Hello, I am Maya Sarkis, and this is Enough Is a Number. I am an accountant in Beirut, and in 2019 my family lost nearly everything we had saved when the banks froze our accounts. This show is about what I learned afterwards, starting with the single most useful thing I did, which was to sit at my kitchen table and work out exactly how much our life costs in a year. Not what I earned, not what I wished for, but the real number. It came out 30 percent lower than I had been afraid of. Today I will walk you through how I did it, the three categories that quietly inflate everyone's budget, and a worksheet you can complete tonight with a pen and one bank statement. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.