Field notes on calmer money.
Everyone asks how to make money. Almost nobody asks how to keep it.
Earning is loud and exciting. Keeping what you earn is quiet, boring, and the part that actually decides how your life goes. Why I stopped planning for retirement and started planning for risk — and why it begins with tracking every cent by hand.
Needs vs Wants: the Survival/Lifestyle way to budget
Every budgeting app sorts spending into categories. This guide explains the simpler needs-vs-wants lens — Survival vs Lifestyle — and how to use it without guilt or thirty-envelope maintenance.
Forget retirement. Build risk buckets instead.
A single retirement date is the wrong thing to save toward. Here's the model I use instead — risks sorted by when they hit, each with its own small fund, sized by how much it scares you rather than how much you earn.
More from the blog
The Snickers problem: why spending on nonsense is a stage, not a sin
The treat you were never allowed as a kid doesn't disappear — it waits. Here's how to live through the stage of spending on pure nonsense on purpose, how to catch the exact moment it stops serving you, and the simple fuses that keep it from running your life.
Survival vs Lifestyle: the only money split that ever stuck
I quit five budgeting apps before I understood the problem was never my discipline — it was the categories. The two-bucket system we built the whole company around.
The Sunday subscription audit: the total is what makes you put the coffee down
No single subscription feels expensive — the list does. A worked example and a no-guilt, twenty-minute method for finding and fixing subscription creep.
Stop grading yourself with the 50/30/20 rule
It's a planning template that everyone treats like a report card — and in Europe its 50% needs figure is below average before you start. Why we ship 60/20/20 instead, and why a plan and a mirror are different tools.