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I spent 20+ years in enterprise finance software - selling predictive, forward-looking…
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Michael Schmahl posted thisGas is up 34% in a year. Your paycheck isn't. So what gets cut? The government's September inflation report puts gasoline at 34.2% above a year ago and prices overall at 3.7% higher. Average hourly pay rose 3.0%. The average worker is buying about 0.7% less than a year ago, on the same hours. If gas cost you $200 a month last year, it's about $268 now. If your income hasn't moved, the extra $68 has to come from somewhere. Something loses. Most people cut what they can see. The coffee. The streaming service. Whatever makes them feel guilty. A better first move is to look for leaks. A leak is money that leaves without a decision behind it: a subscription you forgot you had, a bill that crept up, a fee you never chose. Companies call it spend leakage, and they hunt for it. Households rarely do. Almost everyone guesses low. In a 2022 survey of 1,000 U.S. adults, people's quick guess at their monthly subscription spending averaged $86. Itemized, it came to $219. Closing a leak costs you nothing you were using. It's the only cut that doesn't change how you live. That's what aiSmartBudget is built to show. It connects your checking, savings and credit card accounts, builds an annual budget from what you actually spend, and shows where the money goes across every category, so the leaks are easier to spot. Unpopular opinion: skip the coffee. Audit the subscriptions first. Agree or disagree? If someone you know is feeling it at the pump, send them this. #FounderStory #PersonalFinance #Inflation #CashFlow #aiSmartBudget
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Michael Schmahl posted thisOne in nine Buy Now, Pay Later users paid their bank an overdraft or NSF fee on a 0% loan. The price wasn't the problem. The payment date was. In the Federal Reserve's 2025 survey of household finances, 11% of Buy Now, Pay Later users said a payment had triggered an overdraft or insufficient-funds fee from their bank. That's on a loan that usually costs nothing in interest. Here's how it happens. A pay-in-four plan splits a purchase into four payments: one at checkout, then one every two weeks. The day you click "buy" sets all four dates. One major provider says its due dates can't be changed. Another lets you push one payment back 14 days, once. Take a household paid every other Friday, with about $60 in checking two days before payday. A $400 purchase on payday puts every $100 payment on a payday. The same purchase two days earlier puts every payment on the thinnest day of the cycle, four times in a row. Same store, same price, same zero interest. Up to $140 in overdraft fees. And the fee is often the smaller problem. That same day, the rent, a card autopay, a utility bill or the week's groceries may need the money that just left. No CFO signs a vendor's payment schedule without checking it against the cash forecast. At checkout, a consumer accepts four fixed payment dates in one click, with no forecast at all. A monthly budget can't help, because it can tell you $100 fits in December but not whether it fits on December 23. That's the gap aiSmartBudget was built to fill. Add the plan as a scenario before you buy, and the Register shows each payment against your real paydays and bills, day by day. Try a different purchase day and compare. Unpopular opinion: Buy Now, Pay Later is a better product than the credit card. Zero interest. A hard end date. No minimum-payment trap that turns a $400 gift into a two-year balance. Its only real flaw is the calendar, and that one is fixable. Agree or disagree? If someone in your life is about to do their holiday shopping on pay-in-four, send them this. #BuyNowPayLater #CashFlow #Personal Finance #aiSmartBudget #FounderStory
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Michael Schmahl posted thisTax refunds rose 11% in 2026, to an average of $3,275. A bigger refund is not a bonus. A bigger refund means you over-withheld taxes, resulting in smaller paychecks. The reason is specific. A new tax law cut taxes for 2025, but the law passed mid-year and the IRS left the 2025 withholding tables unchanged. Employers kept withholding at the old rates for twelve months, and the difference came back in the spring. A refund is your own pay, returned up to 15 months after you earned it, with zero interest. In a TaxSlayer survey of 2,000 adults, 59% used their refund to pay monthly bills. Only 18% spent any of it on something nonessential. The money showed up months after the bills were due. A $3,275 refund is more than 4% of the median household's take-home pay. No CFO would let a vendor hold 4% of annual revenue for over a year at 0% interest. Households lend the IRS that share every year, because the W-4 they filled out on day one never gets a second look. The fix is a 25-minute IRS estimator and