Issue 001. Pillar: CARRY, The Second Household.
The number
$7,242
What three quarters of family caregivers spend out of pocket in a year. It lands at roughly a quarter of their annual income.
$7,242 / 12 = $603 a month.
Source: AARP Caregiving Out-of-Pocket Costs Study. About 2,400 caregivers, expenses tracked across 30 categories, fielded 15 March to 25 April 2021.
The line you have probably said
"I'm just bad with money."
You are running a two-household paycheck through a one-household budget. That comes up short every month, and the shortfall is arithmetic, not discipline.
Every budgeting app on your phone was built for one household. You are funding two. The app is not wrong about the math it does. It is wrong about how many households it thinks you have.
The math, shown
Two columns, not one.
Cash I send. The transfer to your mom on the 3rd. The $200 for your sister's textbook. You know about these, because they leave as transfers and you can watch them go.
Cost I carry. The phone line still on the family plan. The insurance policy with two names on it. Groceries for a house you do not live in. The flight home when something goes wrong. These leave as your own spending, so your budget files them under you.
Run a month:
Line | Type | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
Transfer home | Cash I send | $300 |
Phone line on the family plan | Cost I carry | $45 |
Share of the insurance policy | Cost I carry | $90 |
Groceries for the house | Cost I carry | $120 |
Two trips home a year, averaged | Cost I carry | $150 |
$300 + $405 = $705.
The $300 is the number you would say out loud if somebody asked what you send. The $405 is the part that never got counted, and it is the bigger half.
The mechanism: the invisible line
Bank of America runs a survey every year on how many young adults receive family financial help. This year it read 34%, down from 46% in 2024. That is 1,133 Gen Z adults aged 18 to 29, fielded 10 to 28 February 2026, plus or minus 3.0 points.
Somebody funds a national survey, every single year, to count the money flowing toward you.
Nobody runs the survey pointing the other way.
That is the invisible line. The money is not hidden. It is that no instrument is aimed at it, so it never becomes a number, and a thing that is never a number cannot be planned around. It shows up instead as a feeling that you are behind, which is the least useful form the information could take.
The move, ten minutes, this week
Open your banking app and pull the last 30 days. Two columns on paper.
Left: every transfer out to a family member.
Right: every charge that exists because of somebody else in your family.
Do not adjust anything. Do not cancel anything. Just get the total.
Most people find the right column is larger than the left. That is the entire point of the exercise.
Or let the tool do the splitting.
The Second Household Calculator asks you to guess your number first, then splits every row into cash you send and cost you carry, and shows you the gap between the guess and the total. Free, and you can use it before you give an email.
One line I will keep repeating
This counts what you send. It never tells you to send less. That is not the job, and any tool that turns supporting your family into a line item to cut is solving the wrong problem.
One tap before you go
Which one is actually costing you the most right now?
The other three doors
Not your situation this week? Whichever of these is costing you the most, that is the one to open.
The BNPL Credit Exposure Checker: which of your Klarna and Affirm plans are actually on your credit report, and which are not.
The Filing Threshold Checker: no 1099 arrived, so you assume nothing is owed. Check the number that actually triggers a filing requirement.
The Paycheck Timing Map: for when the problem is not the budget, it is that the money lands after the bill does.
Broke Math is written by Kou. Every number here is sourced and dated. Where a figure is old, vendor-run, or measuring something adjacent to the claim, I say so in the line rather than in a footnote. Not financial advice.