Collaborative Solutions for Group Financial Management with Joshua Lee

Managing group finances can be tricky, but it’s all about clear communication and setting shared goals. Whether it’s splitting bills or budgeting for a project, transparency keeps things running smoothly. Have you ever had a financial disagreement that taught you something valuable? In this special episode, I’m joined by Joshua Lee, Co-founder and CEO of Tribe Money Pools. We talk about struggles of managing group finances, from tracking contributions to avoiding awkward money conversations. To deal with these, Joshua introduces his app, designed to streamline group financial management, making it easier to collaborate, stay organized, and maintain trust within the group. Tune in, and learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Collaborative Solutions for Group Financial Management with Joshua Lee Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today is an important day for Action’s Antidotes because it is my 150th episode, that’s kind of a milestone and, usually, I don’t make these episodes or any of these episodes about myself. Usually, it’s about the guest I’m interviewing, but this particular interview actually pertains to an area of my life personally because I’m the treasurer of an organization called Toastmasters, not the organization International, if you’re familiar, but of a local chapter, I’m a treasurer, and as a treasurer of the group, I oftentimes go to the bank, facilitate transactions with a bank account, because groups like Toastmasters or any other group oftentimes require having a budget, and a lot of people have clubs like that or perhaps you’re out there thinking about what kind of club or organization you want to start. Well, when I go to the bank, I never know what to say to the banker about whether it is a personal or a business account, because it kind of treads that line kind of between the two. It’s not a business, we’re not trying to make a profit or anything like that, we’re just trying to organize all the Toastmasters activities and expenses under this account so that we can fund our operations with our dues and what we owe the international organization and stuff like that. Given that a lot of our pursuits and a lot of us are going to find ourselves in a situation like this, I want to introduce to you today’s guest, Joshua Lee, who is the co-founder and CEO of Tribe Money Pools. --- Joshua, welcome to the program. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me today. Yeah, thank you for hopping on. And so I want to start a little bit about what Tribe Money Pools does about these situations where, okay, you’re not a business but you’re also not a personal account, you’re kind of operating something together in a group. Yeah, absolutely, and I think it would be a little helpful for me to provide a little context as to what Tribe Money is just very quickly. Tribe Money is a digital platform that helps groups share and manage their finances. What we’ve taken are the fragmented processes that occur in group financial management today, such as communication, facilitation, execution, and, most importantly, governance, which is all done with different applications or through different means and different channels. We’ve taken all that and consolidated it all into one platform so the actual financial management, the process of sharing and collecting finances with members of your group, whatever it might be, is much more streamlined, way easier and easier to track, and it’s much more secure than all traditional methods that really exist out there in the market today. So. Really pertaining to what you were talking about earlier, what we’ve brought to this space to really help groups such as yours is provide these quick, virtual, shared bank accounts that people can put together with the click of a few taps. Most importantly, set rules and access controls to ensure that people can monitor who can spend, what members are as part of the group, and, all in all, just really make a place that’s a lot easier, that has a shared responsibility for the finances that are collected and no longer have all those responsibilities and burdens put upon a single person, a treasurer such as yourself. And what we’re really trying to hope is that what this application, this shared bank account, you have all the transparency, all the ledgers you need to be able to easily track the finances, very easily redistribute funds, collect funds, as well as also have all the P2P capabilities you may need to be able to quickly move money from one person to another or even just outwardly for the expenses of your groups. In a lot of these clubs, these local clubs, the membership could vary anywhere from as low as 8 to 10 to as high as 25 to 30, depending on what kind of club, and sometimes the same club can vary up and down. People leave, people come in and stuff like that. So how would it work for a club like this where there’s going to be club president, there’s probably still going to be a club treasurer that kind of quality controls everything, but then as people leave and people come in, is it easy to kind of bring people on, take people off the account, and manage that whole variance in membership? Yeah, absolutely. So, the way that the application works is that Tribe Money provides the facilitation of the finances based on the rules that these groups have set. So, for some of these more smaller organizations where you want a more decentralized style of governance over the finances where every member has access, you’re more than welcome to use the template of rules we attach to the group accounts to set those settings so that you can have full membership governance, everybody has access to the accounts. Obviously, as a creator, you’ll be the first one to set the rules but, of course, if people don’t really jive with what you put together, they may choose to opt out from joining that community until the rules are set to a point in which they actually all can properly manage the finances together as opposed to something like a club where you have officers, you can have them be the responsible, quote-unquote, “administrators,” give them the privileges to actually move the finances. Of course, with still some controls within the officer and governing body, where then you can have other members who aren’t as interested in actually partaking in those conversations but just want an easy means to contribute finances or even get the ability to pull finances to just be able to join very simply. And with the transition process, because these are virtual shared bank accounts, it’s very, very easy for people to give permissions that you had over to another member and then just leave the account. Of course, you can request the finances out if you individually contributed that, but that’s really up to the groups to decide and we provide the space to actually be able to do all that very simply. And how did this business idea originate? What was your observation, your observation with your cofounders, that made you decide that this was going to be something that you’re willing to put your time and energy into? There was actually really a twofold reason why I originally started this business. So, for me, back when I was in my undergrad over at the University of Washington, I was the president and treasurer of a club as well during my time there, and managing the finances for 50, 60 members was such a painful process. I was the person who had to do all the bookkeeping, collect all the payments, communicate and facilitate all the different financial records. And it was just a very long and manual process that, just for me myself, I was just wondering why there wasn’t a solution that helped solve this. For the more informal clubs, they’re not incorporated, they can’t justify getting a business bank account, a joint bank account doesn’t really make sense, and I’m not going to pull my money together on GoFundMe, that doesn’t make sense, so everything has to go through me and it’s all through my name, and it’s hard to distinguish between personal finances sometimes as well as this more club-focused finances as well as everything sort of gets muddled. And so, for me, it’s incredibly important, and for the group as well, that I have very stringent practices in how I make sure all the finances are handled on behalf of the group. And so, for me, that was really just one of the biggest pain points I had during my time during undergrad, and talking with other treasures as well in different clubs, this was a very similar problem that many clubs had faced, and more on a personal aspect outside of that, I wanted a space where I could pool finances with my friends, my relationships, my roommates, just to make the whole financial experience a lot quicker and a lot more transparent as well. Having to bookkeep everything, it doesn’t matter as much for people when you trust them already, but now, when you start to step away from that inherent trust, it becomes much more important and really trying to provide those tool sets was for me why I started this journey about a year, year and a half ago. And then what about condo boards and HOAs and these types of groups? Are they one of your key target customers? I think there are people that we’re definitely looking into. I think the concept of shared financial management is very broad in scope but the requirements are a lot more specific for things like HOAs. These are more established, Incorporated organizations that we’re really –– and at least, initially, at launch, we are targeting more informal groups where, again, as I mentioned, a person has to step up as the volunteer treasurer, as the bank, just pretty much everything that has to do with finances for the group and they don’t really have a full system put in place. Small businesses perhaps that are just getting o