One of the things I love most about the Lunch Money community is seeing how people adapt our platform to fit their financial lives. Budgets are useful, but life rarely plays out in tidy monthly blocks. A bill lands early, a dishwasher breaks, a debt payoff opportunity appears, or a savings goal starts competing with next month’s cash.
That’s exactly the problem Dave Varon set out to solve with Meal Ticket, an open-source planning tool that uses Lunch Money data to project your weekly cash flow. Designed for a full desktop experience, Meal Ticket helps answer the question many of us have asked in one form or another: “If I do this now, what happens to my cash six months from now?”
I recently chatted with Dave about his background, his Lunch Money journey, and how Meal Ticket came to life.
This month’s spotlight is on Dave Varon, creator of Meal Ticket, from Norwood, Massachusetts
1) Hi Dave, please tell us a bit about yourself.
I’m Dave Varon, 57, from Norwood, Massachusetts, about 12 miles southwest of Boston.
As a kid, I wanted to learn how to sing really badly. As an adult, I realized I already could. So I dropped out of music school, moved to the West Coast for a year, and bounced back to Boston after the Loma Prieta quake of ’89, the one that canceled the baseball World Series.
I finished college with a film production degree, quickly realized that freelancing wasn’t my thing, and I landed a job in IT at our local PBS affiliate, WGBH. During my 10 years there, I learned to code, made a truly terrible 35mm short film, and spent about a year performing stand-up comedy.
In 2006, I moved into finance. I got laid off in 2009, very trendy at the time, and eventually landed in pharma. I’ve worked as some variety of software engineer in pharma and biotech ever since.
I’m also married and divorced once each, and have three daughters, who are 26, 25, and 16, exactly as planned.
2) What initially drew you to Lunch Money?
Many years ago, I used GnuCash but abandoned it after my account syncing broke, and I lost the motivation to reconcile. Like Jen describes in her own origin story, I eventually ended up using a giant Google Sheets workbook.
At some point, I started using Mint to sync all my accounts, and the unofficial Mint API to pull all that data into my workbook. When Mint shut down, I needed a system that was easy to learn and use, with automated data collection and flexible metadata and annotation features.
The fact that Lunch Money was founded by an individual, not backed by a huge company or VC, appealed to me.
3) What is Meal Ticket?
Meal Ticket is a planning tool that uses Lunch Money to help you visualize cash flow projections. It provides weekly projections of income, expenses, and account balance, helping you plan ahead and make informed financial decisions.
You can also add manual adjustments for one-time expenses, income changes, or other financial events that aren’t captured in your recurring transactions or budgets. You can try it directly in your browser here:
4) How did Meal Ticket get started?
The idea for Meal Ticket came out of a difficult period in my life. During the last few years of my marriage and transition to divorce, I was playing credit card whack-a-mole with balance transfer promotions, borrowing from family members, even borrowing from my HELOC to cover other payments.
To survive financially, I built a system that showed me how cash flow changes affected my account balances. It could tell me things like, “If I pay off this card with next week’s paycheck, will I run out of cash in July or August?”
Thankfully, over the past decade, my financial situation has improved significantly. I have less debt, fewer expenses, and more stability. But I still think about money the same way.
Today, that looks less like starving and more like saving, or making an early loan payment, but I still want to know at a glance, “How will XYZ affect my cash flow in six months?”
Meal Ticket helps me figure that out.
5) What are some scenarios where Meal Ticket might be useful?
Consider a big expense like replacing a broken dishwasher. Can you afford to pay cash? If you put it on credit, how will it affect your weekly cash position until it’s paid off?
What about saving for a vacation next year? Will you have enough cash for the holidays if you set aside $100 or $200 per week for a trip over 12 months? Will you have to put it on credit instead? If so, what will the next six months after the trip look like?
How about paying an extra $50 to your student loans every month to save on interest? Will you run out of money?
While important, accounting apps only track your historical spending. Budgeting apps can help you regulate your cash flow and analyze data, but they’re not always granular enough.
Meal Ticket is designed to acknowledge the irregularities: the realities of day-to-day life that can throw your budget process off track.
6) How does Meal Ticket use Lunch Money data?
Meal Ticket uses the Lunch Money API to retrieve balances, recurring transactions, and other budget data.
It then builds a weekly planning view that includes projected income and expenses, account balances, manual adjustments, and other calculations such as budgeted net, balance, float minimum, and minimum values.
7) Users enter their Lunch Money API key to use Meal Ticket. Where does that key get stored?
The API key is stored in the user’s browser’s local storage. It is used to authenticate against the Lunch Money API when retrieving balance, recurring transaction, and budget data.
Meal Ticket does not collect or store your personal financial information. The only analytics it monitors are anonymous aggregate page views and visitor counts.
Meal Ticket is also fully open source on GitHub at varontron/meal-ticket, so users can inspect how their data is used or host it themselves if they prefer.
Thanks, Dave!
One of the things I love about Meal Ticket is the care Dave put into helping prospective users understand how to use the app before they even connect their Lunch Money account.
The info and documentation links make it easy to see how the planner works and how it might fit into your own cash flow questions. By hosting a version of Meal Ticket, Dave has made it easy for anyone to try it. And since it’s open source, you can inspect the code or host your own copy if you prefer. Great job!
I hope anyone considering their next big expense, debt payment, or savings goal will give Meal Ticket a try and share their feedback with Dave.
If you have any feedback or questions, jump into the conversation on Discord or reach out to Dave by email at [email protected]
Toronto Meetup 🍁
Our second official Lunch Money Toronto meetup is this Friday, June 19, and there are only a few spots left!
Whether you’ve been using Lunch Money for years or just started your free trial, we’d love to see you there! Join us for a relaxed social hour with food, giveaways, and a short presentation from the team.
Not in Toronto, but want us to visit your city? Fill out this form.
Follow Jen’s journey 👋
Our founder, Jen, shares behind-the-scenes content on everything from building Lunch Money to the bootstrapped founder lifestyle. If that’s your thing, come say hi or just follow along on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram.
In a recent post, Jen shared how she ended up in Fukuoka, Japan and how that became the birthplace of Lunch Money!
Call for community spotlight nominations 🗳️
Have a story you’d like to share with the community? It doesn’t have to involve building an app. We’d also love to hear how you use Lunch Money or how it’s made an impact in your life.
If you have a story you’d like to share, please fill out this quick form:
Latest from YouTube! 📺
Most couples think they’re aligned on money, until financial stress starts showing up in ways they didn’t expect. 🚩
In this recent YouTube video, Jacob breaks down five common money problems couples run into over time, why they’re often missed early on, and how they quietly create tension in relationships. If you’re in a relationship (or plan to be), it’s worth a watch.
From the blog! 📝
People often struggle with the choice between saving and investing, and the truth is, you probably need both.
But what’s the difference between saving and investing, and how do you know when to focus on each one? In this blog post, discover the benefits and drawbacks of both and find out how to strike the right balance between the two! ⚖️
Refer a Friend, Earn Credit 💸️
Love using Lunch Money? Share it with a friend to grant them a 60-day trial, and earn 10% of their subscription cost as account credit every time they pay!
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