How YourDigits Detects Your Financial Leaks

My cousin has been testing the app for about 3 months now. He calls me mid-build to say something's broken and half the time my head is already fried from whatever feature I was shipping at that exact moment, so I get cranky. We laugh about it after. I'm actually grateful because between building and testing I can really only run targeted checks on my own, and he's the one who keeps finding the audit edge cases I would never have thought of. The detection logic you're about to read through is the version that made it past his testing. Which is to say it was stress-tested by a real person who had quit tracking twice before he started using this app, not by an engineer who knows exactly what to click.

That matters because the whole point of an audit is that it has to work for someone who doesn't know what they're doing yet. If you had a system for figuring out which leak to fix first, you wouldn't need the audit. You'd already be fixing things. The audit exists for the person staring at their bank app thinking "something is off but I don't know what."

Here's what's actually happening when you run it.

What the Audit Is

When you take the Know Your Digits quiz, you're taking a quick audit. Roughly 3 minutes, no signup. It's the same audit that runs inside the app when you first download it, just in quiz form on the web so you can see where you stand before committing to anything.

The questions cover two kinds of things. First, some intake stuff: region (US or AU), pay frequency, a stress check, and the thing that's friction-ing you most right now. Those don't directly produce leaks but they shape how the app talks to you later and which rung-3 question you see. Then the actual financial structure questions: do you have a spending plan, do you have an emergency fund, are you getting your employer match or tracking your super, do you have any debt above 7% APR (that's my threshold for high-interest debt, roughly the long-term stock market return, so anything above it is costing you more than investing would give you), are you contributing enough to retirement, do you have savings goals, and are you investing beyond retirement.

Each of those questions maps to one of 9 possible leaks. Each leak has a rung on the Leak Ladder, which is the priority order the app uses to decide what you fix first.

The 9 leaks, in order, are: No Spending Plan, Start Emergency Fund, Missing Free Retirement Money (US) or Super Not Tracked (AU), High-Interest Debt, Build Full Emergency Fund, Other Debt, No Savings Goals, Not Saving Enough for Retirement, Not Investing Beyond Retirement. You can read the full breakdown in the Leak Ladder guide. For this article I just need you to know the order exists and that the detection respects it.

What Each Answer Triggers

The mapping is deliberate and mostly one-to-one. Say you have no budget, you get the No Spending Plan leak. Say you have no emergency fund, you get Start Emergency Fund (or Build Full Emergency Fund if you already have a starter, more on that below). Say you're in the US and not getting your full employer match, you get Missing Free Retirement Money. Say you're in AU and you've changed jobs at least once without consolidating your super accounts, you get Super Not Tracked. Say you have a credit card carrying a balance above 7% APR, you get High-Interest Debt. Say your retirement contribution is under your target, you get Not Saving Enough for Retirement. And so on.

Two things about this that aren't obvious.

One, the starter emergency fund and the full emergency fund are mutually exclusive. You never have both at the same time in the app. If you have high-interest debt, you only get the starter version (roughly a $1,000 target). Only when the debt is gone does the full version appear (3 to 6 months of expenses). This is on purpose. Trying to build a full 6-month fund while paying 20% APR on a credit card is mathematically losing and I wanted the detection to refuse to suggest it.

Two, the Missing Free Retirement Money leak works differently in US vs AU. US employer match varies a lot, anywhere from 50% to 100% of your contributions up to some percentage of salary depending on the employer. The leak is about making sure you're capturing whatever your specific match is. In Australia, super is already mandatory at 12%, so the leak isn't about matching. It's about tracking and consolidation. Roughly 4 million Australians have 2 or more super accounts from job-hopping, each with its own fees and insurance quietly draining the balance, and there's about $19 billion in lost or unclaimed super across the country. So the AU version of this leak is about not letting that happen to you.

The Pause Logic

Here's where it gets interesting. After the app detects all your leaks, it runs a second pass called pause logic. The pause logic doesn't delete leaks. It just decides which ones you actively work on right now and which ones wait.

