Early in 2003…
Julie and I (Jesse) married. Living on love was great and all, but we still required food, shelter, and textbooks for school. (Yes, we were still in school.) I knew we would need to watch what little money we had very closely. So, I began developing a system that grew into something quite useful. It really boiled down to four simple rules:
- 1 We decided what we wanted our money to do before we spent it.
- 2 We broke up larger, less-frequent expenses into manageable “monthly bills.”
- 3 We changed our budget as needed.
- 4 We only spent money that was at least thirty days “old.”
Living this way, and seeing how absolutely invaluable the Four Rules were, we wanted to spread the word. YNAB (“why-nab”) launched in September 2004.
