Your money,
coached.

For years, my wife Elisa and I lived paycheck to paycheck. Our checking account swung below zero some weeks. I wasn't saving anything — not because I didn't want to, but because I couldn't see how. Mortgage, two cars, groceries, a family to take care of. "Save more" sounded like advice from someone who'd never been us.

Then our home started eating our savings. Foundation repairs led to new floors. New floors led to new landscaping. Our escrow went up $300 a month — again. We leaned on credit cards because we had to. One month I forgot a payment on the landscaping promo card — my first missed payment ever. The next week, five of my credit card limits dropped to within $100 of my current balances. I lost more than $50,000 of available credit in one quiet algorithmic move. That's when I knew something had to change.

So I started building. Just for myself, at first. I wanted to see when money was actually going to hit and leave my account — not the month total, the day. I wanted to categorize every line and stop being surprised. I wanted somewhere to type in a bank statement without handing my banking password to a third party. I made the Credit Card Scale because we're using the avalanche method to attack our highest-APR balances — and seeing, for the first time, what we were paying per month and per year just to carry that debt made my stomach drop. It also made the path out visible for the first time.

Around the same time I started reading — Chilton, Bogle, Collins, Housel. The Wealthy Barber was first. One principle landed harder than the rest:

Live under your means — always. — David Chilton, The Wealthy Barber

It sounds obvious. But we also had spending and saving backwards. We'd spend first, and if anything was left at the end of the month — usually nothing — we'd try to save it. I learned to flip it: save first, then spend what's left. That single change, paired with lowering our costs, is how the math finally started working for us.

With costs rising faster than income, the only way to live under our means was to lower them — and the app made the way out unmistakable: our home equity. So we sold. We traded the house that was eating our savings for a home we genuinely love that costs us less to live in — a dream home that is also below our means. It turns out those can be the same house. The sale built our first real emergency fund and knocked out most of our credit card debt in one move.

Now we live the flip instead of just knowing it: we save first — at the start of every month, before a single bill — and everything the old house used to eat goes toward aggressively paying down what's left of our debt, and toward our future and our daughter Avery's future. The light at the end of the tunnel isn't a glimmer we squint at anymore. We're walking in it.

I built this app for us. But when I shared it with friends and family, the reaction was the same every time: "you have to share this." Teachers, nurses, neighbors — people who'd been handed "save more" by folks who'd never been them. That's why WealthyWai is here, and not just a spreadsheet on my laptop.

I'm not a financial advisor. I didn't have a financial literacy class growing up — my parents were wonderful English teachers, not accountants. Everything in WealthyWai is what I wish I'd had years ago: plain-English tools, advice grounded in the masterminds who've been saying the same things for forty years, and the refusal to sell you something on the way out. I hope this app helps you in some way as much as it's helped our family.