Too Rich for Budgeting, Too Poor for Private Banking: The Missing Middle of Wealth Management

Today I was looking at my Revolut brokerage account, which was blocked with a few hundred bucks stuck in it. My outcast origin, tied to a sanctioned land, backfired again. It could have been a pair of amazingly beautiful shoes.... but I tried to become financially responsible for my future — and again and again I failed. The same happened with some crypto I bought at the high, the same with SaaS stocks when everything was inflated and then crashed.

Although to be fair, in 2018, I wanted to buy NVIDIA, but eToro KYC didn't pull through the final process — my passport was not good enough to trade.

Looking at my other investments, I sighed: dresses, shoes and bags cannot be my best investments to build a retirement plan. So I decided to start talking to people and learning from my peers. I was just curious how people invest and generate long-term savings.

Some had financial advisors. Some had private bankers. Some had crypto trauma. Some had passive portfolios built with the discipline of a German engineer. But almost all of them had one thing in common: they trusted Excel more than the wealth management industry. Almost everyone I interviewed had a spreadsheet — the one they were bashfully proud of.

Some people, even highly financially literate ones, barely touch their personal investments. Others spend hours and hours working on their spreadsheets, updating formulas, tracking performance, building scripts to consolidate all the allocations.

The approaches were different. Although, the verdict on private bankers and private wealth managers was almost unilateral: in people's minds, they had been sentenced to death.

I bet if you measured people's heart rate and stress levels while they were talking about bankers, both would go through the roof.

And honestly, banks do not help themselves. They are built in a way that makes you feel small. Tall institutional buildings in business centres, security badges, polished marble, silent elevators, meeting rooms furnished to make you feel like a miserable little man under investigation. Some European banks take it to the extreme. Swiss banks, for example, will even charge you to keep your money. A very elegant form of humiliation.

Then comes KYC: the beauty contest nobody asked for. You worked your ass off, made your money, and still you need to prove to the bank's compliance team that you are a good citizen. The whole thing feels unfair to the point of absurdity. Like financial adulthood comes with a moral police interview.

People don't trust institutions with their money. Obscure fees don't make sense. Private bankers don't feel personal. And yet the whole wealth management industry exists and prospers.

So the question is: can personal wealth management become accessible to people who are doing well and could do even better, but are not yet truly rich?

They have good salaries, stock options, RSUs, sometimes several brokerages, sometimes a mortgage, sometimes a tax advisor, always a "darling spreadsheet", and usually no clear answer to the question: "Am I actually doing well?"

They do invest in indices and ETFs, following the best practices of passive investing. And yet the desire to invest in individual companies remains tempting. People believe in vision, leadership teams, company stories. They want to participate in the upside of the world they understand.

But then comes decision paralysis: how do you build an optimized strategy? How much concentration is too much concentration? Where is the ceiling for your personal risk before confidence turns into gambling?

And why are all the fees still based on % AUM? It looks like a status quo bankers are comfortable with and clients don't dare to challenge — except for a few painful bits in basis points. As if the industry collectively agreed that if something sounds boring enough, nobody will fight it.

The biggest personal hell, though, is taxes.

It starts with admin and ends with cash-flow planning. People need to understand their cash positions, tax liabilities, and how much money should be reserved for taxes related to different types of equity. RSUs, options, capital gains, tax residency, tax-loss harvesting, liquidity events... At some point, personal finance stops sounding like freedom and starts sounding like an unpaid compliance job.

I spent another hour talking to Revolut's brokerage support team, asking them to release my money, determined to get my cash back and bet it all on the new Valentino Rockstuds and never ever attempt to compound again.

All in vain...

And maybe this is exactly the point.

Why is it so complicated? Why does a person who understands markets, startups, equity compensation, and financial logic still end up feeling slightly lost when looking at her own money? Can it be easier to invest and understand my concentration, opportunities, and risks?

I don't want anyone to make decisions for me. But I do want a framework. I want tooling. I want something that enables me to make better decisions with structure, calm, and preferably some fun.

Then I tried several tools, but I quit at the onboarding stage. They couldn't connect my accounts in a few clicks. Spreadsheet imports from eToro (that crypto…) were full of errors. One tool took me an hour to onboard and then failed at the final step, which felt almost poetic in its cruelty.

Most tools are either too geeky, designed for active investors and traders, or too simplistic, designed for budget planning but useless for long-term wealth management.

There is a big gap between "track your coffee spending" and "understand your equity, taxes, liquidity, concentration risk, and life choices."

And this is where many people seem to live.

They are not looking for someone in a fancy business tower to make decisions for them. They are not necessarily looking for a robo-advisor with a cheerful interface and the analytical depth of a vending machine. They want to understand their financial life. They want to know what is happening, what is possible, what is risky, what is stupid, and what is worth doing.

I want investing to feel simple, engaging, welcoming, and well-structured — an enablement layer that helps me actually put my money to work.

I also recollected taking a test in one of my EMBA classes. People were raising their hands to show under what circumstances they would move their cash into a yielding account. Some raised their hands at 3%. Most at 5–6%. And then there was a small group of students who would only move their money at least 9%.

"So, it looks like all of you are from emerging markets, exposed to high inflation and traumatized by unstable monetary policies," — the professor concluded.

Indeed. These were people who knew what it meant to be exposed to money depreciation in Zambia, Belarus, Argentina.

The country where you were born. The bank that froze your transfer. The success you felt when you got your first yield in a bank account. The vacation you paid for from it. The fear you felt while reading another piece of disturbing news. The dreams and plans you started building for your family with your potential upside.

Maybe this is why people hold on to their spreadsheets. A spreadsheet does not judge you. It does not ask you to prove you are a good citizen. It does not charge you 1% AUM to explain your own money back to you. It is ugly, manual, sometimes broken, but it gives you one precious thing: control.

But is there anything beyond the spreadsheet that can solve the pain and make personal finance easy for those who work hard, earn well, but are not rich yet?

So here I am, stepping into the summer with the reading list of Graham, Bogle, Munger, wanting to talk to my peers' wealth management behaviours and a growing desire to understand and fix it.

Let's see what I learn.