Nick's family buys a half cow’s worth of beef from a ranch they trust. They grow tomatoes in their backyard garden that produces what Nick calls, without a hint of shame, “one $500 salad every season.” It's part lesson in patience, part effort to feed their kids something that isn't ultra-processed. Sometimes that means paying too much for organic nuggets at Whole Foods. "We're not going to feed our kids like campground raccoons," he says. "Even now."
“Even now” is doing some heavy lifting. Nick was laid off earlier this year, just a few weeks before his third child was born. He has 3 kids under the age of 5, and they're living on a single income. His wife is a pharmacist.
When Nick found out his position was going to be eliminated in a company restructure, his first instinct was that this would resolve quickly. Recruiters were reaching out, and he made it far in interviews at companies he respected. He gave himself a target: be somewhere new by February, right when his transition period ended.
February came and went. Then March. Now it's July, and Nick is taking equity instead of a paycheck at a scrappy AI startup while continuing to apply. "I originally thought there was no world where summer would come around and I wouldn't have a job," he says. "I've been so humbled."
"We Were Able to Say: Okay, what do we actually have?"
Nick and his wife have been using Monarch casually, but consistently, for a few years. She checks in weekly while he tends to log in monthly. When two incomes were coming in and things were mostly consistent, they'd do what he calls “a couples’ State of the Union” meeting: scan the accounts, kill a subscription they forgot about, make sure nothing had quietly gone sideways. While that meeting happens less frequently these days as they adapt to life as a family of five, they still check Monarch regularly. .
When the news of the layoff broke, Monarch became something different for them.
"Household income just went from steady to a radically different reality," Nick says. "If we didn't have visibility into our financial picture, we would have been scrambling to figure it out."
Instead, they could look. Nick pulled up their accounts, took what was coming in from severance, and ran the math on what a one-income household would actually look like for a period of time: mortgage, daycare (expensive, but not optional). He assessed all the things that don’t pause when your circumstances change. Together, Nick and his wife mapped optimistic, realistic, conservative, and worst-case runways. It wasn't a perfect picture, but it was enough to help them know what the next 6 to 12 (or more) months could look like depending on how the job hunt unfolded.
"It's still stressful," Nick says. "But knowing your runway is different from not knowing it."
Thirty Accounts and Counting
Nick counted his Monarch accounts mid-conversation and landed at 30. Checking, savings, dedicated accounts for mortgage and daycare, student loans, credit cards, investment accounts, retirement accounts, and 529s for all 3 kids.
If you couldn't tell already, his favorite feature is the accounts tab. He values the full picture and the net worth number that rolls up everything from everywhere.
"When you get married, you both bring financial baggage from different places," he says. "There's just no way to know what you actually have without something that lets you see it all in one place."
And it's only going to get more complicated. Each of his kids will eventually need their own accounts. Checking, savings, maybe a credit card by high school. By his math, that's somewhere between 6 and 9 more accounts. He thinks about that now, even though that is years away.
What He Actually Wants to Hand Down
He's been turning over an idea he came across from a content creator who is teaching her teenage kids how to manage money. She has them map out 6 months of their expected expenses like haircuts, sports gear, and new clothes, whatever they need, and divides it into bi-weekly allotments (similar to a paycheck). It's on the kids to plan and manage the cashflow. If they blow the budget in week one, they have to figure it out.
"I thought, that's a cool way to do it," Nick says. "I imagine my kids having it all in Monarch, their accounts, their spending, where they're actually at, that would be the way to make it real for them."
His oldest has a pea plant and a strawberry plant she checks on every day. She waters them and watches them. She doesn't know yet that she's learning the same thing her dad has been relearning all year: you take care of something before you know you'll need it.
Nick is still looking. The startup might become something. The job market keeps surprising him in ways that require more patience than he thought he had. But he knows what he has, and he knows what he's building toward.
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Nick asked us to use a pseudonym because of his active job search. No other details of his story have been altered.
