Money

A millionaire lived on $230 a week and discovered the money was the easy part

He budgeted for the groceries. Nobody warned him about the rest.

Matt Fiddes runs a multi-million dollar martial arts franchise in Britain, and his family moves through roughly $2,058 in a normal week without anybody glancing at a receipt. Then a documentary crew handed him a new number for seven days: $230. His first reaction wasn't emotional. It was arithmetic. "That basically fills up the fuel tank of my car," he said.

The swap sent the Fiddes family into the home of Andy and Kim Leamon, who stretch that $230 across two kids and two dogs. Kim lives with complex regional pain syndrome following a life-saving surgery after an accident; the savings are long gone, and Andy carries the household on his own. What Matt got was a week of grocery math, a neighborhood with nothing much in it, and night shifts he'd never worked in his life. In this story by Adam Albright-Hanna, the weekly budget is only the setup.

Because the budget was the part he could plan around. By the end of the week, Matt had a sentence he couldn't shrug off, his wife had cried in a stranger's kitchen, and the family left something behind in the Leamons' house on their way out. It wasn't cash. Meanwhile, the Leamons spent seven days finding out what it feels like when money isn't a running calculation in the back of your head.

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And what did we learn?

Yesterday we covered New York’s efforts to curb screen time for children.

How do GOOD readers feel about the attempts to get screens out of little hands? Less than 10% thought the whole thing was a non-issue, while most of the remainder want to keep up the fight.

• Fight the good fight, screen time is a scourge (41.8%)

• Valiant, but you can't put the genie back in the bottle (20.1%)

• It's not the hours, it's what's on the screen (29.9%)

• Every generation panics about something. This is our "rock 'n' roll" (8.2%)

Well-being

The healthiest couples aren't the quietest ones

Your relationship might be too peaceful for its own good.

Most of us read a fight-free month as proof that things are going great. Therapists read it as a warning light. The average couple lands somewhere around two or three arguments a month, and the people who study this for a living think that's not nearly enough.

The catch is what counts as a fight. As Mark Wales reports, the dictionary version of an argument is a coherent series of reasons offered in support of a point of view, which is a long way from two people saying the worst thing they can think of at midnight. Relationship therapists draw the same line: specific issues, actual listening, and an apology at the end are healthy. Name-calling, threats, and stonewalling are not. One version builds something. The other leaves a mark.

And the couples who work hardest to keep the peace tend to fare worse. Research on conflict-avoidant partners found more aggression, not less, and higher rates of depression among the women in those relationships. Skipping the small stuff doesn't make it disappear. It just stores the feeling somewhere until it comes out sideways.

On August 11, 1866, a fashionable Newport, Rhode Island hotel cleared out its dining room and let strangers roll around in it. The Atlantic House, which had housed the U.S. Naval Academy during the Civil War, needed paying guests again, so it handed the room over to New York inventor James Plimpton. What opened that day was the first public roller skating rink in the United States.

Plimpton had patented his four-wheeled "rocker skate" three years earlier, and its trick was steering. Lean left, go left. Earlier skates were far harder to maneuver, which is a poor foundation for a night out. He also had a shrewd streak: his business model relied heavily on renting skates at rinks, turning an empty room into a revenue stream.

"Rinking" became a craze, and the country soon had skating clubs, conduct rules, proficiency tests, and roller polo. The Atlantic House itself was demolished in 1877, but the idea it helped launch never stopped rolling. Every roller derby bout, disco skate night, and eighth-grade birthday party is still running on a version of Plimpton's playbook.

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