Waking Up From a Financial Bender? Don't Look Back
The Jesse Mecham Show
YNAB
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2026
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If life has pummeled you, and you've woken up from a financial bender -- hundreds of uncategorized transactions in YNAB with no recollection of what happend to all that money -- it's ok. Just get back on the horse and start again.
Jesse offers a humorous, and helpful, solution. Categorize all those transactions under a new category called "Bender," and start looking forward. Don't worry about what happened. Decide what your money needs to do for you now and in the near future, and assign the dollars you have now to those categories.
While reflecting on the past is important to understanding our behaviors and identifying areas of our spending where we need more clarity, it's only important to the extent it helps us get better at assigning money in the future. So pick yourself up, climb back on the horse (I mean, wagon) and give every dollar a job today.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, my name is Jesse Meekam with another episode of the Jesse Meekam show, |
| 0:16.2 | and I'm here each week to obsess out loud about you spending purposefully saving oh so aspirationally although we all |
| 0:23.7 | know that saving is just spending later so let's not give it some high and mighty throne on which |
| 0:28.1 | it can sit saving is just spending later all you people that think you're so great because you're so |
| 0:33.4 | good at spending your money later instead of now give it a a rest. I'm just kidding. What else do I |
| 0:40.0 | obsess about giving generously? But really, it's just money. And it's the worry that you carry about |
| 0:45.4 | money, this just pervasive thing in our lives. And I assert that you can get good at money. |
| 0:56.3 | And when you do, you will never worry about money again. I can also attest to the fact that you will get started. You'll get started with |
| 1:02.6 | Wynab.com. If you want to use our software, Wynab.com slash jesse to get started. And that software will |
| 1:08.3 | teach you how to give every dollar a job so that you feel clarity, |
| 1:12.7 | contentment, focus, purpose, and you begin to act in the world. You will be an agent |
| 1:19.7 | acting instead of, well, everything coming at you and feeling like you're, uh, yeah, you know, just don't look around the corner. |
| 1:31.2 | Something else is coming. |
| 1:32.6 | And it doesn't have to be that way. |
| 1:34.8 | We will have you proactively deciding beforehand what you want to do with your money. |
| 1:39.7 | However, as I mentioned last week, Julie and I felt a little bit of money worry creeping in, |
| 1:45.8 | not because we had been lax on knowing what our money was for, knowing that every dollar |
| 1:52.1 | has a job, but really because we were experiencing a big event in our lives. |
| 1:57.9 | And that event was causing the worry to creep in a little bit of a Trojan horse, |
| 2:02.6 | if you will. So we had to go back to the basics. I had to look at that pile of money on our |
| 2:07.4 | checking account and say, well, Julie, what should this money do before more money comes in? |
| 2:13.7 | And then what large or less frequent expenses do we anticipate? And then what do we want to set aside for next month? |
... |
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