Intentional Living

She’d recently opened a new checking and savings account with Citi, but the debit card the bank mailed to her never actually arrived. Today, she received three separate emails within about three minutes of each other, one confirming her debit card had been activated, another saying an online banking profile had been created, and a…

Her aunt was 45 and had spent the last several years bouncing between family members’ homes, a pattern that had already played out at least twice before this latest request. Years earlier, she’d spent about 15 years in a relationship with a man who had children of his own, helping raise them as though they…

She was 22, recently started full time, and bringing home about $6,400 a month after taxes while still living with her parents. Recently, her parents had asked her to contribute $3,000 every month toward their mortgage for the next three years, framing it explicitly as a loan rather than a gift, one they said they’d…

Her husband had gotten deeply into credit and debit card churning over the past year, a hobby he’d picked up after finding a website with a name close to drofcredit.com. The strategy involved opening new checking accounts and credit cards specifically to earn sign up bonuses, then closing those accounts six months or more later…

Sixteen days earlier, he’d bought a car from a dealership in Florida, signed all the financing paperwork, and driven the vehicle home believing everything had been finalized. The paperwork itself listed a specific lender, an interest rate, and a monthly payment figure, all the standard details that would normally indicate a completed transaction rather than…

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…