a new W-4. Aim for a small refund, not zero. Send part of the difference to a savings account you control, so the money is available the day the car breaks down. Keep the rest in checking to improve overall cash flow and protect yourself against potential NSF fees. Then comes the harder question: what does a bigger paycheck change, and in which weeks? A monthly budget can't answer, because a monthly budget has no days in it. aiSmartBudget is built for that question. Add the new take-home pay as a scenario, switch it on, and the Register shows your checking balance day by day, with the new pay and without it. The same modeling works for a raise or a new monthly bill, tested alone or together, before you commit to either. Which would you model first? A) A change in take-home pay B) A new monthly bill, like a car payment C) A raise and a new bill together D) Something else. Tell me in the comments. If someone on your team counts on a refund every spring, send them this. #FounderStory #PersonalFinance #Taxes #CashFlow #aiSmartBudget
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Michael Schmahl posted thisNo CFO would buy software that lets any manager move budget between departments without sign-off. Why is that OK in personal finance? At home, you're the one signing off. But sign-off in a business isn't about permission. It forces someone to look at the trade-off before the money moves. Most budget apps let you move money between categories in a tap, with nothing showing what the move does to next week, and nothing recording what's owed back. Organizations take this seriously. A nonprofit running several programs out of one bank account needs a board resolution and a written loan agreement to borrow between them. It's called fund accounting, and it's the grown-up version of the old cash envelope system. Household budget apps copied the categories and dropped the controls. Two more things went missing with them. The calendar. A monthly budget can balance and still leave you below zero. Rent clears on the 1st, the paycheck lands on the 5th, and for four days the account is negative. The plan was right for the month. It was wrong for the week. The seasons. A $1,080 annual heating bill might run $200 in January and $30 in July. Set aside the $90 monthly average and the plan works in summer but breaks in winter. Most budget apps show the summer surplus as spare cash and don't forecast the winter shortfall. Every dollar has a job. The question most budgets never answer is whether the dollar will be there in time. That's the gap aiSmartBudget is built to close. The Register runs your balance forward weeks and months ahead, so you see the trade-off before you make it. When a dip is coming, it can suggest borrowing from savings, sized to the gap, with a payback date. And when a surprise lands on a credit card, it helps you plan the payoff. Should household budget software make you see the trade-off before you move money? A) Yes. Show me next week before I decide. B) No. Speed matters more than a warning. C) Show me, but never block me. If your kids or grandkids budget in an app, send them this. #PersonalFinance #CashFlow #aiSmartBudget #FounderStory
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Michael Schmahl posted thisNearly two-thirds of big banks dropped NSF fees. The vendor you were paying can still charge you a fee. Customer backlash, regulator pressure and fintech competition pushed banks to drop NSF fees. The bank's half of a bounced payment got fixed. The vendor's half didn't. Here's what both halves cost. Thursday night: $200 in checking, $255 of bills posting, payday Friday. Road one: the bank pays the bills anyway and charges an overdraft fee. Two bills overdraw the account. At $35 each, the overdraft fees total $70 and deepen the shortfall to $125 before payday. Road two: the bank sends back the two bills that don't fit. Many big banks charge no NSF fee, but each vendor can add a returned-payment fee or a late fee. At $25 each, the vendor fees total $50, with $65 of bills unpaid. Same $55 gap. Road one costs $70 in bank fees. Road two costs $50 in vendor fees. The bank chooses the road, and you learn which road afterward. (Example fees.) aiSmartBudget's Register checks every bill against every payday and shows a negative balance days, even weeks, before the day arrives. Days of warning leave time to move a due date, use a grace period, or shift money from savings before any fee lands. I suspect most people learn how bills and fees interact from a fee, not a class. In 2020, 8 states required a personal finance course. By 2024, 26 did. Research is split on whether classroom lessons last. When does financial education work best? A) In school, years before the bills arrive B) At a big change, like a first job or lease C) The moment a bill is about to cause a problem Send this post to someone in their 20s or 30s setting up first autopays. #PersonalFinance #CashFlow #aiSmartBudget #FounderStory
