How to give yourself grace with money

‘Crip time’ and the grace of margin

A quick note on language: In today’s newsletter, I use the term “crip time”—a phrase from disability justice communities that describes a more flexible, compassionate relationship with time. While “crip” has historically been used as a slur, many disabled people have reclaimed it as a term of empowerment.

The author lives with a disability and uses this term intentionally, as part of a broader invitation to give ourselves more grace both with our time and how we spend our money.

Do you know what America runs on, besides Dunkin’?

Rigorous and stubborn schedules.

From teachers to bus drivers to the morning zoo crew on Z100 FM, most of us rise with an alarm clock; we’ve got places to be.

Even my two children (who’ve been operating in an international waters-type situation with summer bedtimes) had to drag themselves out of bed this morning to get to summer camp on time.

The insistence on sticking to a schedule has allowed for astonishing productivity: grocery shelves are stocked and paychecks delivered like clockwork.

But one community has had to exist apart from rigid schedules for a long time, and their experience might offer a saner way of thinking about our money.

It’s called, somewhat jarringly, “crip time”—a concept from disability rights activists that describes a more flexible relationship with time, one where the body’s needs, not the calendar, set the pace.

Crip time is unpredictable because it needs to be.

Although I don’t use the phrase “crip” myself, I’ve had this experience many times as a result of my physical disability.

A pain flareup means that instead of sorting out my online banking, I’m spending 30 minutes lying on the floor. A Windows software update slows my speech recognition software, and suddenly I’m like a caveman staring at a computer, unable to get anything done.

Crip time acknowledges that your trajectory can easily get disrupted by forces out of your control.

And some version of it is always happening with your spending.

At the start of the month or year, you might imagine your priorities like celestial bodies set into perfect motion. You stack up your money ahead of time to fund those priorities and feel great about your perfect plan.

…And then you end up working late and eating Chipotle all week. Or you tweak your back lifting a bag of Kirkland dog food out of your trunk.

As our founder Jesse Mecham says, there is no such thing as a normal month.

As the writer Ellen Samuels put it:

“When disabled folks talk about crip time, sometimes we just mean that we’re late all the time—maybe because we need more sleep than nondisabled people, maybe because the accessible gate in the train station was locked. But other times, when we talk about crip time, we mean something more beautiful and forgiving.”

Crip time is a margin that extends grace to your situation.

It can be “beautiful and forgiving” because it helps us experience life without the heavy filter of productivity. After all, the belief (wish?) that planets and stars move in perfect, unchanging order was disproven back in the 1600s.

So, margin is what wise people give themselves.

At YNAB, we want you to create more money margin. Heck, we’ll help you do it! A pile of money that you can draw on for any number of important reasons… doesn’t that sound nice?

Maybe you need a weekend out of the city with your partner to reconnect.

Maybe you need to lend your brother $500.

Maybe you hear that your child’s teacher sprays Lysol on anyone who farts in their class and you decide to find a different afterschool program (true story.)

Though we tend to think of illness and disability as abnormal, orienting our days around a body on its own schedule is more common than we realize.

The parent of the young baby who struggles to get out of the house on time. The person suffering from insomnia who is technically present at the 3 o’clock meeting but is so, so tired. He appears to be operating on normative time but is a hidden dweller in crip time, barely hanging on to his calendar.

Don’t avoid the elastic nature of your life.

Embrace that your spending will follow priorities you didn’t plan, or that you might not have ever asked for. It’s life, right on schedule.

I’d love to hear from you— what’s one way you can offer yourself a little grace in your finances (or life) today?

Elastically yours,

Dan