I didn’t expect our Saturday morning coffee to turn into a full-blown budget intervention. But there we were—me, halfway through a bagel, my partner silently scrolling through our bank app, both of us avoiding eye contact like we were waiting for the storm to pass. It wasn’t one big crisis that pushed us there. It was the slow build-up of little things: impulse Amazon orders, splitting dinners with credit cards, the “we’ll figure it out next month” habit we’d perfected.