Dan Cayer on Loose Change!
September 15, 2025

“Just earn more.” This is the hazy solution to a lot of financial worries, the quiet resolution we make to ourselves, the desperate promise we make to our partner in a late-night worry session about money: I’ll just earn more. What this solution has going for it is simplicity; you just have to work hard and wait. There’s cognitive comfort in staying in your groove, not having to consider radical changes to your employment or how you spend.

Where the just earn more approach fails is that it doesn’t actually stop you from worrying about money. Telling yourself that you’ll earn more only means that someday you’ll stop worrying about money. But for now? You’re urgently sitting on your hands.

Just earn more also depends on dim accounting. When are you getting a raise? How much will it be? And how much more money do you actually need to live without worry? The balloon of confidence loses air with every hard question.

About 15 years ago, when my health was at its lowest, a slogan from 12th-century Tibet gave me strange comfort: “Abandon any hope of fruition.” This slogan is not a call to catastrophize, just to let go of having to know how things will turn out. Success or failure, you don’t know. What happens when you stop looking to the future to save you?

Admittedly, this was a tough message for an unemployed, disabled, broke 20-something who was lying on the floor icing his arms all day. I couldn’t cook for myself, couldn’t turn the pages of a book. I was in severe need of fruition.

Here were the unthinkable thoughts: I might never get better. Our financial situation might never improve. We’d stay in this 330 ft² apartment forever, or until we were priced out and had to live in a raft off Coney Island.

To abandon hope of fruition seemed like giving up. Admitting defeat and letting this illness clobber me and eat up whatever promise remained of my life. But as I sat with this slogan in my apartment all day long, while my girlfriend and most everyone else was at work, I realized that the illness hadn’t put my life on hold, I had. Yes, things had dramatically changed and my future was uncertain, but whose wasn’t?

By thinking I couldn’t relate to my career, finances, mental health, or social life until my health was restored, I had made an unconscious decision to focus only on the future. My current life was flyover country on the way to somewhere better. The hope of fruition kept me from relating with things as they are.

Without the constant pressure to figure out The Solution, I ventured out of my isolation. I felt permission to hang out with my friends, started noticing small ways I could reduce my girlfriend’s burden around the apartment. My journal stopped consisting of tortured entries about the future and instead, I started writing about what was actually happening: how I felt, what I saw and heard, and ideas I had (which eventually became my job…).

This is what YNAB has done for my money life. Whereas I used to imagine that I’d be bailed out by the next paycheck, raise, or tax return, now I’m standing on my own two feet. I look at only the money I have right now and put it toward the things I need. When it comes to my future, I'm making my own luck, as it were, saving money each month for my next car repair, hip-hop & tumble classes for my eight-year-old, and a vacation next summer (Jersey Shore, baby!).

A big reason why people don’t look at their finances is the hope that they can get themselves out of this tight spot with more income in the future. It’s already been well-documented that, as a species, we suffer from overconfidence bias. We expect higher revenues, lower expenses and that our investments will grow faster than they actually do.

It’s natural to hope your financial situation will improve, and I hope it does! But don’t wait.

That was the message I received, 800 years in transit, there in my Brooklyn apartment. Don’t wait for your finances to improve, because money isn’t something you wait to happen to you. Being good with money is a skill, one that you can learn right now in your present circumstances. It’s never been a better time. You’ll decide over and over how you want to spend your money. Some will be spent on cilantro at the grocery store tonight and some will be spent in 10 years when you drop off your kid at college. You’re going to make difficult choices sometimes, but in deciding, you are taking charge of the situation.

At YNAB, we believe that how you spend your money is, to a large degree, how you spend your life. So don’t delay in deciding, don’t wait for the perfect, cash-flush moment. Join the lineage of folks who have decided that now is better than never.