A Better Way to Manage Your Everyday Money - Book - Page 11
The Backstory
Are you familiar with the phrase "more month than money?" That's the situation that happens
when you run short of money before the end of the month or before next payday. It's a condition
with which most wage earners are familiar. It was my problem for many years.
I've always had a decent income. What I didn't always have was an effective way to manage my
income. I'm not an accountant… just a breadwinner who, when my wife Lois and I were married,
did not know how to make the bread go far enough.
For about the first ten years after we were married, I used trial-and-error money management.
There never seemed to consistently be enough money to pay bills and for day-to-day expenses.
One payday we would have more spending money than we needed; the next we would run out of
pocket money long before the next paycheck. It was a continual cash roller coaster.
Like most people, I had not received any kind of formal or informal training to prepare me for
the awesome responsibility of managing my income. I was on my own with no financial
roadmap as I searched for any type of money management method that would work for me.
I tried traditional monthly budgets and found that keeping track of every penny spent was
something I didn't care to do. Following my budgets started off great, but didn't last long. I tried
bill consolidation loans and, after doing several, realized that consolidation loans by themselves
are not the answer. They served only to increase my debt instead of helping me to control my
finances. Keep in mind that this was all happening well before the advent of personal computers.
There weren't any software options for personal financial management.
Over the years I gradually, without any premeditated idea of what I was doing, developed a
system for paying my bills, which also evened out the cash highs and lows between paydays.
This system was nothing more than a consistent way of looking at my finances twice a month. I
was doing this all on scratch paper with no formal structure.
When my very simple approach to cashflow management evolved into something that I could
consistently use is impossible to pinpoint. All I can say with certainty is that while I was paying
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