Our family spent a month cash stuffing. Here's our bumpy path to $1,000 in savings

For years, there was a box on a back shelf of P’s house in Edmonton labelled “insurance.” (For reasons of privacy, we are using this initial only.) Her husband at the time thought it contained paperwork, but P had filled it with a different kind of insurance: a physical record of smashed phones, broken eyeglasses, and photographs of the bruises his violent episodes had left on her body. “I had a circle of blue bruises around my mouth because he would cover my mouth and smother me,” she told me. Photographs, videos, and audio recordings are highly persuasive to judges and juries. When a...