Everyone asks how to make money. Almost nobody asks how to keep it.

In seven years of writing online, one question has landed in my inbox more than any other: how do I make more money? How do I earn my first real capital, my first cushion, my first feeling of not-drowning.

It's a good question. It's just not the one that decides things.

The question almost nobody asks — the one that actually separates people who stay afloat from people who keep starting over — is the boring twin of the first: how do I keep it? Preserving capital is unglamorous. There is no growth-hack thread about it, no founder onstage telling you he 10x'd his emergency fund. It rewards patience and dull, repetitive work. Which is exactly why it's underpriced, and exactly why I want to talk about it.

The pension you are quietly counting on

Let me start with the uncomfortable part, because everything downstream depends on it.

It is no longer safe to assume that everyone collecting a state pension today will collect one for the rest of their lives. I'm not saying this to scare anyone, and I'm not making a narrow point about one country. I'm Ukrainian, so it's tempting to read this as a comment about Ukraine. It isn't. It's a comment about states in general.

A state pension is a promise priced decades in advance, paid by people who haven't been born yet, managed by institutions you cannot audit and cannot replace. In a country with a slow judicial system and corruption baked deep into the machinery, that promise is fragile in a specific way: when the person running a public or private fund cuts a bad deal — or an outright criminal one — and then walks the whole thing through friendly courts, what's their real exposure? Often, none. The downside lands on you. The upside they kept.

So the responsible move isn't outrage. It's arithmetic. Assume the safety net might not be there, and ask the questions you'd otherwise outsource to it:

When do I actually want to "retire"? And — for a cold second — how long do I plan to live?

Pick an honest, even optimistic number. Sixty-five years of adult life? Seventy? I hear the fantasy that we'll all routinely pass 100 this century, and maybe we will, but I doubt that future arrives evenly for people who aren't already rich. So plan for the optimistic-but-real version, not the brochure.

Retirement is the wrong unit

Here's where I landed after years of chewing on this, and it surprised me.

I don't want to stop working. Not "I can't afford to" — I genuinely don't want to. Being busy and being needed is one of the few things that keeps people upright into old age. Watch what happens when someone loses the thing or the person that gave their days a shape; very often the body follows the purpose out the door. And the soft version of this — "I'll retire and finally do something for the soul" — I don't trust it either. Your daily work should already be for the soul. If it isn't, retiring won't fix that; it'll just remove the scaffolding.

So if I don't want a hard stop, then "retirement as an event" — one date where work ends and savings begin to drain — is the wrong thing to plan around. It's a unit borrowed from a 20th-century working life that fewer and fewer of us actually live.

The thing worth planning around isn't an event. It's a set of risks — the things that can genuinely break a life — sorted by when they're likely to hit:

• Unemployment — your income stops, for a while or for good.
• Aging and the health problems that come with it.
• Education — yours, or someone you're responsible for.
• Relocation — sometimes chosen, sometimes forced on you.
• Death — your own, or someone close, with everything financial that trails it.
• Treatment — a serious illness, yours or a loved one's.
• The off-budget emergencies that don't fit a tidy category but still arrive: the car, the apartment, the lawyer.

I unpack how to actually fund these — by time horizon, and without turning into a paranoid prepper — in a companion piece on risk buckets. For now the point is the reframe: stop saving toward a date. Start saving against specific risks.

And there's a family clause people skip. If you build a life with someone, you have two choices, and only two. Either you agree explicitly, in advance, that you'll carry these risks together — or you accept, honestly, that in the risky zones you'll be covering two people on your own. In calm seasons a shared budget doesn't grow that fast. In a crisis, the spend in the risky zones can be brutal. Decide which version you're in before the crisis decides for you.

The size of your cushion is set by your panic, not your paycheck

Here's a thing I've watched play out across dozens of people. The right size of your emergency cushion — the stash, I call it — has almost nothing to do with your income. It's set by your panic. By the specific risk that keeps you up at night.

I know someone who keeps a dedicated treatment fund on top of full health insurance, because illness is his particular fear — but holds nothing for unemployment, because he runs a business and is genuinely unbothered by the idea of being out of work. Is he wrong? No. His stash is shaped like his fears, and that's correct. Yours should be shaped like yours.

The trap on the other side is that risk-thinking, taken too far, curdles into paranoia. There's always one more basket to diversify into, one more tail risk to hedge. Don't go there. The plain old rule — don't keep everything in one basket — covers the overwhelming majority of real danger. You do not need to model a sovereign-debt crisis. You need a few baskets and the discipline to keep filling them.

