I want to tell you why Dollars & Sense exists. Not the elevator pitch , the real reason.

Where it started

Like many people, I didn’t grow up with an understanding of , or a healthy relationship with , money. I just knew that there was always tension around the topic.

When I became a mother, raising a little one, I went looking for answers. I read the money books. I watched the money shows. I tried the Excel spreadsheets, the handwritten budgets, the budget ledgers in the checkbooks (I might be dating myself here). I tried every angle to master my money, but I always found myself chasing it. Always $200 over budget, and genuinely surprised at how this could happen at the end of every month.

Two hundred dollars doesn’t sound like a lot until it’s the difference between making it to the next paycheck and not. Every single month.

The thing that clicked

Then I came across a very popular personal finance personality, and everything started to click. I finally felt empowered to take control of my finances by looking at my numbers , really looking at them , and seeing what I was spending and what debts needed to be paid down. I chose the snowball method for paying down debt, because I really needed those small wins to stay motivated.

This helped me manage my money. But something still felt somewhat disconnected. I could see the big picture, but I couldn’t see the details. Or I could see the details, but they didn’t connect to the big picture. No single tool showed me everything I needed in the way I needed to see it.

So I looked for a tool

Every app I came across covered some of what I wanted, but not all of it , or included things I didn’t want at all, but had no choice but to engage with. Maybe one app had a retirement calculator for planning, but lacked a net worth tracker. Or another let me set up my budget, but wouldn’t show me what I actually spent. Or another tracked daily expenses, but didn’t connect them back to my expense categories so I could see the impact. Or maybe it had everything, but the cost was out of my price point when I was still on the path to paying down debts.

I kept looking for the tool that did what I needed. It didn’t exist. So I built it.

What I wanted it to be

I had a short list. It had to be private , no bank connections, no data on someone else’s server (I am a bit paranoid about random servers having access to my private information). It had to be simple enough to use without a tutorial. It had to be honest without being harsh. It had to be a bit motivating, because I need a little motivation every now and again. And it had to feel calm, because money is already stressful enough without your budgeting app adding to it.

And then I started asking why

The tool was one thing. But along the way I kept finding myself digging into the why behind the prices I was seeing. Why groceries cost what they cost. Why gas prices moved the way they did. Why back-to-school shopping felt heavier every year. The answers weren’t complicated, but nobody was connecting the dots for people like me , people who aren’t economists but deserve to understand what’s happening to their money.

That’s what Pull Up a Chair is. It’s the space where we have the conversations that nobody else is having with us , about what things cost, why they cost that, and what we can actually do about it. Sometimes that’s a deep dive into a topic. Sometimes it’s a gathering. Sometimes it’s just a place to sit with the numbers and not feel alone in it.

What’s coming

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be looking at grocery prices, gas prices, and back-to-school spending , not just what went up, but why it went up and what the chain looks like from the source to your receipt. Every piece will include real data, cited sources, and something you can actually do with the information.