His Uber that day had a screen mounted on the back of the front passenger seat, the kind that displays ads throughout the ride and also lets riders pre-select a tip before the trip officially ends. He didn’t choose a tip on that screen, assuming the app would prompt him to rate the driver and…

She’d recently gotten married, and combining finances with her husband to figure out how to split bills forced her to finally look at her own debt as one complete picture rather than a series of separate balances she’d been managing individually. What she found surprised even her, roughly $160,000 in total debt, with about $135,000…

She’d worked at her company for three years, long enough to recognize early on that it was a toxic workplace with high turnover throughout the organization, even though her own department had stayed relatively stable and she genuinely liked the people she worked alongside. She’d pushed through long hours and a fully in person requirement,…

A few weeks earlier, mice had gotten into her car, chewing through wiring in the firewall and building a nest inside the dashboard. The initial repair estimate came back around $1,200, a number that mattered a lot given the details of her existing policy. At the time, her auto insurance carried a $2,000 deductible, which…

Her 95 year old father-in-law had received what looked like a $9,000 tax refund check the previous October, despite telling family he didn’t actually believe he was owed a refund of any kind. Even with that doubt already in his own mind, he’d gone ahead and attempted to deposit or cash the check anyway. A…

She’d signed up for a gig work app to try to fill the gap, but the income coming from it was completely unpredictable week to week. One stretch might bring three jobs, the next twelve, then nothing at all the week after that. That kind of volatility makes budgeting nearly impossible, since there’s no way…