Intentional Living

She and her husband had become the default financial safety net for her in-laws and their minor kids, covering the cost of nearly every shared activity. Buffets, outings, whatever the plan happened to be, it was consistently her and her husband’s treat. Beyond covering day to day activities, they’d also lent out $1,000 at various…

She was 16 and had recently discovered that her parents had taken $331.48 out of her bank account, an amount that represented almost everything she had left saved from her first job the year before. According to what she’d pieced together, they’d been using her debit card while telling her it had simply been lost…

Before their family cabin sold after sitting empty for years, her parents told her and her brother that whatever remained after taxes and fees would be split evenly between the two of them. She wasn’t counting on the money and genuinely appreciated the gesture, seeing it as a generous decision on her parents’ part rather…

A distant family member had been married to a man who was the oldest of six siblings. He passed away well before the rest of his siblings, and their mother went on to outlive her son by many years afterward. His widow eventually remarried, moving on with a new spouse and building a separate life…

She and her husband had separated in early 2021 after 11 years of marriage. He’d moved out shortly afterward, filed for divorce, and the two of them had signed several documents through his attorney, dividing furniture and bank accounts between themselves and agreeing that each would keep their own debts and future income going forward….

She was a teenager who’d gotten her first job a few months earlier, initially earning around $40 a week during the school year, an amount that only covered her expected contribution toward gas money for getting to and from work. Once summer started and her hours picked up considerably, her weekly earnings climbed to somewhere…