Your money,
coached.

My wife Elisa and I have been living paycheck to paycheck. Our checking account has 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 helped me see the way out clearly: our home equity. In ten days we close on selling our house. We're sizing down. That sale becomes an emergency fund, pays off most of our credit card debt, and for the first time in years gives us room to save toward our future and our daughter Avery's future.

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. We're not out yet — but for the first time in a long time, we see the light at the end of the tunnel. I hope this app helps you in some way as much as it's helped our family.