About
An independent publication, run by one person.
No editorial team, no staff writers, no sponsored placements. If something here is wrong, one person wrote it and one person fixes it.
The Planned Life publishes practical systems for planning, money and focused work — for people whose weeks don't repeat. Irregular hours, exam periods, a small business with lumpy income, a month where everything lands at once.
Why this site exists
Most planning and budgeting advice is written for a calm, identical week: up at five, same class every morning, predictable paycheck. That advice fails the moment life isn't shaped like that, and people conclude they're bad at planning. Usually they just picked a system built for someone else's week.
So the test for everything published here is narrow. Does it survive a bad week, and can you restart it after you drop it?
Who makes it
One person, working independently, based in Europe and writing mainly for a US and international readership. I've chosen not to publish my full name or a portrait, so I'm not going to dress this up with credentials or a stock photo of someone at a desk. What I can tell you is what actually informs the work:
- I design and sell the planning and budgeting templates in the shop, so the spreadsheets and printables used as examples are files I built and use.
- I write the calculators on this site myself, in plain JavaScript, and each one publishes the formula it uses so you can check it against your own maths.
- I run a one-person business, so the pricing, fees and monthly-review material comes from doing it rather than reading about it.
I am not a financial adviser, an accountant, or a licensed professional of any kind, and nothing here is personal financial advice. It's arithmetic and method, which is a different thing.
How the tools and templates are built
Every calculator runs entirely in your browser. The numbers you enter are never uploaded — they're saved on your own device so the page remembers them when you come back. Each tool states its assumptions and shows its formula. Where a rule of thumb is used (for example, roughly two study hours per credit per week), it's labelled as a rule of thumb, not presented as a finding.
How recommendations are researched
Buying guides are researched from manufacturer specifications, patterns across publicly available reviews, and my own analysis of what a category is actually for. Those three are labelled separately on the page, because they are not the same kind of evidence.
I don't claim hands-on testing I haven't done. If I haven't used something, the guide says so. No star ratings are invented here, no prices are copied into a page where they'll be wrong next week, and no testing is attributed to a staff that doesn't exist. The full method is on how guides are researched.
How the site makes money
- My own products. Spreadsheets and printable templates sold through my Etsy shop. This is the main source of income, and those links are always marked as my own products rather than recommendations of someone else's.
- Amazon Associates. Some buying guides contain affiliate links to amazon.com. If you buy through one, the site earns a commission at no extra cost to you. Terms: affiliate disclosure.
Nothing here is paid placement. No brand has ever paid to appear on this site, and if that ever changes it will be labelled on the page in question rather than buried in a footer.
What this site won't do
- Put a calculator or a basic download behind an email form.
- Invent statistics, studies, reader counts or test results.
- Publish a "best of" article whose only value is a reordered Amazon page.
- Recommend a product on an article whose problem it doesn't solve.
- Pretend to be a team.