Welcome @pickhardt !
Models are a bit tricky in Meteor because there isn’t a go-to ORM. I’ve rolled my own like this example. The concept is to share them on both the client and server. The client uses it to run it’s ‘simulation’ or ‘stub’ and the server copy does the real mutation.
For general app layout checkout my React-ive Meteor repo to see how you can organize your Blaze or React components/pages.
I would recommend reading this article to get the hang of template level subscriptions. It was very common to do this in the router and now the best practice is generally to let the template/component take care of it:
https://www.discovermeteor.com/blog/template-level-subscriptions/
I also just posted a new way to structure user actions and data manipulation, it might be worth reading as well (this will be rolled into React-ive Meteor in the next few days):
The nice thing is that Meteor lets you structure you app how you like. The bad part is that it takes a while to figure out what works best 