but there’s no way round apart from adding assets one at a time…
Asset choices
Topia has a surprising amount of assets that it can deal with. I had no issues with telling it about my partial public service pension at the same time as my Vanguard SIPP.
One of the things I really liked was that you could put your mortgage down as a debt, then later when you entered details of a property you could connect the mortgage to that property. There’s also a feature to hide property equity from your net worth and FIRE calculations.
There’s a decent “other” box, too. Geeks like me who diversify into gold or crypto or fine wines or whatever can manually add their assets in here pretty easily.
OK, I haven’t mentioned fine wines or whisky on the blog before and I currently don’t have either, but maybe in a few years I’ll diversify out. I have considered both!
We’re not psychic, but…
At the bottom of the home page is a tab to factor in planned life events. This can include house purchases, pay rises, having kids and so on.
I particularly liked the disclaimer at the top of the section: “we’re not psychics…”. Shame. Lottery winnings would speed this whole thing up.
Once this is all set up, the app will track growth in your accounts and tells you how close you are to FIRE. There’s a timeline prediction (I got 5yrs and 11 months) and a progress bar, and Topia tells you what it thinks your FIRE number is.
Now, the more advanced financial independence veterans among you will read that and start asking difficult questions, such as “yeah, but what assumptions is it making?”. Don’t worry, Topia has you covered and this leads nicely to my favourite bit of the app.
The tinker section
If you’re already used to doing your own modelling, you know what your FI number is and you know how to plan your campaign. Fair enough, so far this app has been a glorified loading bar for your life.
The Tinker section changes things and I thought that this is where the real value of the app comes in.
Here, you can actually define what FIRE looks like for you. You can tell the app how much is enough, you can play with your savings rates to see the impact of possible changes you could make, you can even add in “well, I plan to work part-time, I reckon that’s £200 a month I can bring in from cat sitting…”
Or whatever. Doesn’t have to be cat sitting. You do you.
I had a play around with this for a good hour while I was supposed to be doing something productive. Honestly, it’s mesmerising!
There’s only one criticism that I have with the Tinker section, which is that it told me my assets could only be expected to grow by 3.5% annually. I presumed that this included inflation, as the app generally explains things in “today’s money”, but I couldn’t see what rate that inflation was set at nor change the growth rate.
Hey ho.
I could however play with the withdrawal rate, which is useful if your assets are supplemented by a defined benefit income later in life. Maths gets hard when you factor that in.
Other features
I’d actually met Logan Leckie, the founder of Topia, online when he was canvassing for design input. Back then, the feeling I got was that the Topia app will look to integrate financial education. If that goes ahead, the app really could be a one-stop shop.
That’s not without it’s issues, of course. If you read this blog, chances are that you probably read a few others, have read some of the books out there and watched a few YouTube channels. Although the basics – spend less than you earn, invest like it was going out of fashion – tend to be similar, there are marked differences of opinion. For example, I quite enjoy the odd side hustle, but the popular opinion on the r/FIREUK subreddit is that these are a waste of time.
What could be quite useful would be a curated reading list and maybe links to a few decent videos. I suppose I would say that, though…
Who is Topia for?
Topia is clearly aimed at newer financial independence campaigners, but it’s still something to consider if you’re already we’ll set for success. The style is intuitive and friendly, while hiding some remarkably advanced tools that will keep more grizzled veterans of financial independence campaigning happy for hours.
A cheeky Q&A with Logan Leckie
Logan is the mastermind behind the Topia app. One of my blackmail terms for doing this review was that I would get to ask him a bunch of questions.
Here goes!
Hi Logan! What made you design Topia?
Hey! It was a combination of 3 things really:
- Being incredibly passionate about the FIRE movement and the impact pursuing/ achieving financial independence can have on someone’s life
- Seeing lots of pain points in the FIRE journey which were (in my opinion) preventing a significant number of people from understanding financial independence or getting started on the journey (e.g. relatively complex calculations involved, beastly Excel spreadsheets needed to track/ monitor your progress, information overload from all the content/ forums out there)
- I’ve always had a bit of an entrepreneurial spark in me from a young age, so the prospect of starting up an app within a community I was so passionate about was incredibly exciting and motivating.
You must have trialled this app out yourself – how many years do you have until FIRE is an option for you?
Ah, good question! Before I started Topia, I was around 8 years out from reaching FIRE. However, taking the plunge to start Topia meant I took a significant salary cut and had to put up some of my own savings/ investments to kickstart the app in the early days, which more or less put my FIRE journey on hold.
How long have you been on your own financial independence campaign?
3 years
So can we expect an Android version in 2022?
We’re shooting to have Android up and running by April/May next year!
What are you planning as the price point/ revenue generation for the final version?
