Welcome to Moneymatics: Why I Built the Money Site I Needed at 28

I was 28 years old, earning $67,000 a year, and I Googled “what is a 401k.”

Not because I’d never heard the term. I’d heard it a hundred times. But I’d nodded along during every conversation about it the way you nod along when someone references a movie you haven’t seen. Oh yeah, totally, I know that one.

I didn’t know that one.

And it wasn’t just 401ks. I didn’t really understand compound interest beyond a vague “your money makes more money” explanation. I didn’t know the difference between a Roth and a Traditional IRA. I had credit card debt I was carrying month to month without fully understanding what the interest was actually costing me. I had a “savings account” at my bank earning 0.01% interest, and I felt good about it because at least I was saving.

I was a reasonably intelligent adult with a decent income, and my financial literacy was roughly equivalent to a sophomore in high school who’d taken one unit on “money management” before the class moved on to something else.

The Embarrassing Realization

The thing that finally cracked it open for me was a conversation with a coworker named David. We were grabbing lunch, and I mentioned that I’d started looking into investing. He asked what I was doing with my 401k.

“I just have it set to… whatever the default was,” I said.

He looked at me with the expression of someone who had just realized I’d been leaving money on the table for three years. “Did you check if your company matches?” he asked.

They did. 4% match. I’d been contributing 0% since the day I was hired.

I had left, by that point, roughly $6,000 in free money on the table. Money my employer was offering to give me as a benefit of my job, and I hadn’t taken it because I hadn’t understood the system well enough to know I needed to opt in.

That was the most expensive gap in my financial education. And I knew there were more gaps I didn’t even know I had.

What I Did About It

I spent the next two years reading everything I could about personal finance. Books, blogs, Reddit threads. I read the Bogleheads forum until it started making sense. I read Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money three times. I finally understood what a mutual fund was, why index funds tend to beat active funds, and what “dollar cost averaging” actually meant in practice.

And here’s what I noticed as I went through this process:

Most of the resources were either too complicated or too corporate.

The complicated ones assumed I already knew things I didn’t know. They’d explain the difference between a TIPS ladder and an I-bond as if I had a baseline understanding of bond duration, which I did not.

The corporate ones — the NerdWallets and Bankrates of the world — were helpful databases, but they felt like they were written by committee. No warmth. No acknowledgment that money is an emotionally loaded subject. And somewhere between every third paragraph was a credit card recommendation I wasn’t sure to trust.

What I wanted was something that felt like a knowledgeable friend sitting across from me, explaining things in plain language, not trying to sell me anything, and not making me feel stupid for not knowing.

I couldn’t find that. So I built it.

What Moneymatics Is

The name blends money and mathematics — because I believe personal finance is fundamentally a math problem, but one that most of us are doing with our eyes closed, and that’s not our fault.

Moneymatics is the site I wanted when I was 28. It’s for people who:

Earn decent money but feel like they should be doing better with it
Have heard the terms (401k, index fund, Roth IRA, debt snowball) but aren’t sure they fully understand them
Are tired of being talked down to by finance “experts” who act like it’s all obvious
Want practical guidance without the product pitches

We cover six areas I think matter most to people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s: budgeting, debt, saving, investing, retirement planning, and growing your income. Each pillar has a “Start Here” article that meets you where you are.

What Makes This Different

A few things I’m committed to here:

No product pitches disguised as advice. I don’t get paid by credit card companies or brokerages to recommend their products. If I mention a specific company or product, it’s because I think it’s genuinely good, and I’ll tell you that directly.

Real numbers, real situations. Not vague percentages. When we talk about budgeting, we’ll talk about $60,000 salary budgets. When we talk about investing, we’ll use actual ETF names with actual expense ratios. Vagueness is where financial education goes to die.

Emotional honesty. Money is emotional. It triggers anxiety, shame, comparison, fear, and occasionally euphoria. Pretending those emotions aren’t part of the equation doesn’t make them go away — it just means we don’t address them.

Appropriate humility. There are things I’m confident about (the math of compound interest, the evidence for index funds, the importance of an emergency fund). There are things that are genuinely uncertain (short-term market movements, the right amount to save for retirement). I’ll try to be clear about which is which.

For You, Specifically

If you’re reading this, you’re probably somewhere in the early-to-middle stages of your financial life. Maybe you’re starting from scratch, or maybe you’ve done some things right but feel like there are gaps you don’t know about.

Either way, you’re in the right place.

Start with the Start Here guide if you’re new and not sure where to begin. Or jump into whichever pillar is most pressing for you right now — budgeting, debt, saving, investing, or retirement.

And sign up for the weekly newsletter. Every week I send one useful money insight, one thing I’ve been reading, and occasionally something honest about my own financial journey — the wins and the ongoing work.

Let’s figure this out together.

— Alex

P.S. The coworker who asked me about my 401k match? I bought him lunch for a year after that conversation. Cheapest lesson he ever taught me.