About Sage & Serif
We built these because we needed them ourselves
Jason and Caroline Zook, the couple behind Sage & Serif
From $124,000 in debt to financial clarity
A few years ago, my wife Caroline and I sat down and added up everything we owed. Student loans, business debt from a failed venture, credit cards we should have cut up years earlier. The total was $124,000. It was the kind of number that makes you want to close the laptop and pretend you never looked.
But we did look. And then we built a spreadsheet. Not a fancy one at first. Just rows and columns tracking every dollar coming in and going out. We updated it together every Sunday morning with coffee. That weekly ritual changed everything for us.
Within three years, we paid off all $124,000. Not because we made a fortune overnight, but because we finally understood where our money was going. The spreadsheet gave us something no app or notification ever could: a real picture of our financial life that we built and controlled ourselves.
Years later, we still track our finances weekly. It is not a chore anymore. It is the 20 minutes each week that keeps everything else running smoothly.
Why spreadsheets, not another app
We tried every budgeting app out there. Mint, YNAB, Copilot, you name it. They all worked fine until we wanted to customize something or see our data in a way the app did not support. With a spreadsheet, we were never locked in. We could add a column, build a chart, or change a formula whenever we wanted.
The problem was that building a good spreadsheet from scratch takes forever. Getting the formulas right, making it look clean enough that you actually want to open it, setting up dashboards that update automatically. We spent dozens of hours building and refining ours.
Sage & Serif is what we wished existed when we started. Templates that are already built, already beautiful, already full of smart formulas. You download one, drop in your numbers, and you are up and running in minutes instead of weeks.
A bit about us
We are Jason and Caroline Zook. We have been running online businesses together for over a decade. Jason is the guy who once made a living wearing t-shirts on the internet (yes, really) and has been featured on The Today Show, CBS, and in The New York Times. Caroline is a designer and entrepreneur who built a successful design business before we joined forces.
Together we run Wandering Aimfully, where we help people build businesses on their own terms. We also built Teachery, a platform for selling online courses.
Sage & Serif came from our own experience with spreadsheets. After years of refining the ones we used personally, we decided to turn them into something anyone could pick up and use right away. Every template reflects what actually worked for us, not what sounds good in theory.
Ready to take control of your finances?
Start with a free tool or pick the template that fits your life. No account needed.