How you can lose several years of your life if you're not particularly dumb, seemingly frugal, but just don't do the math.

I lived in Kazakhstan and earned $200 a month, supporting a family of three. Naturally, the money wasn't enough, and I'd never heard of "saving and setting aside" — it wasn't possible anyway.

I moved to the US and immediately started earning minimum wage — $2,000. That was enough for everything: $500 to family in Kazakhstan, $500 for a hostel bunk, $500 to live on, and $500 toward a $5,000 debt I'd borrowed for a year from two friends to make the move.

To me, that was the height of wealth. I picked up two side jobs on top, which let me pay the debt back early plus $200 extra — $100 to each friend.

After paying off the debt, I got a driving job and started living in the car. Unfortunately, living outside a home meant I couldn't save the $500 I used to pay for the hostel bunk, because eating out cost more. The new budget looked like this: $750 — food, $750 — family, $1,000 — savings.

Six months in, with $6,000 saved, I broke my arm. Flew to Kazakhstan, didn't work for six months — rehabbing the arm. Thank God I had an American credit card with travel rewards, which I used for the round-trip tickets. When the money ran out completely, I started living off the credit card, and to avoid paying interest, I flew back to work with my arm still not fully recovered.

The following year, having seen how much the credit card had bailed me out, I started "playing the credit cards" — that's what they call it in the US when you use credit cards in the black, getting sign-up bonuses and cash back and coming out well ahead. I ramped up my credit score and credit limit very quickly and aggressively — up to about $20,000 at that point. And after another year at the same pace — $750 for me, $750 to family, $1,000 to savings — I tore my meniscus. That's the cartilage in the knee. In some complicated way at that.

Flew to Kazakhstan in a wheelchair. After surgery, six months of recovery, learning to walk again. Money ran out, started spending on the credit card, and to avoid paying interest, I had to fly back to the US still leaning on a cane. Again the credit card saved me, since it let me pay for tickets with points and keep living when the money ran out.

After the credit card bailed me out a second time, I started growing my credit score and limit with even more enthusiasm.

Changed jobs, got my truck license, started earning $3,000 a week. My personal credit limit at that point was around $50,000, and it "blew my mind." Or rather, I just stopped counting money. Why bother? There was a roughly infinite amount of it. Besides, I'm not a spender. I earned $3,000 a week — that's $12,000 a month — and I spent significantly less (just $3,000 a month).

Rented an apartment for $750 a month, financed a car for $750 a month, spent $750 a month, and sent $750 to Kazakhstan. At that pace — earning $3,000 a week and spending $3,000 a month — I worked for another year. Since I worked hard and couldn't always get six hours of sleep, there was no time to count.

I planned and paid for — thank God, also with points — another vacation in Kazakhstan. And there, having calmed down, I tried to figure out why, earning $3,000 a week and spending $3,000 a month, it was getting harder and harder to pay off the credit card balances to avoid interest.

First, it turned out my brain only remembered the best weeks, the ones that hit $3,000. But in reality there were weeks at $2,500, at $2,000, and less.

But the main thing — I hadn't accounted for the fact that even at the hardest work pace I can possibly sustain, I can only work 39 out of 52 weeks a year. That's two months on the road and one week off, plus one vacation a year to see family.

So at maximum I could sustain a schedule of working 75% of the time and resting 25%. And I wasn't factoring that into the mental math of my pay.

Under those terms, if I earned $2,500 a week on average, that was no longer $10,000 a month but only $7,500.

And the average didn't even reach $2,500. Plus that money was before business expenses. I knew the formula — profit equals revenue minus expenses — but why bother counting $20–30 for parking or $80–90 for shoes? Why count tens of dollars when your paycheck is $12,000 and your spending is $3,000?

In the end, after subtracting rough expenses, it turned out my average profit was $2,000+ a week. And since I don't work 100% of the weeks in a year, only 75% — 39 weeks — it turned out that despite the $2,000+ income, the disposable money per week of the year was around $1,500, or about $6,000 a month.

Same story on the expenses side. Adding insurance, maintenance, gas, washes, and other costs to the car, it ran well over $1,000. The apartment with payments and parking rental was also close to $1,500. Food turned out to be $1,000 a month, not $750, plus $500 for health insurance. And there turned out to be a few more installment plans in Kazakhstan than I'd imagined.

By the time I realized that paying off the credit cards on time was getting difficult, I had around $100,000 in credit limit: $50,000 personal and $50,000 business. Plus weekly income of $3,000–3,500+. It created the illusion that I had roughly infinite money. Credit card balances of a few thousand dollars seemed insignificant compared to limits in the tens of thousands.

On January 1, 2025, realizing that I was spending about as much as I earned — around $6,000 a month — and that the credit cards were maxed at about $6,000, I got scared. Where do I get that money if I'm spending exactly what I earn?

I realized I couldn't afford to rent the apartment and pay for the car. But the problem was, the apartment lease was already signed for six months ahead, and the remaining car loan was higher than the car's resale value.

I started saving and the first thing I did was unsubscribe from every subscription. The subscriptions added up to hundreds of dollars. Another medical leave in April 2025 was again paid for with credit card points. Luckily I was only sick for a month.

In June the lease ended and I became homeless in the US again, but happy this time. Because of that, by January 1, 2026, I figured I'd broken even — all credit card balances paid off and around $8,000 in savings. That should cover taxes and two weeks of rest in January and April.

And in April 2026, I sold a 2020 Toyota RAV4 for $18,000 — a car I'd bought three years earlier for $36,000. The remaining loan at the time of sale was $20,400, so I paid $2,400 out of pocket just to have it taken away. On top of that, over 40 months I'd paid the bank $28,200 in installments.

$30,000 over three years. And that's just for the car.

$18,000 over a year and a half of renting an apartment I had no time to live in.

And these weren't crazy expenses. I didn't gamble it away at a casino. I didn't blow it on showing off. I wasn't buying Rolexes or flying business class. I just wasn't counting.

Didn't count the year, only counted the best weeks. Didn't count the car's expenses, only counted the payment. Didn't count the apartment I barely lived in. Didn't count vacations, illnesses, and downtime. Didn't count small expenses, because against the big weekly income they seemed unimportant.

And that's how you lose not one bad month but several years of life.

Try to find time to count how much you actually earn and how much you actually spend. Not in the best weeks. Not in your head. Not by feel. Not by credit limit. But specifically by transactions over a year. Because if you don't count, you can accidentally lose $50,000 and not even understand where exactly it went.

Today we finished work on the bilingual blog-diary. The core idea: all entries are stored in a structured database, from which AI can quickly retrieve and analyze them, answering any questions about the history of my thoughts. And the site itself is a convenient, aesthetic shell so I can read my own entries. We set up automatic publishing, added light and dark theme support, implemented bilingual content, and built an elegant star rating mechanic. The project is officially launched and ready to go.

Testing the new file format. The filename now includes both date and time, and the file itself has YAML frontmatter with all the fields. This should be readable by Next.js out of the box, no extra parsers needed.

Third test entry, created after the scenario was activated. The first two rows existed before activation so Make ignored them — its pointer was set to "from now on". This row should be picked up by the next scheduled run.

Today we set up automatic diary publishing through Make. The scenario watches Baserow and creates markdown files in GitLab. This is the second test entry — checking whether Make actually picks up the new row and drops a file into the repo. If it works, we can start writing the diary for real without worrying about the infrastructure.