Morgan Kane

I'm Morgan Kane. I've spent my career in software quality assurance, the job most people describe as "finding things that are broken and figuring out how to fix them." That same obsession with correctness, edge cases, and realistic user behaviour is what I bring to every article on this site.

Unburden exists because I needed it. I had debt, the quiet accumulating kind that multiple balances across credit cards and loans produce when minimum payments barely move anything. I have ADHD, which changes how time, reward, and consequence land in a brain. I tried every debt payoff app on the market, and each one failed me for the same reason: they were built for someone else's brain, someone else's financial situation, someone with a willingness to hand over bank credentials to a fintech I had never heard of.

So I built the tool I needed. Unburden is what came out of that. The blog is the reasoning behind it — the math, the research, the patterns I kept seeing in hundreds of debt profiles I modeled while writing the app.

What I write about

The articles on this site fall into four buckets:

• Debt payoff math. Snowball versus avalanche, minimum payment traps, the actual interest cost of waiting six months to start, what an extra $100 per month does to a timeline. Calculated, not motivational.
• ADHD and money. Why traditional budgeting fails executive function, money triggers specific to ADHD brains, the four-part debt cycle I see repeatedly in reader stories, and which strategies actually stick.
• Financial vulnerability. The Burden Score measures how much pressure your debt is putting on you personally, not how much risk you pose to a lender. Most content on this site returns to that distinction because it matters more than credit-score content pretends.
• Canadian personal finance. BNPL in Canada, tariff effects on household budgets, provincial differences in consumer debt, and the math lenders do not show you before signing.

Credentials and process

I am not a licensed financial advisor, a CFP, or a credit counsellor. What I bring is a QA career spent validating software, a personal history of paying down six figures of combined household debt, and the research discipline that background requires. Every article includes its sources. Every calculation is amortization math any reader can verify with a spreadsheet. Every number is reviewed before publication.

Every article on this site is researched, written, and verified by our editorial team before publication. Sources are cited. Calculations are checked against amortization math. If a number is wrong, it is my responsibility.

Why the math matters more than the motivation

The personal finance industry has a tendency toward inspiration. Pay yourself first, build good habits, visualize your debt-free life. None of that is wrong, but it skips the part that actually helps: the specific number, for your specific situation, that tells you what happens if you do X instead of Y. I write the second part because the first part is already everywhere.

When I run the math on snowball versus avalanche across a thousand debt profiles, the avalanche wins on interest saved for 72% of profiles. That is a number. It is also different from the number you will see on most personal finance sites, because most personal finance sites have not run the math. When I write about the minimum-payment trap, I show where every dollar of a $200 payment goes on a specific balance at a specific APR, because general claims about "most of your payment being interest" leave readers unable to act.

The goal is to produce content that lets a reader run the calculation for their own situation afterward. If the article does not leave you with a method, it probably does not belong here.