Budgeting, accounts, credit, investing, taxes, and the jargon that comes with all of it — organized into tabs so you can jump to whatever's actually useful right now.
Before any of these accounts matter, you need a rough plan for your take-home pay. The 50/30/20 rule is a simple starting split — not a rule to follow exactly, just a way to see where money should generally go.
Based on take-home pay, not your salary before taxes. Tap a category below for examples.
Money set aside for the unexpected — a layoff, a medical bill, a car repair — so a bad month doesn't force you into debt or into selling investments at a bad time. This usually comes before investing, not after.
Where should it actually sit? This is exactly the job of an HYSA, over on the Accounts tab — easy to access within a day or two, FDIC insured, and it earns real interest without being exposed to the market dropping right when you need the money most. Checking earns nothing; a brokerage account could be down when you need it.
Every account here does one of four jobs: let you spend, keep you safe, grow your money, or grow it with a tax deal attached. Tap a card to see what it's really for.
Every account on the Accounts tab holds money that's yours. A credit card is the opposite — it's a line of credit you borrow against, then pay back. It doesn't fit on a savings-to-retirement timeline because it isn't about growing money at all.
Your score isn't one mysterious number — it's five factors, weighted very unevenly. Two of them (payment history and utilization) account for nearly two-thirds of it.
Approximate FICO-model weighting — the exact formula varies slightly by scoring model, but this ordering holds broadly across all of them.
Two common strategies for paying off multiple debts: avalanche (highest interest rate first — mathematically the cheapest) and snowball (smallest balance first — often easier to stick with). Enter up to three debts and see both side by side.
Enter at least one debt above to see results.
Enter at least one debt above to see results.
This assumes a minimum payment of 2% of each balance (or $25, whichever is greater) and applies your extra payment to one debt at a time, rolling freed-up minimums into the next. It's a simplified illustration, not a payoff guarantee — actual card terms vary.
"Brokerage," "401(k)," and "Roth IRA" are just containers. What's inside them — stocks, bonds, funds — is what actually determines your risk and your return. Any of these can live inside almost any account on the Accounts tab.
Investment growth doesn't just come from what you put in — it comes from earning returns on your past returns too, so the growth snowballs the longer it's left alone. That's why starting early matters more than starting big.
This example assumes $200 a month at an average 7% annual return — a common illustrative figure, not a promise. By year 30, you'd have contributed about $72,000 — but the account would hold roughly $227,000. That extra $155,000 didn't come from you. It came from growth earning more growth. Actual returns vary and are never guaranteed.
Plug in your own numbers and watch the chart above update.
People use these words interchangeably, but they're not the same. Volatility is how much a price bounces around in the short term. Risk is the chance you don't have the money you actually need, when you need it — and sometimes the "safer-feeling" option is the riskier one.
Cash feels safer day to day because the balance never drops. But zoom out, and a quieter risk shows up: cash can fall behind the rising cost of living. Stocks are the bumpy line — genuinely volatile in any given year — but historically have grown enough over decades to outpace that rising line. Neither is "safe" in every sense; they're just risky in different ways, on different timelines.
Stocks can swing 10-20% in a single year — unsettling to watch. But held for decades, the real risk isn't the swings, it's needing that specific money on a timeline too short to ride one out.
Cash and HYSAs don't swing — the balance you see is the balance you get. The risk is quieter: it slowly loses purchasing power to inflation, which doesn't feel like "losing money" but functions like it.
The salary in your offer letter — gross pay — isn't what lands in your checking account. Money gets pulled out along the way, and budgeting off the wrong number is one of the most common early mistakes.
Illustrative example only — your actual split depends on income, state, and elections. Use net pay, not gross, when building your budget above.
Net worth is everything you own, minus everything you owe. It's the clearest single measure of financial progress — more useful than your salary, your account balances, or any one number on its own.
Cash in checking, savings, and HYSAs. Investment and retirement account balances. Home equity, if you own property. Anything of real value you could sell — a car, for instance, though it typically loses value over time.
Credit card balances. Student loans, car loans, personal loans. Remaining mortgage balance. Anything you've borrowed and still have to pay back.
Rough numbers are fine — this isn't going anywhere, it just adds and subtracts.
A negative number early on — common with student loans — isn't a crisis, it's a starting line. What matters more than the number itself is which direction it's moving over time.
The terms that get thrown around like everyone already knows them. Search or just scroll.
Common things people believe about money that either aren't quite true, or are more nuanced than they sound.
One finance tip a week, no fluff
Short, plain-English emails — same style as this site. Unsubscribe anytime.