Hi — I’m Paul Menexas.

Monte started with a goal that’s easy to say and hard to plan: I want to retire my spouse so she can raise the family we’ve started.

Hold one goal like that up to the light and a dozen questions fall out of it. What kind of home can we actually afford on one income? What happens if I change jobs — or have to? How much buffer is enough before “someday” gets a date?

Like most people, I chased those answers across a patchwork of genuinely good tools: SmartAsset for the paycheck math, Zillow’s mortgage calculator, the net-worth view in my bank’s app, and the spreadsheet that tried to glue it all together. Each one was great at its single question. None of them could do the thing I actually needed — hold two or three possible futures side by side and show me what each one costs.

So I started building the missing piece — first as a scrappy prototype I hacked together with Claude. Somewhere between the third rewrite and the tenth what-if, it clicked: I’m not the only one standing at this kind of crossroads. Anyone weighing a home, a career change, a single income, or a growing family is trying to compare futures with tools built to compare numbers.

Monte is the cohesive version of everything I was juggling — your real paycheck, your real taxes, and every “what if” as a lens you can flip between. If you poke around you’ll find my questions baked right into the features: the per-paycheck breakdown, the rent-vs-buy and career-change lenses, and yes, “Retire a spouse” is a first-class scenario.

It’s just me building this — every forecast, slider, and pixel — which cuts both ways, so I lean into the good half: no growth hacks, no dark patterns, no selling your data. Monte is young and I’m only getting started. Early users shaped every corner of the planner — and when you write in, the person who reads it is the person who wrote the code.