About this site

Let's start here: I am not a financial advisor.

I want to get that out of the way up front. If you're looking for cold, hard, Investopedia-style definitions from someone who has never had to choose between rent and groceries, you are in the wrong place. If you want to hear from a guy who's been down to $3.28 with three days until payday and lived to tell about it, you've found your man!

I'm Jaime. I've been trying to figure out money for most of my adult life, with varying degrees of success. I'm in a good place now. The path here was not a clean ascension. I've carried credit card debt I didn't talk about, made financial decisions that seemed perfectly reasonable until they weren't, and found just about every way possible to keep myself living paycheck to paycheck.

I'm a big fan of envelope budgeting, though I use software to get that done. (I'm a YNAB man. Don't know it? Don't worry, I'll totally fill you in.)

I've made all the mistakes, run into all the walls, and eventually found my way out. Unfortunately, I had to walk that path blind. I didn't have a financial advisor. Or a parent who could explain a Roth IRA. Or a family playbook with instructions written in the margins. (Mine had a meatloaf recipe, a coupon for Kmart, and the phone number of someone I genuinely hope I never need to call.) I had a paycheck, a pile of expenses that kept being slightly larger than the paycheck, and the vague sense that other people had figured something out that I hadn't.

Call it the playbook gap: the distance between people who grew up with money being explained to them, and people who grew up with money being avoided as a topic entirely. That gap is expensive. And nobody is issuing refunds.

PaycheckAcademy.com is the reference I wish had existed.

This is the kitchen-table version of financial education. The one that looks at your actual numbers, tells you what's happening and what you can do about it, and skips the inspirational quotes about lattes, the 5am wake-up calls, and the suggestion that you'd already be financially independent if you'd just fixed your mindset.

The audience I'm writing for is working adults. Employed and surviving, but close enough to the edge that a bad month still stings. No playbook. No advisor on speed dial. Probably carrying some debt that's gotten familiar, and some goals that keep getting pushed back a year.

The site covers budgeting, debt, saving, credit, earning more, investing basics, and the money problems that show up at specific life moments: first job, new baby, job loss, car you shouldn't have bought but did.

Everything here comes from someone who made the mistakes. Some of them twice. The expensive ones are usually the most educational. Thankfully, you don't have to make them all yourself. I did it for you. So come along. Let's get this thing started.