Guides
Financial guides
13 plain guides to reading your cash flow, keeping your records honest and arriving at tax time with the work already done.
Foundations
How to organize your personal financesA sequence that works: get everything in one place, make the records true, then start asking questions of them. 2 min read.How to understand your monthly cash flowIncome minus expenses is the headline. The useful part is which of those numbers is volatile, and why. 2 min read.How to build a personal budgetBuild the budget from what you actually spent, in the categories your own money already falls into. 2 min read.How to calculate your net worthEverything you own minus everything you owe — one number, whose direction matters far more than its size. 2 min read.Why organizing your finances mattersOrganized records do not make you richer. They make every later decision cheaper, from a monthly budget to a tax return. 2 min read.How to keep side income separate from your personal moneyIf you earn money working for yourself, the most useful habit is separation: one place for that income and its costs, apart from everyday spending. 3 min read.
Your accounts
How connected bank accounts work in CountorraWhat happens when you connect an institution, what Countorra receives, and what it never receives. 2 min read.How to review imported transactionsA short, repeatable pass that keeps an imported ledger honest: transfers, then duplicates, then categories. 2 min read.
Taxes
How to prepare your financial information for tax seasonMost of the work is gathering and organizing, and almost all of it can be done before the forms arrive. 2 min read.Federal and state personal income taxTwo separate systems, two separate calculations — and in some states, only one of them applies. 2 min read.How to prepare before speaking with a tax professionalArrive with organized records and a written list of questions, and the conversation is worth far more. 2 min read.Why preparing your taxes feels difficultThe arithmetic is rarely the hard part. Gathering a year of scattered records, months after the fact, is. 3 min read.