Arjun Kataria

Arjun Kataria founded Owdyn in Auckland in March 2026, after trying every budgeting app he could find and discovering that none of them answered the only question he actually had: how much can I spend right now, without touching money already committed to rent, bills and savings?

That question became Safe-to-Spend, and building it meant going deep on the unglamorous parts of New Zealand personal finance — how each bank formats a CSV export, how Afterpay and Laybuy instalment schedules land against a fortnightly pay cycle, how a credit card balance behaves differently from a bank balance in a net-worth calculation, and what actually happens to a budget when payday and the power bill fall in the wrong order.

He writes here about the things that came out of that work: what the numbers mean, where the common advice breaks down for New Zealand conditions, and how to read your own money without a finance background.