Balancrix is a budget planning service based in Portland, Oregon. We help households and small businesses build written budgets with a real person by their side. This page is the honest version of who we are, how we started, and what we believe — because a service that asks people to open up about money owes them transparency in return.

How Balancrix began

Balancrix started with a conversation between two friends in a Portland coffee shop. One of them, Sam Torres, had spent years as a budget coach at a community nonprofit, helping families sort out their spending one kitchen table at a time. The other, Dana Whitfield, had run a small retail business and remembered the exact month she realized she had no idea what the business could afford to pay her. Both kept meeting the same wall: people did not lack sense about money — they lacked a process, and a person to walk through it with them.

The idea was deliberately small: take the patient, judgment-free approach of community coaching and make it available to anyone — households and small businesses alike — as a paid service with a written plan at the end. No products to sell, no accounts to manage, no fine print. Just planning, done properly. Balancrix has grown since then, but the original shape has not changed: sessions with real people, a plan you keep, and boundaries we repeat until they are boring.

What we believe

We believe a budget is a plan for the life you actually want, not a punishment for the life you have. We believe people respond to clarity, not to shame, and that the best plans are built from real numbers in plain language. We believe small businesses deserve the same planning care as large ones, and that an owner's pay should be a decision, not an accident. And we believe in knowing exactly what we are not: we are planners, not investment sellers, tax preparers or money managers — and we say so on every page where it matters. Our full position is in the important disclaimer.

The team

Sam Torres, founder and budget planner. Sam spent six years as a budget coach with a Portland community nonprofit before founding Balancrix. Clients describe Sam's sessions as "the first time money felt doable." Sam leads the personal planning track and writes most of our guides on household budgeting.

Dana Whitfield, co-founder and business planner. Dana ran a small retail business for eight years before co-founding Balancrix, and she brings that owner's-eye view to every business session. She leads the business planning track and has built the operating budget process used with our business clients.

Priya Raman, senior budget planner. Priya joined Balancrix from a financial-counseling background and specializes in variable income, family planning and first budgets. She leads our monthly membership practice and trains new planners in the Balancrix method.

Leo Grant, business budget planner. Leo works with trades, restaurants, studios and early-stage startups. He is the person our business clients call when a slow season is coming and the plan needs to be ready for it.

Every Balancrix client works with one of these planners by name. We keep the team small on purpose, because the relationship between a planner and a household or business is the service.

How we work

Sessions happen by secure video call across the United States, and in person in Portland when schedules allow. Every client receives a written plan, worksheets and plain-language support — the same standard whether the plan is for a single person or a company of thirty. We answer our own email, we return calls within one business day, and we honor the boundaries and the guarantee we publish. Client information is confidential: what a client shares in a session stays in the session, as described in the privacy policy.

Our home

Balancrix Inc. is a registered company in the state of Oregon, with our office at 4715 Hawthorne Terrace, Suite 300, Portland, OR 97214. Portland is where the service began and where our planners still gather for the monthly team reviews that keep our method honest. We serve clients in every US time zone, and our working hours are Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Pacific Time.

The community side

A small share of every plan funds free budget workshops for Portland-area community organizations and nonprofits. It is our way of keeping the original kitchen-table spirit of the service, and we are happy to tell you more about it if you write to [email protected].

Talk with us

The best way to understand Balancrix is to meet one of us. Book an intro session, call +1 (503) 555-0174, or write to [email protected] — a person, not a queue, will answer.