I’m Eric Dawson, and I write The Money Watch from a 1950s brick ranch in north Columbus, Ohio, usually at the kitchen table with a beagle mix named Biscuit asleep on my foot. I was born in 1988 and grew up in Kettering, just south of Dayton, in a house where receipts went into drawers and manuals outlived the things they explained.
Most of what you will read here starts in my own life. A parking ticket, a slow laptop, a candle label, a fee on a bill nobody can explain: ordinary life keeps handing me questions, and that is why this site covers so much that looks unrelated.
At 15 I tried to speed up our family computer by reinstalling Windows and wiped two years of family photos that nobody had backed up. I still back up before I touch anything. I did three semesters of community college in downtown Dayton, then let the stockroom shifts win.
My early twenties were ordinary work: a grocery stockroom, then four years in an apartment-property office in the Dayton suburbs, handling about 40 move-outs a year. In 2013 I moved to Clintonville, in Columbus, into a $725 one-bedroom, and lost $310 of my deposit to a carpet-cleaning clause I had skimmed. That is where this site really starts: I opened a notes file of questions I had got wrong.
For the next eleven years I worked the customer-service and operations desk of a regional wholesale distributor, reading invoices against their paperwork. My best day there was spotting a fuel surcharge billed twice on 63 invoices, which came back as a $4,100 credit. My worst money decision was all mine: a $1,395 service contract on a used 2014 Honda Fit that has never paid out a cent.
The notes file grew, and not only about money: the parking-app zone I got wrong in the Short North in 2021, the $38 a month of unused subscriptions in our household bills in 2023, printer settings, food labels, whatever friends asked next. By 2020 it held about 150 answers; by April 2025, when my desk job ended, about 400.
My wife, Megan, who has watched me open four browser tabs over a $40 question, suggested I stop calling it a hobby. The Money Watch started in September 2026 and works the way the file did: where my own experience answers a question, I tell you what happened to me, including what went wrong.
Where you need real information, such as a rule, a price or a fee you will act on, my experience is not enough. I research those thoroughly and rely on the people who publish and know it: the maker’s, agency’s or venue’s own page first, then independent sources that check it. Every figure goes into my fee sheet with the date I read it, and where sources disagree, I say which is more authoritative and why.
On money topics I report what the sources publish, not what you should do. I do not give tax, investment, legal, medical or insurance advice, and I never turn research into an experience I did not have.
If something here is wrong or out of date, email admin@themoneywatch.com. Corrections come first, and material changes are noted at the bottom of the article.
Eric Dawson
Columbus, Ohio