The 47 Things Problem: What Every Adult Manages

We asked 1,000 homeowners to list everything they manage. The average answer? 47 distinct items across 10 life domains. Here’s the breakdown.

In 2024, we ran a survey. We asked 1,000 homeowners across the United States a simple question: list every service, account, policy, subscription, and obligation you actively manage. Not just financial accounts. Everything. The lawn service. The pest control contract. The warranty on your water heater that you’re pretty sure expired but can’t find the paperwork for.

The average answer was 47. Forty-seven distinct items, spread across what we now call the 10 life domains.

The 10 Domains

When we categorized the responses, a clear taxonomy emerged. Every item fell into one of ten buckets, each representing a fundamental area of adult life management.

• ●Home & Property — mortgage, property tax, HOA, maintenance, warranties, energy plans
• ●Insurance — auto, home, life, health, umbrella, dental, vision, long-term care, disability
• ●Banking & Credit — checking, savings, credit cards, loans, lines of credit
• ●Retirement — 401(k)s, pensions, Social Security, IRAs, RMDs
• ●Subscriptions — streaming, fitness, software, meal kits, news
• ●Telecom — cell phone, internet, cable, home security
• ●Vehicles — insurance, maintenance, registration, fuel, warranties
• ●Legal & Estate — wills, trusts, power of attorney, beneficiaries, advance directives
• ●Health & Wellness — preventive care, prescriptions, Medicare, FSA/HSA
• ●Education & Career — student loans, 529 plans, professional development

The Hidden Cost of 47 Things

Managing 47 items isn’t just tedious. It’s expensive. Our research found that the average household loses approximately $2,400 per year to things they could have caught: an insurance policy that auto-renewed at a higher rate, a subscription they forgot to cancel, a savings account earning 0.01% when the market rate is 4.5%, a property tax exemption they qualified for but never filed.

Beyond the money, there’s time. The average person spends over 47 hours per year managing bills, calling providers, comparing rates, and searching for documents. That’s more than a full work week dedicated to administrative overhead for your own life.

Why Nobody Has Solved This

The fintech industry builds vertical apps. Mint tracks spending. Lemonade sells insurance. Zillow estimates home values. Truebill catches subscriptions. Each one solves a slice of the problem. But nobody connects them into a coherent system where your insurance knows about your home improvements, your utility tracking knows about your solar panels, and your financial overview accounts for the forgotten subscription you’re still paying for.

That’s the gap. Not a missing feature — a missing layer. An operating system that sits across all 10 domains and sees the connections that no single app ever could.

One Workspace, Full Context

1Plan’s approach is fundamentally different. Instead of building another vertical app for one domain, we built a workspace that treats your entire life as a connected system. When you add a new baby, 1Plan doesn’t just congratulate you — it triggers a checklist that spans life insurance, health plan updates, beneficiary changes, a 529 college fund, and updating your will. Because those things are connected, even if no app has ever treated them that way.

Forty-seven things, ten domains, one workspace. That’s the thesis.