Topia is completely free to use. It didn’t make sense to us to charge for a tool designed to help people achieve financial independence!
However, in the long term, Topia will have to generate some sort of revenue to be sustainable. We are in the process of partnering with a one of the largest asset managers in the world to produce the first-ever ‘FIRE fund’, which will be a globally diversified, ESG, low-cost ETF; meaning that users wouldn’t have to leave the app and go onto other platforms (e.g. AJ Bell, Vanguard, Hargreaves Lansdowne etc) to start their investing journey. When you invest there is always a fund fee and an account or platform fee, so if people invested in the fund directly through the app then Topia would receive the platform/ account fee, as opposed to the other investment platforms.
We’re still in the early stages of mapping this out but the key thing is that we want Topia to be a free tool.
I really enjoyed the Tinker feature on the Topia app. What other features are you expecting to add in the next year or so?
We’ll shortly be introducing a savings rate optimisation feature. Through open banking, Topia can monitor your spending and pinpoint certain areas on which you could cut down your expenditure on. We then always contextualise this around how cutting down specific expenditures could impact your FI journey. For example, if you buy two fewer coffees next week, you could reach financial independence “X” months sooner. We have some screenshots of this feature already.
We’re looking to introduce an “allocation” feature that will help ensure you are allocating your savings in the most optimal way. For example, Topia would nudge you if you weren’t maxing out your employer’s pension contributions, or if you were paying higher-than-average fees for any of your investments. We’ll also look to wrap in an ISA bridge feature here. This will help you anticipate how big an ISA bridge you would need to ensure you can bridge the gap between retiring early and accessing your pension.
You have built yourself a company, effectively as a tech entrepreneur, to follow this vision. What exciting things has 2021 brought you and what plans does the company have for 2022?
2021 has been an epic year filled with lots of ups and downs.
My biggest takeaway from 2021 has been how awesome the financial independence community is. Before Topia, I was more of a “blog and podcast” sort of financial independence person, meaning that I wasn’t one to interact too much on the forums and Facebook groups. However, throughout 2021 I got much more immersed in the community side of financial independence and was blown away by how passionate and active the financial independence community is.
A good example is that in the early days of Topia, I needed tonnes of feedback to ensure the app was doing its job and adding value. I would put up a post in the communities asking for some feedback and get an overwhelming number of people offering their time to help out with feedback. Which is how me and you first met!
Pursuing and achieving FIRE can massively change someone’s life. I think our world is slowly starting to wake up and realise the importance of time and having the power to choose how you spend your time. People no longer want to spend 45 years of their lives sitting behind a desk and commuting for 1-2 hours a day. Flexibility, choice and freedom to choose how we spend our time is becoming the most treasured currency in our society.
I think the pandemic has fast-tracked this paradigm shift. We all got a glimpse of what it was like having more time and flexibility: no commuting, no sat aimlessly in the office watching the clock tick, more morning walks and afternoons spent pursuing hobbies or with family.
So, what I’m excited for in 2022 is for Topia to turbocharge this shift in how people view their timeline of life. Our Mission is to make financial independence accessible to millions more people, who have either never heard of it or struggle to make a start, and help empower them to unlock financial independence and choose how they spend their time.
People no longer want to spend 45 years of their lives sitting behind a desk and commuting for 1-2 hours a day. Flexibility, choice and freedom to choose how we spend our time is becoming the most treasured currency in our society.
Logan Leckie, 2021.
If he becomes famous for this quote, I call dibs on selling the posters.
Topia recently took on Grant Sabatier as an advisor. Grant famously made his money by having what are effectively a ton of side hustles and income streams. Have you tried any side hustles? If so, what were they and how did they go?
I sure have!
As I said earlier, I’ve always had that entrepreneurial spark so side hustles were always a big interest for me. So before I delve into my side hustles, a fun fact about Logan: I play the bagpipes.
One side hustle is that I play the bagpipes at events most weekends (weddings, corporates, funerals, parties etc) and I also teach students online.
I also dabbled in Amazon drop shipping, but once Topia started gaining momentum I packed this up and focused all my attention on Topia.
Awesome stuff! It sounds like there’s more to come for the Topia app and company, and cheapskates financially prudent mobile phone owners will soon be able to get their grubby mitts on the Topia app in early-mid 2022. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for the Android release!
Final thoughts
I quite liked the Topia app and the philosophy behind it. I particularly liked the Tinker function, and it’s something that I think will be on my phone when it hits Android in the near future.
For now, it’s coming off the work phone. I really don’t want to get caught with financial independence stuff on there. However, this app has the potential to really change the game for financial independence campaign planning. It might be a bit late for 2022, but maybe Topia will help me with my 2023 FIRE campaign plan?
If you’d like to download Topia, you can see it on the Apple app store or Google play store.
