I Finally Looked At Our Actual Numbers

By Jack Mercer · Money · June 9, 2026

I avoided our real financial picture for a year. Here’s what happened when I stopped.

For about a year I had a rough idea of our finances and a strong preference for not making it more precise than that. Rough felt safer than exact.

Then a bigger-than-usual bill landed in the same week as a smaller-than-usual pay period, and rough stopped being good enough. I sat down and actually built out every account, every subscription, every recurring cost.

It took two hours and roughly four uncomfortable realizations. We were paying for two streaming services nobody had opened in months. A “temporary” subscription from eight months ago was still temporary.

None of it was catastrophic. That was almost the most annoying part. There was no single villain to blame, just a slow accumulation of small leaks nobody had bothered to plug.

I expected the spreadsheet to make me anxious. Instead it did the opposite. The vague dread I’d been carrying around had more weight than the actual numbers did.

We cancelled the unused subscriptions that night. Saved less than I’d hoped, more than I expected, and got something more valuable than the dollar figure: I stopped flinching every time a bill notification popped up.

I’m not pretending one spreadsheet fixes a financial situation. But avoiding the numbers never made them smaller. It just made the not-knowing heavier.

---

Jack Mercer writes about real life for men who are too busy living it to talk about it. No advice. No solutions. Just one bloke being honest.