Reading the ledger

When Money Broke is a faceless documentary channel that decodes how ordinary households survived economic crises through their real budgets — the period ledgers, receipts, and prices that recorded what a decade actually cost.

Every story starts from the same place: a household budget, built entirely from primary sources — Bureau of Labor Statistics prices, Census Bureau income, the contemporary record — and then read line by line. Not headlines, not nostalgia. The cost of a gallon of gas, a dozen eggs, a mortgage payment, and what happened to the family that had to pay them.

It is calm, dense, evidence-first economic history. This site is the archive: the canonical home for the channel's work, where each episode is kept alongside the story behind it.