And that is how guito began

guito grew from an idea that had stayed with me without my noticing: everyone should be able to see their money in one place and have the information they need to make their own decisions.

In fact, the idea began in the study of the house I grew up in, in Aveiro, a small city in the centre-north of Portugal. At home, money was written down. In one of the drawers of the solid-wood desk, my father proudly hid a small notebook with a black cover and no title. Every line carefully kept the family's spending and income. Each time I opened it, it was fatter: between the last page and the back cover, the receipts piled up, month after month.

Then came the crisis. In 2008, when I was 13, the subprime crisis broke out in the United States and soon reached Portugal. The little notebook was no longer enough for my father. An engineer, as he was and as I would become, he moved to Excel spreadsheets with big formulas and charts, crossing data upon data to reach the conclusion he had reached at the very start: “the times ahead will not be easy”.

My father stepped up the policing of lights left on around the house, down to the millisecond. My mother swapped our usual yoghurts for store brands, which were starting to fill supermarket shelves. And I, in my innocent imagination, thought the troika, the three lenders behind Portugal's 2011 bailout (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF), to whom the state owed rivers of money, was a giant three-headed beast, just like the dog in the first Harry Potter film.

Years later, in 2014, when one of Portugal's biggest banks collapsed and took the savings of customers it had sold commercial paper to as if it were as safe as a deposit, I realised I had to understand what I was buying. We all do. Many of those people invested because they trusted their account manager, who assured them it was the safest product there was. And this in a country where, even today, only 11% of people have a high level of financial literacy, the lowest in the European Union. Imagine back then.

When I started working, I did what I had seen my father do and built my own Excel file. Every month I added data and spent hours thinking about how to structure and show it better. A lot of manual work, not very intuitive, no automation. I knew I needed something different.

guito takes inspiration from that old black notebook, and I am one of its users. I created it to help anyone understand their finances, see where they stand today and make better decisions tomorrow.

guito’s commitment is to give you clear information and leave the decision to you. It does not sell financial products or take advantage of people who know less about money. It receives no commissions, is not a credit intermediary, does not sell your data and does not show adverts.

I believe information is power. The power to prosper and to achieve, for you, for your family and for society as a whole.

guito gives you the tools and the facts. The choice is yours.