Chronicle Do the reckoning
No budget. No spreadsheet. Just the real number.

Track your money.
Then track your life.

Chronicle prices every purchase in the one currency that doesn’t come back — hours of your life, at what your hour actually earns.

Do the reckoning Read the method
One ordinary Saturday entered both ways
A haircut, a full cart,
a long lunch, a matinee.
Money−$214.00
Life−11.6 hrs
Your life, the other ledger

Start with the week your body actually had.

Before we price the hours, look at how you’re spending them.

hours, honestly — not time in bed
in thousands — 6.5 ≈ 6,500 a day
a brisk walk, a workout, anything that lifts your pulse
phone plus laptop, outside of work

Your 168-hour week

Sleep · 48h Movement · 2h Screens · 39h Everything else · 79h
62well-week score, out of 100

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A rough gauge, not a diagnosis — sleep, movement and screen load, nothing more. Your inputs stay in this browser.

The idea

Money is life energy in another form.

You already traded the hours. The price tag just hasn’t caught up.

You go to work and hand over hours — morning alertness, patience, the good years — and receive money in exchange. By the time it reaches your account, it has already cost you the only thing that doesn’t come back. What you call a budget is really a schedule of how much more life you’re willing to trade.

So Chronicle keeps a second column. Beside every amount it records the same figure in hours, priced at what an hour of your life actually earns — after the commute, the wind-down, and the money you spend just to keep the job. That number is usually a good deal smaller than your salary implies.

“Money is something we choose to trade our life energy for.”
Vicki Robin & Joe Dominguez — Your Money or Your Life
Three steps, one number

What does an hour of your life actually pay?

Only you have anything to enter. It takes about ninety seconds.

1

Start with what you keep

$
$
commute, lunches out, work clothes, the coffee to cope
2

Count the hours the job really takes

what’s on the contract
getting there, getting ready, decompressing after
3

Divide the second by the first

Real money kept, over real hours given. That quotient is the exchange rate the rest of this page runs on.

$18.42your real hourly rate

Your payslip implies $24.00. The gap — $5.58 an hour — is the cost of showing up.

Payslip rate$24.00
Real rate$18.42

Starting figures stand in for a typical full-time worker. Overwrite them and everything below re-prices itself. Your inputs stay in this browser.

Conversions

What the everyday things really cost.

The same prices, read in the second column.

Priced at your real rate — $18.42/hr
PurchaseMoneyHours of your life
The month so far

September, kept in both columns.

A running balance you can feel, not just read.

DateEntryMoneyLife
Carried forward — —

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Chronicle

Track your money and you balance a column. Track your life and you decide what the column was for.

Do the reckoning