About Run Figures

I'm Jessica Winkler. Type A, INTJ, elder millennial, mom of four — twins first — and constitutionally unable to leave a question half-answered.

Run Figures is a set of tools I built because I wanted these answers and couldn't find them in usable form. Buried mid-article, half-computed, or built by a bank that wanted me to open something. Most of these got built on my phone while doing one of the twenty other things a family demands.

The math that started it

Twins meant two full-time daycare slots on day one and the math broke immediately. There was never a version where one salary covered it.

We're in Colorado. Housing costs here are high, and childcare still outran the mortgage. Six years and four kids later, it's still the largest line in our budget. Full daycare at this point would run us $5,000 to $6,000+ a month.

So daycare wasn't the answer and quitting wasn't either, we really couldn't afford for one of us to stop. What we landed on was a third thing: a part-time nanny, grandparents in the early years, and a schedule held together with tape. It cost roughly half what daycare would have and even then it was still our biggest expense.

I only found that option because I ran the numbers first and that's the entire idea here.

One thing I'd say honestly, because nobody said it to me: childcare is prohibitively expensive, most families get no meaningful help with it, and it will be your biggest expense for years. And it's worth it. It's a season. If you aren't spending money on your kids, I'm not sure what you were saving it for.

What these tools are

I work a real remote job — a true 40 hours, fixed schedule, a calendar full of meetings. Working from home is not childcare, and pretending otherwise is an expensive mistake. So I don't have hours to spend assembling an answer out of nine blog posts that each contain a third of it.

Every tool here is built to end in a number. I'm a long-time sufferer of analysis paralysis, and the thing that breaks a research bottleneck isn't more reading, it's one concrete figure and a clear view of what it doesn't account for. Where the math rests on an assumption, I show the assumption and where it came from.

Some of these answers are unhelpful. A few of them are "this doesn't work." I'd rather publish that than find something encouraging to say.

What I'm not

Not a financial advisor. Nothing here is personalized financial, tax, or legal advice — it's educational, it's arithmetic with sources attached, and your situation has variables no calculator sees. See the terms.

How this pays for itself

Run Figures will run display ads. That's it. No email list, no course, no affiliate funnel behind the results. The tools are deliberately aimed at questions where the honest answer is sometimes "don't buy anything," which is exactly why no bank has built them.

Contact

hello@runfigures.com. Real inbox. Tell me if the math is wrong — I'd genuinely rather know.

Run Figures is published by Digital Simplicity LLC, in business since 2009.