Why we're building Castle
At Castle, we believe that every homeowner deserves more when it comes to managing their biggest asset: their home. Here’s a bit about my personal home story and the renovation that started it all.
Tales of the weekend warrior.
I was born into a family of real estate enthusiasts. Growing up, stories of overcoming home improvement challenges were shared over the dinner table like battlefield victories. There was the epic of my grandparents’ multi-year restoration of a dilapidated federal townhouse, the nail-biter of my mother (8 months pregnant) trying to save our flooded basement, and the legend of the year my dad took off work to build a log cabin.
In my family, real estate presented the ultimate optimization problem. The name of the game was to create a beautiful home that was also an appreciating asset. Achieving both usually required a lot of work and a little luck. I was taught from an early age that a home is both the ultimate source of creative expression and upward mobility.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, I had the opportunity to design and build my own home. In the summer of 2020, with our lease in Manhattan about to expire, my husband and I started looking at properties upstate and fell in love with the historic architecture and rolling green countryside of the Hudson Valley. Seven offers and four inspections later, we found a way around the residential property speculation bubble by buying a historic photography studio that we planned to convert into our house.
This was a serious undertaking. The building had no kitchen, no bedrooms, and very little plumbing (or even lighting) to speak of. In addition to drawing the actual design for the home, we sourced the materials, finished the kitchen cabinets, re-stained the deck, and painted endless amounts of trim. After a crash-course 12 months, the house was livable and we moved in.
My home the money pit?
This was an incredibly rewarding, once-in-a-lifetime experience, and there is no doubt that the house was (and continues to be) my creative outlet. But was it a good investment? This was harder to gauge.
For one, it was shockingly difficult to track just how much money we spent on our renovation. This may sound flippant to those who have never undertaken a renovation of this size, but I can assure you that our failure in accounting was not for lack of trying. We built an elaborate spreadsheet to track our vendors, installment schedules, and credit card accounts, spent dozens of hours researching cost benchmarks and what opportunities we might have to save, yet still felt like we were writing paper checks into a black hole.
Even once we moved in, we weren’t out of the woods. Soon, we were pummeled with maintenance fees and property taxes. Our back door leaked the first winter and our heating bill was astronomical. Our property insurer dropped us for no apparent reason and we had to scramble to find a replacement. It turns out that we were not alone. Most people we spoke to had similar stories to tell but seemed resigned to the fact that there was little we could do about it — that the experience of being a homeowner would necessarily come with $5,000 rounding errors.
Even though we were financially okay, the notion of spending blindly into the void and “throwing money at our problems” made us both deeply uncomfortable. While some of these costs were unavoidable, others seemed entirely avoidable (or at least could have been greatly reduced) had we been able to access better information to make a more informed choice at the time.
I was reminded of a commonly repeated family phrase — that “We make the most important decisions in life (including marriage, having children, and home purchases) with the least amount of data.” But did it need to be that way?
And thus the idea for Castle was born.
The problem with home payments.
There are 85 million+ homeowners in America who are spending more money on their homes than ever before. And yet, the way we spend money on our homes remains almost unchanged since the 1980s. In almost every other industry, retail consumers and corporate CFOs now benefit from more secure, flexible, and automated payment flows — think one-click checkout, cash advance, tap to pay, and automatic expense reconciliation to name just a few. Despite all of these advances in other areas of consumer and business finance, most financial decisions about the home continue to be made in response to a problem, with few comps or benchmarks, and paid with cash or check.
At Castle, we believe that homeowners deserve better tools and better data when it comes to managing their biggest asset. That’s why we’re building payments infrastructure for the largest consumer category in the U.S. — to help people automate, consolidate, and reduce their home spend.
Homes can still be incredible sources of wealth creation and security for millions of Americans, but that won’t happen if homeowners continue to lack the resources to make more informed choices. It is 2025. Homeowners shouldn’t have to make some of the most important financial decisions of their lives in a vacuum and place blind bets on whether they can afford the roofs over their heads. There is nothing romantic about realizing you hadn’t budgeted for a 20% increase in your property insurance or pouring your savings into a fixer upper that leads you to financial ruin.
Why Castle?
The way we spend money on our homes today is incredibly fragmented (the average homeowner uses more than three payment methods per month for their home expenses), outdated (home payments are disproportionately cash and check), and unsafe (fraud/risk is not well modeled in this space). Fixing the home payments problem is a massive challenge, but if we are successful, the opportunities are enormous.
Standardizing and digitizing the way we make home payments could revolutionize the way that homeowners, real estate professionals, insurers, lenders, vendors, and governments share data. In turn, better data could help millions of homeowners make more informed choices and meaningfully improve their financial resilience. In our next few posts, we’ll share more details about how we intend to tackle the home payments problem and our vision for a world where more homes in America run on Castle.
I’m building Castle because my home is my castle and I believe that living in your dream home and making a good investment needn’t be a choice. Help us bring Castle to everyone else who feels the same.