Some financial defaults are negotiated. Many are silently embedded in the systems we are all party to — contracts nobody signed but everyone bears terms under.
The Unpriced names and prices these transfers: who provides the financing, who captures it, what the actual numbers look like, and what would change them. Each investigation follows the same template — name the instrument precisely, compute the exposure, surface the asymmetry, propose the levers.
Investigations
One investigation per piece. The next ones — credit-card grace periods, security deposits, withholding overcollection, gift-card breakage, the subscription lag — are in the queue.
The 401(k) Match Forfeiture
If you work 36 months and 1 day at an employer with a 3-year cliff, you keep 100 percent of your accumulated match. 35 months and 29 days: you keep zero. This investigation prices the labor-vesting asymmetry — same nominal match producing two entirely different economic packages depending on which side of the vesting threshold you sit on — and surfaces the 2024 wave of ERISA class actions that puts the mechanism in federal court.
The Payroll Lag
If you get paid every two weeks, you are extending your employer an interest-free loan worth roughly one week of your salary. Continuously. This investigation prices it — for paycheck workers and for bonus-eligible workers — and surfaces the asymmetry: the firm captures the float; workers can't charge for it. With a live calculator fed by FRED data.
Methodology covers every FRED series we pull, every editorial constant in the model, the downstream allocation of float between employer and government withholding, and the empirical gaps we are honest about.
Sources index and about page are forthcoming.