A Paean to YNAB
For most of my adult life, I lived like that—$20 and half a gallon of gas away from the edge. Sometimes I had a little more margin for error, a few times there was a lot less room to misstep. I’m not ashamed of that. A lot of people live there; I was in very good company. But it’s one thing when you have a variable-hours, minimum-wage job, a disabled husband and a small child. It’s something else when you have a decent job but just can’t figure out how the heck to stop living on that edge. When you have more money and less responsibility (disabled husband having passed on, child having grown beyond the need for paid child care,) you should be able to pull out of debt and make progress, right?
