I Built A Spreadsheet Because I Was Afraid

I'm 41 years old. My wife and I have four kids, a nice house, and a yard full of projects that never seem to end. We drive used cars, stick to a budget, and generally try to make smart financial decisions.

From the outside, our life probably looks pretty stable.

But for years, I couldn't shake the feeling that it was never enough.

No matter how much we saved, I worried it wouldn't be enough to retire. I worried that one bad year, one layoff, or one unexpected salary cut would force us to sell the house and completely change our lives. Sure, we could afford our lifestyle now, but what if I lost my job and had to take one that paid less? What if everything we had worked for slowly slipped away?

I work in government contracting, where stability can disappear overnight. Over the last few years, contracts have slowly dried up. Then one day my employer sat me down and explained that profits were down and they had to cut my salary.

I was scared.

I was angry.

Mostly, I felt trapped.

I started looking for other jobs, convinced I could simply move somewhere else and keep building the life we had planned. But the offers I found paid even less than what I was still making. Every morning I found myself wondering:

"Is today the day they cut my salary again? Or worse, let me go?"

The strange part is that, on paper, we were doing well.

We had retirement accounts. We had savings. We owned a rental property. I had been tracking our net worth for years, and if the numbers continued to grow at the same pace, we would probably retire comfortably in our sixties.

But that realization didn't make me feel any safer.

That's when I realized I had been chasing the wrong number.

For years, I thought a bigger net worth would eventually make the anxiety disappear. I figured that once I reached some magical milestone, I would finally relax.

Instead, every time I reached one goal, I moved the goalposts.

I realized what I actually wanted wasn't a bigger number on a balance sheet.

I wanted options.

I wanted to know that if my job disappeared tomorrow, my family would still be okay.

So I started building a spreadsheet.

At first, it simply tracked our net worth. Then I added retirement projections. Then emergency funds. Then debt. Then rental income. Eventually I started tracking something I called "Passive Income Coverage"—the percentage of our monthly life that could be paid for without my paycheck.

Slowly, something unexpected happened.

The fear didn't disappear.

But it became measurable.

And once it became measurable, it became manageable.

I stopped asking, "Will I ever have enough?"

Instead, I started asking, "What small step can I take this month to make my family a little more secure?"

I don't have this all figured out. I'm not retired. I don't own ten rental properties. I'm certainly not a financial advisor.

I'm just an ordinary husband and father trying to build a life where one bad day at work doesn't put my family's future at risk.

This website is simply a record of that journey.

Some of the numbers I track I've been following for years. Others I only started measuring recently. None of them are really about becoming rich.

They're about answering one simple question:

If life doesn't go according to plan, will my family be okay?

I will go over these numbers over the next weeks and months to show you why I track them.

And if you're an ordinary family trying to build a little more security for your own future, maybe some of what I've learned along the way will help you too.