How HelmLife Works

A five-minute tour. Come back anytime from your profile menu.

What Is This App?

HelmLife is a handful of small, focused helpers in one app — for your money, your plans, your health and your focus. Use all of them, or just the ones you need.

Your Tabs at the Bottom

Each helper is a tab in the pill bar at the bottom of every page. Here's what each one is for:

My Budget — Where does my money go?Log your own spending and income, then see it all in simple charts.
Group Expenses — Who owes who?Split rent, trips and dinners with others. We do the math, no awkward chats.
Bucket List — What do we want to do?Places to go, things to try — a shared to-do list for plans and dreams.
Health — How am I eating and moving?Snap a meal to estimate calories, and log workouts to see what you burned.
Reset — Can I put my phone down?A quick timer that nudges you off the scroll and back to what matters.
Business Card — How do people reach me?A digital business card — work and personal — with a QR code, a share link and your résumé.

Tip: Only see the tabs you picked when you signed up? That's on purpose. Open your profile circle (top-right) → List components to turn tabs on or off and drag them into the order you like.

My Budget

Create a Personal List

On the My Budget tab, + Create opens a list only you can see. Pick what the list tracks — Cash flow (money going in and out) or Investing Plan — and a currency. Use separate lists for e.g. Travel 2026, Side hustle, or My Roth IRA.

Log Entries (Expenses & Income)

In a Cash flow list, + New opens two tabs. Bundle logs several expenses and income at once; each item has a paid checkbox, so a grocery list becomes a tick-off-as-you-shop tally. Receipt reads a photo of a receipt — store, address, date, every item, tax and total — lets you fix anything it misread, and keeps the photo with the expense.

Investing Plan Lists Are Special

When you create one, pick 🌱 Beginner (a simple form: how much, which account, what you bought, what it's for) or 📊 Advanced (tickers, % splits, hold horizon, conviction). It's per plan, and you can switch anytime from the plan's page. Every plan can have a goal (we show how much to put in each month), a monthly streak with milestones, and a What could this become? growth preview. One Investing Plan can track all your accounts. Each time you tap + New Investing Plan to log money you put in, you pick which account it went into — Individual, Roth IRA, Traditional 401(k) or Roth 401(k). Not sure? Tap What's the difference? for a plain-English guide with pros, cons and examples. The list then shows how much went into each account. Each contribution asks for one total amount and splits it across tickers by percentage — the app calculates the per-ticker dollar amount and ensures the rows sum exactly. Each contribution can carry a confidence emoji, hold horizon, and a short “why” — the journaling angle helps future-you remember the thinking.

See Your Totals

The list index shows running totals per list plus a week / month / year rollup card at the top. Investing-plan contributions are excluded from the Spent / Gained / Net rollup on purpose — they're a separate category, not money going out or coming in.

Tip: The account guide opens in a new tab, so your half-filled contribution isn't lost.

Group Expenses

Create a List

Tap + Create on the Group Expenses tab. Name it something friendly like Trip with Friends or Apartment rent, and pick a currency (locked once the list is created — every expense in the list uses that currency). You can invite up to 10 friends by email right from the create dialog — they need an account on HelmLife.

Add an Expense

Open the list and tap + New expense. There are two tabs:

Expense — one or more independent expenses. Tap + Add another item next toCreate N expenses to stack more rows.
Bundle — one expense with multiple line items (grocery run, restaurant bill). A saved bundle becomes a reusable template.

Pick Who Paid & How to Split

Each row has Who paid? and Due date on the same line, and tapping Customize split expands equal / percentage / custom share inputs per member.

Settle Up

On the list page, the Who Owes What card shows per-person running balances. Tap an expense to open it and mark individual shares paid.

Tip: Deleting a list with multiple members triggers an approval flow — each member must tap Approve before the list and its receipts are removed.

Tip: Attach one receipt per expense — snap a photo or upload a file. It's read in your browser to pre-fill the vendor and amount; if it gets the numbers wrong, just edit them before saving. Need a different one later? Tap Replace.

Bucket List

Create and Share

Tap + Create, name it, and pick a target date (when the whole bucket should be done — required). Use the Share button on the list page to invite someone by email. The bucket-list dashboard shows Due in N days / Due tomorrow / Overdue on each card so you can see at a glance what's coming up.

Add Items with Details

Each item has a description, due date, address, link, and an Assign to dropdown. The address turns into a quick-tap Google Maps link; the link renders as a chip you can tap to open the page (product, listing, etc.). The new-item form defaults each item's due date to the bucket list's target date.

