Jason Foster 🥉

I’d start with: Rent 1,100, Utilities 150, Groceries/household 350, Transit 120, Fun 120, Misc/true expenses 100 renters insurance ~15, then auto‑save 600 to your emergency fund and leave roughly 300–350 as a checking buffer. After the first two cycles and average your actual grocery/transit spend and adjust those caps, and keep one card for variable spending so it’s easy to track. Biggest early pitfalls are setup buys and shared items creeping into your personal categories, so track roommate splits in a simple ledger and settle weekly.

Only makes sense if it's true 0% APR and you can auto-schedule equal payments to clear it a month early. Read twice: any deferred interest clause, the minimum payment being insufficient, and the late fee language that cancels the promo and backdates interest. Make sure there's no annual fee and that 10 percent beats what a cash-back card plus price match would do. If shipping is slow, confirm when the promo clock starts and get it on the receipt.

An e-reader with an adjustable front light and warmer color temp feels like paper and eases eye strain at night. Affordable options around a hundred offer matte screens and long battery life so you can read for hours without harsh blue light.

Split by income if pay is uneven. One joint account for rent, utilities, and groceries. Automate transfers on payday and stop micromanaging.

Pick a monthly floor using your worst recent month and budget only from that. Cover rent, utilities, food, and gas first, then hold all nonessential spending until you see the second paycheck of the month. Any income above the floor goes to a checking buffer until you have one month of expenses, then to an emergency fund target around $1000. I use automatic transfers the day deposits land so I do not have to think about it.

Broad toe boxes stopped the pinching and let me run longer & and a proper in store fitting matters since sizing varies. Choose cushioning that feels right because too little hurts and the right amount keeps you comfortable.

Figure your bare bones number first. That is rent, utilities, groceries, phone, transit, and insurance, nothing cute. Start with one month of that, then push to three months, because variable income plus HCOL bites when two slow months hit back to back. Easiest ramp I know is a skim and salary setup where every payment lands in a holding account, you autopay yourself the same amount each week, and anything left after bills spills into savings until each rung is met. I had a stretch where my hours got sliced and the two month cushion kept me from swiping a card, so I keep the rule tight and boring.

You want asynchronous gigs with clear deliverables that fit into 60 to 120 minute blocks. The easiest place to start is small writing jobs like podcast show notes, blog post summaries, or product description rewrites. Put your $100 into a couple of clean portfolio samples and getting visibility on Upwork or Fiverr, using Canva to format samples and paying the small bidding or listing fees. Create three samples, set fixed prices like $35 for a 400 word summary, $50 for show notes with timestamps, and $30 per bundle of 5 product descriptions, then only pitch gigs that say no meetings. Batch your outreach on Sunday, save a proposal template, and aim for two quality pitches per week so it stays a habit rather than a second job. Add quick win fillers like UserTesting, Prolific, or Respondent studies which pay roughly $10 to $50 per session and run 10 to 45 minutes, perfect for weeknights. If you like simple tech, offer micro tasks in Google Sheets such as Remove duplicates, TRIM to fix spaces, SPLIT or TEXTSPLIT to break fields, and VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP to merge lists, which often pay $20 to $35 an hour on fixed scope. For longer term upside, build and sell digital templates on Etsy or Gumroad like Notion dashboards, budgeting spreadsheets, or resume kits so your hour on Sunday creates an asset you can resell. Ship one template per week, write a clear use case and instructions, add screenshots, and reinvest early sales into better mockups and keywords. Protect your energy by time boxing to 90 minutes a night, setting a floor of $25 per hour effective pay, and declining anything with recurring meetings or same day turnarounds.

Two ideas if you like a little DIY... Magnetic boundary tape is an easy invisible fence when you tuck it under a thin rug around your cable pile so you do not have to redraw the map every time something shifts. If you want a physical guard that looks clean, stick a strip of foam weather seal to the floor in a shallow U around the power strip and the wheels will refuse the climb. I also add a small flag of painter's tape near the end of flimsy cords to make them more visible, and I parked a doormat as a sacrificial zone at the entrance to the TV nook. Did a full remap after setting all that up and the paths are much smarter now, it used to nose under the stand and chew things then get mad and beep and now it glides past.