I’m working on a similar product at https://mygraph.ca and always looked up to James and Actual. Great product and well engineered.
It was amazing to see how productive he has been the past few years working on it while also being at Stripe. Not surprised to hear it got to be a bit much.
Unfortunately the only current and sane way to allow users to aggregate their financial data seems to be by having users pull .csv files from all of their accounts (at least where I am, in Canada).
I built https://mygraph.ca as I was tired of Mint failing to sync with Canadian banks (and later dropped Mint anyway because of the security/privacy concerns).
It’s not targeting technical users but it would be cool to add a SQL integration like Stripe Sigma, etc at some point.
"[..] while still allowing for a decent income even in the event of failure." How does this work? You're just taking enough of a salary as an early stage C[X]O/founder that your downside is limited?
Unrelated question, but are you working as an iOS developer and making that salary in the Midwest? Or do you have a different role like Architect or PM?
Are you using arrow functions? I find that using es2015 arrow functions for class methods takes care of most of the problems around this and react.
The only annoyance is dealing with binding event handlers to items/components in a list. Generally you need to abstract the list item into it's own component and do the event handler binding there.
Vancouver rental prices are actually not that bad, as rent prices are usually more closely aligned with incomes (which are comparatively low in Vancouver).
Prices to buy in Vancouver are completely insane and detached from local incomes.