What Lamp & Ledger does

Lamp & Ledger connects to your bank accounts, sorts what you spend, and turns your debts into a payoff plan with a date on it. It is a planning tool — not a bank, not a lender, and not a financial adviser.

Behind it sits an old conviction: what you have isn’t finally yours — it’s entrusted to you. A ledger is attention written down, and attention is where faithfulness starts.

What it can do

• Read your transactions and balances from banks you connect.
• Sort spending into categories you control, and remember your choices as rules.
• Build a monthly budget from what you actually spent rather than a blank page.
• Hold every card and loan in one table with the rates and minimums your bank reports.
• Project a debt-free date, and let you try scenarios against it.

What it cannot do

It cannot move money. There is no transfer, no payment and no bill pay anywhere in it — we ask your bank only for transactions and balances. It also never sees your bank password: that goes straight to Plaid, our connection provider, and never reaches us.

Your banks update on their own, a few times a day — your bank tells us when there is new activity. You can still press Sync whenever you want to check right now, and your dashboard says so when a connection has gone quiet rather than showing you stale numbers. See Keeping your data current.

Where to go next

Connect your first bank is the first real step. If you would rather not connect anything yet, you can add accounts and debts by hand and still get a date.

Whatever the numbers turn out to be, they are not a verdict — they are a starting point. Debt quietly narrows what you are free to do and to give; walking out of it, at whatever pace you can manage, opens that back up. That is the whole point of the date.