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:

We decided what we wanted our money to do before we spent it. We broke up larger, less-frequent expenses into manageable “monthly bills.” We changed our budget as needed. 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.