Big decisions
Rent or buy? Finding your break-even year
Rent is not throwing money away, and neither is mortgage interest. Compare the unrecoverable costs of each and find the year buying starts to pay off.
Personal finance, worked out
Notes from the household ledger
Essays and worked examples on the money questions people in their thirties actually face: rent or buy, salary or freelance, pay down or put away.
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Investing costs
The real cost of a 1% fee, worked out over thirty years
One percent sounds small next to a 6% return. Run it over a working lifetime and it takes roughly a quarter of your growth. Here is the arithmetic.
Freelance money
Building a tax buffer when nobody withholds for you
When you freelance, every payment arrives before tax. A simple percentage rule, a separate account and a quarterly check stop the annual tax bill from becoming a crisis.
Latest from the ledger
Five insurance myths, and the one rule that sorts them out
Insure what you cannot afford to lose, self-insure the rest. Five common beliefs about cover tested against that rule, with deductible maths.
The one-hour monthly money routine (and why daily tracking fails)
Automate the transfers, then review once a month. A step-by-step routine with a sample payday schedule for a single salary of $4,600 net.
How to read a pay slip, line by line
Gross pay, pre-tax deductions, withholding and the year-to-date column. A walk through a sample pay slip and the five things worth checking every month.
Sinking funds: how to stop being surprised by bills you knew were coming
Car services, birthdays and annual renewals are not emergencies. A simple sinking-fund system turns them into a single predictable monthly transfer.
Avalanche or snowball? One household's debts, run both ways
We ran a fictional couple's three debts through both payoff methods, month by month. The gap was smaller than the online arguments suggest.
Sizing an emergency fund when your income is never the same twice
The three-to-six-months rule assumes a steady salary. Here is a way to size a buffer from your own worst months instead, with a worked example.