Trusted friends

Fewer debts. Fewer payments. Still private.

Trusted friends lets Commingle simplify debts across people you trust – without putting everyone into a group or sharing transactions they weren’t part of.

When trust is mutual, Commingle can safely reduce chains of debt between you and your trusted friends. You and your trusted friends still only see transactions you personally participated in, but the balances between you may change as Commingle finds simpler ways for everyone to settle up.

What does “trusted” actually mean?

Marking someone as trusted means more than simply saying that you trust them personally.

You’re telling Commingle:

“I trust this person enough that Commingle may reassign debts between us when it can simplify our balances.”

Trust must be mutual before Commingle can use that relationship to simplify debts. You can withdraw your trust at any time and enable it again later.

Friends aren’t notified when you add or remove trust. If trust becomes mutual, however, both of you can see that you trust each other.

How debt simplification works

Imagine:

You owe John $20.
John owes George $20.

If all three of you mutually trust each other, there’s little reason to make two separate payments.

Commingle can simplify the chain so that:

You owe George $20.

John’s balance is cleared and one payment can settle all three balances.

But simplification isn’t limited to situations where a debt can disappear completely.

For example:

You owe John $50.
John owes George $20.

Commingle can reduce the chain to:

You owe John $30.
You owe George $20.

The total amount everyone is owed remains correct, but unnecessary debt between friends is removed.

Commingle continuously looks for opportunities like these when trusted relationships or relevant transactions change. That means enabling Trusted friends, adding a transaction or editing an existing one can cause balances between mutually trusted friends to be simplified.

You don’t need to wait until everyone settles up.

Why not just create a group?

Many expense-sharing apps use groups to solve a similar problem. Groups work well for things with a clear beginning and end: a holiday, a weekend away, a flat you share for a year or a particular event.

They become much more awkward when you try to use them for your actual, long-term circle of friends.

Your friendships don’t fit neatly into groups

You might travel with Anna and Mark this month, share dinner with Anna and George next week and lend Mark some money later.

Should these be three groups? One permanent group? Should you create a new group every time somebody joins or leaves?

Trusted friends doesn’t require you to decide.

You simply choose the individual people you trust. Commingle works out which debts can safely be simplified from the relationships that exist at that moment.

One person, one balance

Groups can also create a strange situation where the same two people owe each other money in different places.

You might owe Anna $40 in one group while Anna owes you $30 in another.

Those balances may make sense inside each group, but they don’t represent the simplest answer to the question that actually matters:

Who ultimately owes whom?

Trusted friends works across your eligible shared transactions rather than trapping debts inside separate groups.

Privacy stays between participants

A permanent group often means everyone in it can see expenses that have nothing to do with them.

Trusted friends works differently.

If Anna and George have a transaction together and you weren’t part of it, you don’t get to see it – even if both of them are your trusted friends.

Commingle can still use the resulting balances when simplifying debts between mutually trusted friends. The transaction itself remains visible only to its participants.

You get the benefit of a shared debt network without turning your financial activity into a shared ledger.

You decide whom you trust

In group-based systems, debt optimisation may be a setting for the entire group. That means somebody else’s decision can affect whom you eventually need to pay – or collect money from.

That can leave you owing, or being owed by, someone you barely know or simply wouldn’t want involved in your debts.

Trusted friends makes that decision personal.

Commingle only uses your trust where the required relationships are mutual.

You choose the people you’re comfortable relying on. Your friend makes the same decision independently. Nobody has to accept the trust choices of a group administrator.

Trust can change

Friendships and circumstances change. Trusted friends is designed around that.

You can withdraw trust at any time and request it again later. There’s no permanent group structure to reorganise and no need to decide whether an old group should be abandoned and a new one created.

Changing trust does not undo your transaction history. Commingle simply recalculates how eligible debts should be represented based on the relationships and balances that exist now.

What Trusted friends does – and doesn’t do

Trusted friends can change who you ultimately owe or who owes you. That is the point: Commingle removes unnecessary steps from chains of debt.

It does not move transactions between people, reveal transactions to new people or pretend that somebody participated in a purchase they weren’t part of.

Your transactions remain yours.

Transactions describe what happened.
Trusted friends simplifies how everyone settles up afterwards.