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Michael Schmahl posted thisThe iPhone 18 Pro ships Friday. Financed, it comes out to $50 a month, exactly the size of bill nobody checks before it costs them. At 0% APR over 24 months, that's $49.96 a month. Small enough to feel harmless. Almost everyone can afford fifty dollars a month, looked at that way. The real question is different: can your calendar absorb it on the specific day it lands? I ran the numbers on a household that looks completely fine. Income covers expenses with $387 to spare every month. But a month isn't one number. It's thirty individual days, and cash doesn't arrive evenly. The day before the second paycheck lands, this household's actual cash balance runs down to $17. Add one new $50 payment on the wrong day. A seventeen dollar positive balance goes negative, potentially triggering an NSF penalty fee, typically $10 to $35. On a monthly budget, that $50 bill just trims a $387 surplus down to $337. Still fine, on paper. On the daily cash flow, one day went negative. That resulting bank penalty fee was never part of the phone decision. Every company I sold finance software to ran a rolling cash flow forecast. They added sophisticated modeling tools to understand the cash flow impact of capital expenditure decisions. Unfortunately, personal finance software has never offered a lighter weight solution to help households model the cash flow impact of their own smaller capital expenditures, whether a new cell phone or a car purchase. This gap is exactly why aiSmartBudget exists. Genuinely curious why we accept a rigorous financial process at work, and a completely different level of rigor, often close to zero, at home? #CashFlow #PersonalFinance #aiSmartBudget #FounderStory
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Michael Schmahl posted this$140,000 salary. 3% raise. $350 more a month, before taxes. Why anchoring bias on the gross number creates real financial trouble. Most people budget the $350 that got said out loud in the room. Their downstream financial challenge is that only $206 a month actually lands in their checking account. Psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman proved this back in 1974. Give someone an initial number and they'll only adjust a minor amount away from it. Taxes and a 401(k) contribution are exactly the adjustment that gets skipped, because nobody's running that math during a performance review. So $350 becomes the anchor. Trade up to a nicer car for $250 more a month, add $65 in higher insurance, and $315 looks completely reasonable against $350. Against the real $206, it's short $109 every month, for as long as that payment runs. The net raise didn't create budget room for the upgrade. It ultimately consumed cash that was supposed to pay for other items in the budget. Those items either get canceled, or alternatively, moved onto a credit card, which creates a whole financial challenge of its own. That gap, between the communicated gross salary increase and the net deposit to your checking account, is why aiSmartBudget exists. Before you ratchet up your financial commitments, let aiSmartBudget's Model Income Change feature run your new larger paycheck against your new larger bills, to ensure that decision is sustainable. Link in the comments. #FounderStory #PersonalFinance #aiSmartBudget #BehavioralEconomics #CashFlow
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Michael Schmahl posted thisThe average raise this past year was 3.2%. Inflation ran 3.4%. Why do we confuse small losses masquerading as small wins? Most people don't feel behind after a raise. They feel ahead. So they do the one thing that makes it worse: they spend like they're ahead too, and keep digging. I ran the real math this week: three income levels, real 2026 tax brackets, real inflation data. After taxes, FICA, and a 401(k) contribution that grows right along with the new salary, every single scenario came out behind once you adjust for inflation. Not a smaller raise. A real pay cut. The number that matters isn't the gross amount on the pay bump. It's the net amount that actually clears your account, checked against your increasing, inflation-fueled cost of living. Nobody hands you that second calculation. You get a percentage on an offer letter, and the rest is assumed. That gap, between the number people celebrate and the number that's actually theirs, is exactly why aiSmartBudget exists. Zoom out and it gets sharper. S&P 500 profits are on pace to grow about 24% this year. Even the 493 companies outside the AI mega-caps are still growing profits around 16%. The average raise was 3.2%. If a company's profits are growing five to seven times faster than the paychecks fueling the growth, is that a viable long-term strategy? Or maybe a bet that nobody's really counting? What are your thoughts? #PersonalFinance #Inflation #aiSmartBudget #FounderStory