Two rules. First, Not Saving Enough for Retirement gets paused if you have active High-Interest Debt. The leak still appears in your list but with a "Clearing debt first" label. The app is telling you "yes this is a leak, yes it matters, but don't touch it yet because paying the debt is a guaranteed return that beats what retirement investments will give you right now." Second, Not Investing Beyond Retirement gets paused if any of Start Emergency Fund, High-Interest Debt, or the retirement leak are active. Investing is the last rung. It only unlocks once the foundations are solid.

The one leak that's never paused is No Savings Goals. You can always set and work on a savings goal even while you're clearing debt or building your EF. That was intentional. Savings goals are how you build the tracking habit and feel progress when the rest of the ladder is slow, and pausing them would cut off the one leak that actually rewards consistency the fastest.

This is what I mean by the ladder being prescriptive. It's not just "here are the things that are wrong." It's "here are the things that are wrong, in this specific order, and here's what we're pausing for now."

An Example Audit

Let me run you through a realistic one so you can see it end to end. Numbers are slightly disguised but the shape is real.

28 years old, roughly $3,500/month income, roughly $2,800/month expenses. $500 on a credit card at 19% APR, no emergency fund, contributing 3% to retirement. In the US this person is getting a partial employer match but not the full amount. In AU they've had two jobs since graduating and never consolidated their super accounts, so one older account is sitting there quietly losing fees.

Here's what the audit detects.

Start Emergency Fund. No EF while carrying debt, so the starter version is what gets surfaced (not the full version). The task will be something like "set aside a small amount each pay cycle toward a roughly $1,000 buffer, in a separate account from your everyday spending."

Missing Free Retirement Money (US) or Super Not Tracked (AU). US version: not capturing the full employer match, which is 50-100% free money depending on their employer. AU version: unconsolidated super across two accounts, with lost-super data showing it's costing them in fees and duplicated insurance. Either way it's on the ladder and it's active.

High-Interest Debt. $500 on a card above 7% APR qualifies. Active.

Not Saving Enough for Retirement. The 3% contribution is below target for their age. Detected but paused. The app surfaces it with a "Clearing debt first" label because the high-interest debt is active. They'll see this leak on the list so they know it exists and matters but the actual task waits until the card is paid off.

Four leaks total. The active tasks for this pay cycle are: starter emergency fund, capture the free retirement money (or sort out the super), and pay the high-interest debt. The fourth leak sits paused in the background.

Health Score: somewhere in the Needs Work tier, which is the 0 to 39 band on a 0 to 100 scale. The app also has Fair (40 to 59), Good (60 to 79), and Excellent (80 to 100) tiers so you know roughly how big the gap is before you start climbing. You can read more about how the score is calculated in the health score guide.

Nothing in this picture says irresponsible. There are just 4 active leaks and no one had told them which to plug first.

What You Do With It

Once you have the audit results you're not done. Detection is just the first step. The next step is the app turning each active leak into a pay cycle task with an actual dollar amount, which it does based on your income, expenses, and how you're pacing against your existing spending. That part is what I wrote about in The Full System: Audit, Detect, Task, Adapt. The detection gives you the map. The tasks are how you walk it.

For the person in the example above, the first pay cycle's tasks might look like: put $50 toward the starter EF, put $80 toward the credit card, confirm your employer match or pull up your myGov super accounts and see how many you have. Nothing dramatic. Just the specific things that move the specific rungs that are currently active for you. The detection respects your pay cycle too, so the tasks scale to weekly, fortnightly, or monthly income, not a calendar month.

Your first pay cycle focuses on the highest-priority leak the detection found, not all of them at once. That's the whole point of the order.

Run Your Own

If you want to see what your audit looks like, take the Know Your Digits quiz. roughly 3 minutes, no signup. You get your score, your leak list, and the priority order at the end. If you want to then actually run the tasks every pay cycle, that's what YourDigits is for. The detection you just read is exactly what runs inside the app.

If you're still deciding, the Leak Ladder guide covers the philosophy in full and works as a standalone system. You can apply it manually with a spreadsheet if you want. The app is just the tool that runs the detection and the tasks for you so you don't have to.

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Related reading:

• The Full System: Audit, Detect, Task, Adapt: what the app does with the leaks once it finds them
• Your Money Has a Health Score. Here's How to Read It.: what the 0 to 100 score is actually measuring
• The Leak Ladder: The Complete Guide: the full priority system, standalone