A coworker of mine, I’ll call him Marcus, spent a solid month last year trying to build a “passive income empire” based entirely on videos he’d watched promising a hands-off si...
A friend of mine, I’ll call him Ben, opened a high-yield savings account back when rates were sitting near their recent peak and has basically treated it as a “set it and forget it” ...
A younger cousin of mine tried the 50/30/20 rule a couple of years ago, right after she moved to a city with genuinely brutal rent prices. She sat down, did the math 50% needs, 30% wants, 20% savings ...
A former roommate of mine, I’ll call her Priya, used to pay her rent with a check every month like it was still 1998, while I quietly earned travel points on my half of the utilities, groceries,...
A coworker of mine, I’ll call him Theo, used to spend his lunch breaks reading stock forums, tracking individual company earnings calls, and occasionally making trades based on a hot tip from so...
A few years ago, a friend of mine- I’ll call her Sam- had three credit cards, all carrying balances and charging somewhere north of 22% interest. Every month she’d make the minimum payment...
A friend of mine, I’ll call him Greg, ran a small landscaping business for about three years before he ever looked at a profit-and-loss statement. Not because he didn’t care — he was just ...
A former coworker of mine, I’ll call her Denise, spent years assuming she’d need at least $20,000 sitting in a savings account before she could even think about starting her own bookkeepin...
A few years back, a coworker of mine — I’ll call him Ray — got into a fender bender that, on paper, should’ve been a minor headache. Instead, it turned into a genuinely stressful few month...
I once sat down to do a budget with a friend, Maya, who nearly had a panic attack every time she looked at her bank balance — even when it was perfectly healthy. It took a while to figure out why. Tur...