The Day I Discovered Where All My Money Was Going.
Have you ever noticed how your money seems to just disappear? You look at your balance and think — where did it go? I didn’t buy anything big. I’m not going to explain why that happens in theory. I’m going to tell you exactly what happened when my mom and I figured it out for ourselves.
One Notebook. One Month. One Stuffed Envelope.
One day we did something that changed everything. My mom and I grabbed a notebook and started writing down every single dollar we spent for an entire month. Every single one. We kept all our receipts in a big envelope, and by the end of the month it was completely stuffed.
When we finally sat down and looked at all those numbers — we could not believe what we were seeing.
Everyone has holes in their pockets. Not big dramatic holes. Small ones. The subscription you forgot about. The habit you never added up because each individual purchase felt fine. The thing that costs almost nothing until you multiply it by 365.
The Numbers That Actually Shocked Us
My mom was spending $5 on a latte almost every morning — six days a week. I thought it was a pretty small thing. Just $5 for something that made her happy. My Target snack runs added up to $75 a month. That’s $900 a year on snacks I don’t even clearly remember eating.
Then I pulled out my calculator.
That’s nearly $9,000 in one year on things that were basically just convenient. I sat there staring at my notebook in shock. That money could have paid for a trip to Europe. That could have been real memories. Instead it was just gone — along with everything it could have become.
Not Giving Up Everything. Just Being Intentional.
This is the part I want to be clear about: we didn’t stop enjoying life. We didn’t give up coffee or restaurants entirely. That would have been miserable and it would have lasted about two weeks.
We just made small shifts.
My mom cut her coffee shop visits from six times a week to three. On the other days she used a used espresso machine from a thrift store. After about two weeks, she didn’t even miss going every day. For eating out, we went from five times a week to just one — Sunday lunch became our special restaurant time and we looked forward to it way more than we ever did when it was just a regular Tuesday delivery order.
We started cooking together instead. At first I could barely make anything. We started simple — tacos, stir-fry, pasta. I learned how to make my favorite black bean dish entirely on my own. The first time I made it alone I was so proud. Some recipes from YouTube were complete disasters. Some were incredible. It was genuinely fun. We’d talk while we cooked, listen to music, spend actual time together. We got closer.
$388 a Month. An Envelope. A New Rule.
Those two simple changes freed up $388 every single month. That’s $4,650 a year. We opened a completely separate savings account and called it the Adventure Fund. One rule: we don’t touch that money except for travel.
Every time we chose to make coffee at home or cook dinner instead of ordering out, I thought about that number growing. I checked the balance all the time. It’s hard to explain how satisfying that is until you’ve watched a number climb toward something you actually want.
That was almost a decade ago. Since then we’ve been to Italy, Morocco, Mexico, Peru, Nepal, the Czech Republic, and fifteen other countries. We hiked to Machu Picchu. We watched the sun rise over Mt. Everest. We got lost in the markets in Marrakech and drank mint tea with strangers. None of it would have happened without that stuffed envelope of receipts.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you: when you stop spending mindlessly, you don’t just have more money. You actually enjoy what you do spend more. Our one Sunday restaurant meal feels genuinely special now. Coffee shop visits feel like actual treats. We got more creative — we learned to cook dishes from countries we’ve visited. We found free things in our own city we’d never noticed before. Plugging the holes didn’t make life smaller. It made it bigger. The money was always there. It was just leaving through the wrong places.
Write down everything you spend for one month. Every single dollar. Use a notebook, your phone, whatever works. Don’t judge yourself — just observe. Be a scientist studying your own spending habits.
At the end of the month, add up the categories. Calculate what your daily habits add up to over a full year. Then ask yourself one question:
What could this money become if I redirected it toward something I actually want?
Maybe you want to travel. Maybe you want to start a business. Maybe you want a car. Maybe you want to go to college without loans. Whatever your big dream is — you probably have more power than you think. The money is already there. It’s just leaking out in ways you haven’t tracked yet.
You don’t need to be rich to live an amazing life. You just need to plug the holes and redirect what’s left toward the things that actually matter to you.
Figure out what you truly care about. Then make your spending match your dreams. That’s the whole thing. That’s where it started for us — a notebook, an envelope of receipts, and a calculator that showed us exactly what was possible.
This is just what worked for us. Nearly a decade of it. You can choose to do what we did.