Before you track a single cent: four things to accept

All of this — every cushion, every basket, every risk bucket — runs on one boring engine: tracking every cent, by hand. Not estimating. Not vibing. Counting.

But before the counting works, you have to swallow four things. Skip them and the tracking just makes you feel bad without changing anything.

One: it is completely normal to go through a phase of spending on garbage. Someone never got the chocolate bar they wanted as a kid; now that nobody's stopping them, they'll either eat the whole shelf or finally get sick of it. Same with clothes, gadgets, cars. Whatever that stage costs you, it has to be passed through, not jumped over — and trying to skip it is usually why "disciplined" budgets detonate. I wrote a whole piece on living through this stage on purpose: the Snickers problem.

Two: do it by hand, and accept that this is manual work. Set aside the time to fill in your own numbers. And please — no AI agent, no app that "magically reduces it all into one tidy number" for you. I say this as someone who automates aggressively in business and builds software for a living: personal finance is the one place I'm against automation. The value isn't the number at the end. It's the ten minutes your own attention spends on it. An app that does your thinking for you has quietly removed the only thing that was working.

This is also, bluntly, why Tracklio is built the way it is. It syncs the boring data so you're not retyping your bank statement, and then it gets out of the way and makes you sort each transaction into Survival or Lifestyle. It takes about ten minutes. It does not think for you, on purpose. A tool that promised to do the thinking would be selling you the exact thing that breaks the habit.

Three: split your money into "survival" and "everything else." This division is not optional — it's the whole spine. It matters most precisely when you can't yet save whatever's left at the end of the month, because it tells you where the give actually is.

Four: read every number two ways — as a percentage of the whole, and as a flat amount. A category that's "only 4%" can still be a number that makes you wince in absolute terms, and vice versa. You need both lenses or you'll fool yourself.

The $50 inside the $350 jeans

Here's the example that makes the survival/everything-else split click.

Do you need jeans? Obviously. Survival includes not being naked. So how much is a decent, durable pair you can wear for a year? Fifty dollars, give or take — less if you're smart. That fifty dollars is survival.

Now, the Stone Island jeans at $350. Are those a survival expense? No. But here's the part people get wrong: they're not entirely a luxury either. Inside that purchase, $50 is survival and $300 is Lifestyle. Same trick with food, with housing, with almost everything. Most purchases are an alloy of a need and a choice, and the skill is seeing the seam.

This is the heart of how we think about money at Tracklio — every transaction sorted by intent, not by the store's name on the receipt. If the idea is new to you, Needs vs Wants, done the Survival/Lifestyle way is the full version.

The order of operations

Once you can see the seam, the sequence almost builds itself:

1. Cover survival. Know your real floor — the minimum your life actually costs to run.
2. Fund the risky stuff first, even at a trickle. A thin risk cushion beats a fat brokerage account when the car dies the same week you lose a client. Vanity is, more often than people admit, more expensive than simply doing nothing.
3. Then build a fund you barely touch — slow, low-utilization capital that sits on top of the risk cushion. This is the part that compounds. This is the part that eventually does the quiet work of buying you options.

Your active income and that low-touch fund both stack on top of what you've already defined as survival and risk. Not instead of. On top.

The questions I get, answered honestly

"Bohdan, do you actually do this yourself?" Yes — because I can't afford not to. That's not false modesty. The discipline is load-bearing for me specifically.

"Isn't it a huge time sink?" No. Ten minutes a day, averaged. Less than the time most people spend reading their hundredth chart or hundredth piece of news that changes nothing about their life. The honest analysis of your own cash flow and your own cycles is worth more than any market take you'll scroll past.

"What are the exact proportions? Give me the formula." There isn't one, and there won't be. It's genuinely individual, and it demands a slightly ascetic honesty about what the word survival really means for you. Anyone selling you a universal ratio is selling you comfort, not accuracy.

I wrote all this down because it's the base layer I've been asked about a hundred times in seven years and never answered properly — because for a long time I didn't have a clean answer. Here it is, as clean as I've got it: if you want to sleep at night, build a system and count every cent with your own hands. Everything else — the cushions, the buckets, the slow compounding fund — is just structure poured on top of that one habit.

Want to feel the survival/everything-else split before you commit to anything? Sort a sample month in the demo — it takes about thirty seconds and asks for nothing — or run your own numbers through the free calculators. The number is the same either way. The only thing that changes is whether it's hypothetical or it's yours.