Finance blogs argue about feelings. We brought receipts.

Every claim on this site traces to our own ledger, our friends' anonymousized ones, or a public dataset. Current household sample: 14 families, 6 years of line items, zero drama.

The 15-Minute Check · October 16, 2026 · by Ada

The monthly money check, done in fifteen honest minutes

Once a month, first Sunday, we run the same five lines: what came in, what went out, what the subscriptions quietly became, what the emergency fund says, and one number we're choosing to move this month. Not a budget — a check. Budgets predict, checks observe. Observation is where the actual steering happens.

The whole ritual fits on a single index card, which is the point. A system you'll actually run beats an optimized one you'll abandon in March.

Readers who adopted the card version wrote in for a year: average time to completion, month nine, was eleven minutes. The fastest recorded: a retired engineer in Bristol, four minutes flat, "including tea."

Per-Use Math · October 8, 2026 · by Ada

Cost per use: the only shopping math worth doing

Every big purchase in our ledger carries a small formula: price divided by realistic uses per year, projected over a sensible lifespan. It doesn't decide for you. It just moves the argument to the correct battlefield — not "can we afford it" but "is the thing itself any good."

From our own purchases, actual numbers, actual households
Item	Paid	Cost/use, 3 yrs	Verdict
Pizza stone	$34	$2.43	Retired to cupboard
Wool coat	$210	$0.87	Best value owned
Stand mixer	$280	$1.55	Earned its shelf
Home elliptical	$390	$6.10	A cautionary tale

The elliptical row is why the table exists. It looked like a health investment and behaved like furniture with opinions.

Insurance, Read · October 1, 2026 · by Tomas

We read our policies so you believe it's survivable

This year's exercise: all four household policies, read end to end, exclusions highlighted. Findings — the home policy covers things we'd assumed it didn't, the travel policy was renewed twice with a coverage gap, and the gadget add-on was insuring a phone we no longer own. Total found: $58 a month of pure fiction, cancelled in one phone call.

Insurance isn't exciting. But "read your policy" is the entire personal finance industry's best free lunch, and it takes an evening with a pencil.

Savings Rate · September 24, 2026 · by Tomas

Savings rate, without the shame arithmetic

The internet treats savings rate like a personality test. Ours, over six years and two job changes, has ranged from 4% to 31% in the same household with the same discipline. The rate moved because life moved: a roof, a baby, a year of freelance lean times. The only measurement that survived contact with reality: did the number go up more often than down, over years, not months. It did. That's the entire story.