DIY FinanceAbout us
An honest institution for everyday money.
DIY Finance is here to advance Financial Wellbeing — through education that respects you, measurement that tells you the truth, and guidance that stays honest even when honesty is unglamorous. This page is who we are, why we exist, and how we work.
Why we exist
For the kitchen table.
Money decisions don’t get made in an office. They get made at home — after dinner, between shifts, with real life happening all around them.
Everyday households carry one of the hardest jobs there is: quiet money decision after quiet money decision, made mostly alone, with the numbers scattered across apps, statements, and the back of an envelope. The people doing that work aren’t careless. They’ve just never been handed a system.
That’s the gap DIY Finance exists to close. Not with another wall of tips, and not with another product that has something to sell you first — with a financial support system, not just another app. A framework for your whole picture. An honest measure of where you stand. A Guide who explains things in plain sentences. One clear next step at a time.
We build it on one belief: everyday people are fully capable of running their own financial lives with dignity — when someone finally hands them the framework, an honest number, and a steady guide. That belief is the company. Everything below is how we act on it.
The method
How the system works.
Understand where you stand, measure it honestly, organize what matters, act on it, and review how it went.
Framework
The foundations, capabilities, and resources that support important life decisions.
Score
Track change across seven factors of your financial life — without reducing your life to a number.
Journey
Organize your priorities at your own pace — not a fixed order you must follow.
Actions
Turn understanding into progress through specific steps you choose.
Review
Look back, adjust, and keep going. The cycle never ends.
The founder
Michael Hallinan.
A Buffalo kid, a Marine, a builder — now pointed at the American kitchen table.
Michael Hallinan is a native of Buffalo, New York — a city that knows what a paycheck means, what a layoff means, and what it takes to keep a household steady when neither is certain. He grew up around the kind of people DIY Finance is built for: people who work hard, look after their own, and rarely get a straight answer about money.
He answered the call to serve. A United States Marine and a combat veteran of the Iraq War, he deployed with the 11th and 31st Marine Expeditionary Units and earned the Combat Action Ribbon. Over more than two decades in uniform he rose to Colonel, served as Deputy Commander of the Marine Corps Cyberspace Warfare Group, and led the Pentagon’s first cyber strategy — responsible for billions in annual spending — before mobilizing to U.S. Cyber Command.
In civilian life he built financial technology for real people: he co-founded Deserve, a fintech platform acquired by Intuit, and held senior technology and security roles at Robinhood, AAA, and Booz Allen Hamilton. Georgetown, NYU, and National Defense University trained him. Buffalo raised him.
Then came the research. Studying financial wellbeing for U.S. service members, he saw the web of instability up close: good people — Marines, nurses, drivers, parents — carrying real bills with no honest guide, and no straight path through. The highest-stakes system with the least support is the one at the kitchen table. So he founded Mission Finance, Inc., the company that makes DIY Finance, and pointed everything he had learned at the American household.
Inspire, inform, and guide — never decide for you.
The whole idea
DIY Finance in 100 words.
Know your numbers. All seven — credit, income, expenses, debt, savings, investments, home equity. Write down why you want to change; the reasons will carry you. Set goals you can measure. Erase high-interest debt first. Track every hard-earned dollar and live on less than you make. Pay yourself first. Invest monthly, early, and capture the employer match. Let home equity force savings over time. Review honestly, adjust, and keep moving forward — it’s a journey, not a race. Be quick to ask for help, and quicker to offer it. Then take Your Next Best Step. That’s the whole system. That’s DIY Finance.
The entity & contact
The company, plainly.
DIY Finance is made by Mission Finance, Inc. d/b/a DIY Finance — a company bound to a covenant of honesty.
The covenant is simple. No invented statistics. No manufactured urgency. No promises about outcomes we can’t stand over. When we don’t know something yet, we say so — plainly — and publish the answer once we have it. The full commitments, on your data, your money, and the words on this site, live in the Trust Center.
And if you’d like to talk to a human: write to hello@diyfinance.app. Mail there is read by people, and answered by people.
DIY Finance is a financial coaching tool, not an investment advisor. Orb’s guidance is educational. For tax, investment, or legal advice, consult a licensed professional.