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Michael Schmahl posted thisHire a CFO to review your household finances. Which report do they ask for first, the budget or the cash flow? It isn't the budget. They want to know whether you clear next week, next month, next quarter. If the answer is no, the budget is moot. A budget measures solvency. Does income cover expenses over a period. Cash flow measures liquidity. Is the money in the account on the day the charge lands. Both can end you. Illiquidity gets there first. Public companies settled this a long time ago. For most of the twentieth century they provided an income statement, a balance sheet, and not much else. In 1987 the Financial Accounting Standards Board issued Statement No. 95 and made a statement of cash flows mandatory. One reason the board gave: investors and creditors needed to assess a company's ability to meet its obligations. Neither statement showed the movement of actual cash. So the rules changed. Households are still living like it's pre-1987. The household budget is like the business income statement. Rarely do you find a statement of cash flows, let alone a running 13-week cash flow forecast. CFPB survey data puts it plainly: 78% of people who overdraft never saw the charge coming. For many households, the monthly budget showed solvency. Where was the indicator of liquidity? That gap is what aiSmartBudget is built to close. Every finance team I sold to would have found it unthinkable to run a quarter without a forward cash view. Almost no household has one. I have a theory about why. What's yours? #CashFlow #PersonalFinance #aiSmartBudget #FounderStory
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2mo
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Lee Doble Thanks Lee! Appreciate all your support of our journey since the beginning.
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Michael Schmahl liked thisMichael Schmahl liked thisI've spent 20+ years selling software. I never imagined I'd be the one building it. Well, I'm not, but my little AI engine is. But it's still pretty wild to even say. For most of my career, I've worked with incredibly talented developers, engineers, and product teams who built the software I was responsible for selling. My job was to understand the customer's problem, demonstrate the solution, and ultimately convince someone it was worth paying for. And along the way, I had a LOT of opinions about how software should work. Why doesn't it do this? Why is this so complicated? Why can't we just add that feature? Well... now I can. Over the last few months, I've started building my own applications using AI. -A custom sales commission and deal tracker. -A family dashboard that brings our calendars, schedules, and daily lives together. -An app for my daughter's little nail business. -Even a personal AI system designed to organize and make sense of the information I collect throughout my day. And here's what I've realized. I didn't need to become a software developer to start building software. I needed to understand the problems I wanted to solve. And after 20 years of selling technology, listening to customers, understanding business processes, and figuring out what makes a product valuable... Turns out, I've been preparing for this for a long time. I think a lot of people look at AI and wonder what it's going to do to their careers. I'm starting to look at it a little differently. What is AI going to allow me to do that I was never able to do before? That's a much more exciting question.
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Michael Schmahl liked thisMichael Schmahl liked thisI thought I was ready to expand the beta for Our.os. Then I actually tried to do it. Last week, my developers told me there was nothing stopping us from expanding the beta. Technically, they were right. The app was built. We had a few people testing it. And it was time to start getting it into more hands. Except when I actually sat down to do that, I realized how much I hadn't fully thought through. What should someone know before they start using it? How do I welcome them? How do they report problems? How do I collect feedback without constantly bothering them? What am I actually trying to learn from these people? Then someone asked about privacy and data usage, and I discovered that our policies needed updating too. Suddenly, something I thought was ready to go turned into another week of work. The funny thing is, none of this was particularly surprising once I started doing it. I'd just been so focused on getting the product ready that I hadn't fully considered what it would take to run the experiment. I've experienced versions of this throughout my engineering career. You can plan something in considerable detail, but actually doing it has a way of revealing things you couldn't see from the planning stage. I think that's where I am with Our.os right now. The software is one part of the experiment. Everything required to put it in people's hands and learn from them is another. And every part of it will require iteration.
