You don’t need to be in financial crisis to be here. You just need to be curious about money — and a little tired of advice that assumes your life looks like everyone else’s.
Here’s what you get. Every weekday morning, one thing about money that the headline left out — the part that decides whether it costs you. A Fed hike is $15 a year on a $6,000 card balance; the part that costs you is the rate you agreed to years ago and never asked about. A record median income is a statement about the country; the part that costs you is reading it as a statement about yourself. I’ve spent the years since 1994 across a desk from people’s actual budgets, and the pattern I keep seeing is that the expensive mistake is almost never the one in the news. It’s the one nobody mentioned.
So that’s the job: notice the thing, explain what it means, and say what I’d say across the kitchen table. Not what to do — your life outranks anything I write — but what I’ve watched happen, and why.
And not all of it is money. I write about AI without the hype, about getting older, about starting something when you’re nervous, and about what all the numbers are actually for. If one of those is what brought you here, you’re in the right place too.
A little about me, since you’re trusting me with your inbox. You might know me as the Get Out of Debt Guy. I’ve been a search-and-rescue pilot, a firefighter, and a dog-rescue pilot who flies dogs from kill shelters to new homes (yes, really). I’ve run a 70-person consumer-help organization, sat inside an industry that pressures people into bad decisions, and been invited to the UK Parliament to talk about financial literacy. I’ve been on FOX, CNN, ABC, NBC, and MSNBC. And I’ve had my own money go sideways, badly, which is the credential that actually matters for this.
There’s a dad joke at the top of every issue. People opened my last daily for years because of it. I sell nothing, and I don’t sell the list.
Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.
— Steve Rhode
