About Us

Making Better Financial Decisions Together

BudgetRoots was born from a simple observation: too many people struggle with managing their money despite having decent incomes. The problem isn’t a lack of desire to improve – it’s that most financial advice is either overly complex or painfully generic.

Founded in 2019 by Dave Kellerman, a former financial advisor who grew frustrated watching clients make the same preventable mistakes, BudgetRoots began as a small consultancy in Minneapolis. Dave noticed that while his one-on-one clients thrived with personalized guidance, this approach couldn’t scale to help the millions of Americans caught in cycles of financial stress.

“I kept seeing smart, hardworking people making decisions that undermined their financial health,” Dave recalls. “Not because they were careless, but because nobody had ever shown them a better way that actually fit their real lives.”

Beyond Generic Advice

Most financial resources tell you what you “should” do – save 20% of your income, cut out coffee, never carry credit card debt. That’s like telling someone who wants to get healthy to “eat less and exercise more” without considering their specific circumstances, preferences, or challenges.

At BudgetRoots, we recognized early on that lasting financial improvement doesn’t come from generic formulas. It comes from building systems tailored to your actual life – your income patterns, your necessary expenses, your personal priorities, and yes, even your financial quirks and habits.

Our first digital tools launched in late 2020, focusing specifically on helping middle-income households establish emergency funds without sacrificing quality of life. The response exceeded our expectations, with users reporting not just improved savings, but dramatically reduced financial anxiety.

Our Approach Today

What sets BudgetRoots apart isn’t just our tools – it’s our philosophy about money management:

Reality-Based Planning: We start with how you actually spend, not how some expert thinks you should spend. Real change happens when you work with your existing patterns, not against them.

Progress Over Perfection: Small, consistent improvements outperform dramatic but unsustainable changes. Our systems focus on continuous small wins rather than budget perfection.

Values-Aligned Spending: We help you identify which expenses genuinely enhance your life and which don’t – because cutting costs isn’t about deprivation, it’s about redirecting resources toward what truly matters to you.

Simplified Without Being Simplistic: Financial management doesn’t need to be complicated to be effective. We strip away unnecessary complexity while maintaining the nuance needed for personalized guidance.

Our Growing Community

What began with a few hundred beta users has grown into a community of over 35,000 households across North America. Our user base spans from young professionals tackling student loans to pre-retirees maximizing their final working years, with particular strength among dual-income households juggling complex financial priorities.

Our Minneapolis headquarters has expanded to a team of 17 financial specialists, behavioral economists, and technology developers, complemented by remote team members in Austin, Portland, and Toronto. Despite our growth, we maintain our founding commitment to practical, personalized financial guidance that acknowledges the messy reality of real-world money management.

Looking Forward

As financial landscapes continue evolving, so do we. Recent developments include our specialized tools for variable-income households, partnerships with credit unions nationwide, and our upcoming mobile application that brings BudgetRoots’ personalized guidance to your pocket.

We believe financial stability shouldn’t be reserved for those with perfectly stable incomes or exceptional financial discipline. By meeting people where they are – with all their financial strengths, challenges, and quirks intact – we’re helping rewrite financial futures, one household at a time.

Whether you’re looking to build your first emergency fund, navigate a major life transition, or optimize already-solid finances, BudgetRoots provides the guidance, tools, and community support to make it happen.

Your financial journey is unique. Your financial tools should be too.