Assign and Tick

Every item shows an assignee chip on the right:

Solid dark “You” — your task.
Bordered first name — someone else's.
Dashed “Unassigned” — free for anyone.

Tap the chip to reassign. Any member can — including taking a task off a friend.

Tip: Only the assignee can mark a task done. Once ticked, the assignment is frozen — uncheck first to hand it off.

Tip: The list owner can change the bucket's target date anytime from the list detail page — the edit shows up in Recent activity so co-owners see when the goal moved.

Health

Start Your Food & Fitness Log

Tap + Create on the Health tab and pick Food & Fitness — we'll make My food & fitness for you. Your logs file themselves into weeks — 7 days at a time from your first log, named like 1st week · October — and earlier months fold away. Tracking a family member too? Create another Food & Fitness log and name it after them.

Log What You Eat

On My food & fitness, + Create → Calorie Log for today or yesterday. Snap a photo of your meal and we'll estimate the calories (the photo is never saved), or type it in.

Log How You Move

Pick Exercise Log instead and just describe what you did — “30 min brisk walk, then some push-ups” — or tap an activity. We estimate the calories burned, and if you logged meals that day too, you'll see your net.

Rings, Points and Fair Play

Your Food & Fitness log shows three daily rings (logged meals · calorie goal met · burn goal met) worth 10 points each, plus streaks, and badges. A day can be fixed until the end of the next day, then it locks. You keep 5 active weeks; when a 6th starts the oldest is archived, and Free keeps 10 archived weeks. Tap Show scoreboard to see it all.

Compete

Show scoreboard on My food & fitness has two leaderboards. 🌍 Global competition ranks everyone using the app by this week's points (first name + initial only — tap Hide me to leave it). Tap Compete to add up to 9 people for 👨‍👩‍👧 Friends & family; everyone competes with their own log, nothing extra to log. Others see your points and totals, never your individual meals or photos.

Blood Pressure and Lab Results

Pick Vitals & Labs when you tap + Create — we'll make My health for you. Inside it, log your blood pressure (we explain each reading) and keep lab results like A1C or cholesterol, with a Copy for my doctor summary. Tracking a parent or partner? Create another Vitals & Labs list and name it after them.

Tip: Free accounts get 3 meal-photo estimates a day, up to 20 a month; after that each one costs 2 Pieces. Typing a meal in is always free and unlimited.

Reset

Caught yourself scrolling? Tell Reset what you should be doing, pick 3–15 minutes, and put the phone down. When time's up you get a (slightly cheeky) nudge to get back to it.

Tip: Turn on Notifications on the Reset tab so the nudge reaches you even when the app is closed. On iPhone, add the app to your Home Screen first.

Business Card

Make a Work card and a Personal card. Only your name and title are required. Add a phone, email, website, address, socials, a photo or logo, and a PDF résumé if you like. Everything on the card is tappable. With more than one card, tap ☆ Make primary on the one you use most — it shows first.

Tap Show my card to hand someone your phone: drag to spin it, tap to flip it. The QR on the back opens your card on their phone, where they can save you to their contacts.

Tip: Turn the share link off to hide your card (the QR stops working too). New link retires an old link for good.

Your Account

The profile circle (top-right of every page) lets you:

Edit your display name.
Change your password.
Choose which tabs you see (List components).
Reopen this guide.
Sign out or delete your account.

Free-Tier Limits

Up to 5 lists in My Budget.
Investing Plans: up to 10 contributions, each split into up to 15 allocations (Pro: 25 and 25).
My Budget bundles: up to 10 expenses and 10 income entries each (Pro: 20 and 20).
Planned Expense goals: up to 15 “What I'm saving for” items and 15 savings entries each.
Up to 15 lists each in Group Expenses and Bucket List.
Up to 15 items / expenses per list.
Recent activity feed shows the last 15 events per list.
One receipt per expense.
Food & Fitness: 5 active weeks (7 Calorie + 7 Exercise Logs each, 31 of each in total) and 10 archived weeks.
20 meal-photo calorie estimates.
Business Card: 2 cards, Work and Personal (Pro: up to 8, each with its own name, plus AI-designed looks).

Create dialogs show a small Free tier · N left hint so you always know how much headroom you have.

Tip: Pro tier raises every cap to 50 — My Budget lists (from 10), Group Expenses and Bucket List lists, items per list, and the Recent activity feed (from 15).

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