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Michael Schmahl liked thisMichael Schmahl liked thisI sold my first AI company to a Nasdaq-listed company in a $60M deal. If I had to start again today, there are 5 things I’d do differently. 1. Be extremely careful who you start with. Skills matter. But values, trust and honesty matter even more. Ideally, I’d start with someone I’ve known for years. 2. Build something in a boring industry. I wouldn’t chase the latest AI trend. I’d look for industries still running on Excel, email and manual processes. That’s where I think some of the biggest AI opportunities are. 3. Raise as little money as possible. Across two companies, I raised more than $15M over five rounds. Some of that money helped us grow. Some of it just created more pressure and complexity. If I started again, I’d try to get as far as possible without VC. Ideally to $1M ARR. 4. Charge more from the beginning. We spent too long trying to make our product affordable for everyone. The customers who paid the most were often the easiest to work with. I’d rather have 20 customers who really value the product than 200 who constantly question the price. 5. Take my health much more seriously. After selling my company, I burned out. Looking back, there were plenty of warning signs I ignored. Today, I’d protect my weekends, sleep properly, exercise and be much more selective with my time. At 25, I was willing to sacrifice almost everything to make the company successful. At 34, I’d still want to build something ambitious. But not at the expense of everything else in my life. What would you do differently if you started again today? I write about this and more in my weekly newsletter: https://lnkd.in/dmEYTw6B
Experience & Education
Licenses & Certifications
Volunteer Experience
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Treasurer
Danville Congregational Church
- 2 years
Corporate Officer tasked with financial oversight of $1.6M non-profit organization
• Fund Accounting: Oversee accounting staff for timely and accurate bookkeeping
• Financial Analysis: Prepare and communicate key financial metrics to Board of Directors
• Annual Budgeting: Led leadership through annual budgeting process balancing cost of operational objectives with sources of funding, including: annual stewardship, plate, building rental, and preschool operational profits
• Risk…Corporate Officer tasked with financial oversight of $1.6M non-profit organization
• Fund Accounting: Oversee accounting staff for timely and accurate bookkeeping
• Financial Analysis: Prepare and communicate key financial metrics to Board of Directors
• Annual Budgeting: Led leadership through annual budgeting process balancing cost of operational objectives with sources of funding, including: annual stewardship, plate, building rental, and preschool operational profits
• Risk Management: Conducted insurance coverage review and implemented policy upgrades for superior protection
• Capital Expenditures: Spearheaded strategic investment in 30kW Solar System to mitigate surging electricity costs
• Debt Restructuring: Negotiated retirement of higher interest rate private bonds through low interest rate commercial loan
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Capital Campaign Chair
Danville Congregational Church
- 2 years
Developed and led three-part $5.9M capital fund-raising campaign to fund new pre-school construction project:
• $1.4M through multi-year gifting campaign
• $3.4M through commercial debt financing (primary construction loan)
• $1.1M through private debt financing with subordinated bond offering -
Head Coach, Mustang Fury 99G, Competitive Premier Travel Team
Mustang Soccer League
- 7 years
Children
Utilizing competitive sports as a platform to develop outstanding young adults
• .629 Winning record (129W, 70L, 29T)
• 8 Tournament and League Championships
• Emphasis on team work, communication, work ethic, leadership, overcoming setbacks, sportsmanship, recognition, and friendship
• Positive Coaching Alliance “Double Goal Coach” certification
• CYSA Coaching Licenses: F, E, and E/D
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