Major purchase
Keep the budget, and what it ruled out.
A major purchase — a car, a roof, a first flat — is months of comparing with one number underneath it that keeps moving: what you can actually spend. Each time that number moves, some of what you ruled out three months ago stops being ruled out. You worked those exclusions through with an assistant in the spring. By autumn you have the conclusion without the reason, or the reason without the number it was based on.
When the budget moves, everything under it moves
A big purchase isn’t one decision. It’s a hundred small ones stacked on a single number. What you can spend sets the areas you look in, the areas set the size, the size rules out two thirds of the listings. Ask about any of it and you’re really asking about the number underneath.
Then the number moves. The mortgage offer lands £17,000 under what the broker first estimated. A survey adds nine grand you hadn’t counted. Over ten months it moves two or three times, and each move quietly puts things back on the table that you took off it in March. You had reasons. The reasons are in a ChatGPT session from the spring, somewhere between a question about stamp duty and a question about damp. So you either spend an evening re-researching an area you already researched, or you don’t — and carry on excluding something that would now fit.
What Giraffe keeps
Giraffe holds the small set of values a purchase actually runs on — the budget, the deposit, where you’re looking, the one thing you won’t compromise on — with the decisions you’ve settled and the questions still open underneath them. When something moves, you say so: “Update the budget — the offer came in at £226k, so £268k all in.” The new number takes the row. The old one is kept behind it, dated, with whether it was you or an assistant who wrote it down.
Nothing on the page is a transcript. Four rows, three decisions, two open questions — short enough to read in the car outside a viewing. Each decision carries the reason it was made, so when the budget drops you can see for yourself which of them just came undone. Giraffe won’t notice and won’t tell you; it keeps what you wrote down where you can hold it against today’s number. Here is how Giraffe works, step by step.
Ten months of flat-hunting, in one project
Say you’ve been looking since November. A session working out what a rate actually costs you month to month. Another comparing two areas on commute time and council tax. A long one in June about whether a slate roof with eleven years left in it is a reason to walk away. Forty-odd conversations, both assistants, ten months, nothing joining them up. What survives is this:
First flat
- Current
- Decisions
- No new-builds. The three we saw were smaller than a tenement flat at the same price, and the Western Harbour one carried a £1,400-a-year factor fee on top.
- Stop viewing anything listed above £270k. Four of the five we fell for were over it, and every one of them sold for more than it was asking.
- Fix for five years, not two. A cheaper two-year rate that resets in 2028 is a bet, and this is already the largest one we’re making.
- Open questions
- How far over the Home Report value to offer. The two we lost went 8% and 11% over, and no lender will lend against the part above the valuation — so that gap comes straight out of the £42k.
- Whether to wait for the fixed saver to mature on 12 November, or break it and lose about £180 of interest.
- Notes
- Every listing photo is shot with a wide lens. The Gorgie one that looked like a corridor was fine; the Leith one that looked enormous was 41 square metres.
- Recent changes
The one you ruled out in March is back on the list
Look at the Areas row. Gorgie came off the list in March — twenty minutes further from the station, and, honestly, it felt like settling. Three weeks ago the budget dropped £17,000 and Gorgie became the only place with a second bedroom in it. Putting it back took one sentence. Without the record, an exclusion is invisible: you either never revisit it, or you re-ask an assistant every question you already asked in March and get back the answers you already had.
The budget row is the one you can’t afford to read wrong. Every question you put to an assistant carries that number inside it — what does this get us, is it worth offering on, does the survey change anything — and a careful answer built on £285,000 is a careful answer to a question you stopped asking. One live value per fact means the number you bring to the next conversation is the current one, and £285,000 is still there underneath it, with the date it stopped being true.
It doesn’t stop being useful once you’ve bought
Most projects never end. This one does — you offer, it’s accepted, the budget row stops moving. The page keeps earning after that. It’s where the survey findings sit two winters later, when you’re working out whether the roof waits another year. It’s the only place that says why you went over the valuation, written before you knew how it turned out. And when the next big one comes round — a car, or the kitchen — you already know what the first four rows are. That one starts life as a plan with dates and a budget.
A few more questions
- How do I keep track of what I ruled out while comparing something expensive?
- Write the exclusion and its reason down together, somewhere separate from the conversation you made it in. With Giraffe you ask ChatGPT or Claude to save it — “we’ve ruled out new-builds, and here’s why” — and it lands in a project you can re-read months later. That matters most when your budget changes, because a reason that held at £285,000 may not hold at £268,000, and the only way to check is to still have the reason.
- My budget changed. Does the old number get lost?
- No. A Giraffe project holds one live value per fact, so the new budget is the one you read. The old one is kept behind it with the date it was replaced and whether you or an assistant wrote the change down. Nothing is watching your finances — the number changes when you say it changed, not before.
- What should actually go in a project for a big purchase?
- Four or five values that move — the budget, the deposit or trade-in, the places or models still in play, the one thing you won’t compromise on — plus the decisions you’ve settled with the reason attached, and the questions still open. Leave out the listings and the transcripts. A useful test: if the budget changed, would this row change with it?
- Isn’t this just a spreadsheet?
- A spreadsheet holds the numbers and none of the reasoning, and it has to be opened and updated by hand at the moment you least feel like it. A Giraffe project is written by asking — one sentence to the assistant you were already talking to — and it keeps the reasons beside the numbers: what you decided, what that ruled out, what is still unanswered. It reads as a page rather than a grid, in a browser, with no assistant open.
Keep the number, and everything it ruled out.