Taking My Own Advice

From time to time, I take on various self-improvement projects, some of which are fruitful. During 2011, these projects have included praying, cooking, running, reading, and sewing, and probably others.

Inspired by The Millionaire Next Door, by Dr. Tom Stanley, I’ve decided to get a better handle on my family’s living expenses.

I’ve decided to put myself and my family on a budget.

I heard that. You gasped. “What?! No Clark Family budget?! But she’s an accountant! She has to do a monthly household budget.”

Well, there, I’ve confessed it. Like a carpenter sleeping under a leaky roof, a mechanic driving a crappy truck, and a farmer with a crop failure in the backyard garden, this accountant keeps no household budget. Shame on me. Budgeting is my new self-improvement project.

Back when I worked in the real world…what seems like a hundred years ago now…Matt & I created what the author of the book calls “an artificial environment of economic scarcity,” or something like that. Basically, this means, when you get paid, you take money out of your paycheck and save or invest it first before you pay bills or buy groceries. The idea is that if one feels like she has no money, one will act like she has no money and thus blow less money on fake pearls, fountain soda, and super-cute shoes. Well, this worked fine as long as I had a paycheck, but like so many things in our lives, cancer changed this too. Working while our infant was undergoing cancer treatment was neither practical nor desirable and thus there was no steady paycheck to facilitate this strategy.

On the first day of every week each one of you is to put aside and save, as he may prosper, so that no collections be made when I come.—I Corinthians 16:2

When the most intensive phase of John’s therapy ended, I went back to work briefly on part-time basis, then opted for self-employment. Matt & I have never taken the time to re-implement this strategy that served us so well in the early years of our marriage. It was not that it was not possible to create a new household spending strategy; we just lacked the initiative to do so.

If you’ve ever been a farmer or a farmwife, you know that those summer months between the time you apply your hard-earned cash (and, if your banker agrees, perhaps some of his) to purchases of fertilizer, fuel, seed, and chemicals, and the harvest season when your crop comes to fruition can get long. The same is true in the tax preparation business, which is also seasonal.

Thanks to the nature of our jobs, the threat of actual economic scarcity is always at the back of my mind, and sometimes at the front of it. That’s why I’ve decided to adopt a defensive strategy against this threat.

“The plans of the diligent lead surely to advantage, but everyone who is hasty comes surely to poverty.”—Proverbs 21:5

I’ve identified at least 4 elements of this strategy.

1.       Household Expense Account

I always advise my clients who are business owners to have separate checking accounts for their business and personal spending. This is another bit of my own advice I have been slow to adopt, but, a couple weeks ago, we opened a checking account just to pay household expenses. This will avoid having dozens of transactions posted vaguely every month to “owner’s draw” in the general ledgers of our businesses.

2.      Monthly Transfer

After estimating monthly household expenses, I will transfer to this account only enough to cover this amount and use this money for discretionary household spending. No more will I use the excuse of accumulating credit card points to justify credit card use. I’ve heard somewhere that researchers have discovered that shoppers tend to spend more when using a credit card as opposed hard cash because the expenditure is not as real when you’re using plastic. This supposedly holds true whether or not credit card holders carry a balance or pay the card off every month. I should look up the statistic and cite it here, but my boys are nagging me to get them drinks, so I won’t right now. I really don’t think this behavior pattern holds true if one is a disciplined spender and saver, but as I confessed, I no longer am.

3.      Grocery Envelope

I honestly do not have a good idea of what we spend on groceries, but I know, next to our house payment and health insurance, it is our largest monthly expenditure, and furthermore, it is an expense which we can control from month to month. So, I’ve put myself on Dave Ramsey’s envelope system with regard to grocery spending. At the first of each month (today) I intend to put the cash estimated to be required for our monthly food expenditures in an envelope and attempt to use only this money to feed my family. I actually did this last night, right before buying 2 gallon of milk and a dozen eggs from the grocery store and 2 pizzas from Casey’s. So, before the month even started, my grocery fund is down $30! I fear I have not been realistic about the amount of cash I’ll need. But that’s the idea; to quantify the expense, then work to reduce it.

4.      Just say “NO” to Wal-Mart

I loathe above most all things a trip to Wal-Mart, but that’s not why I’m finding it important to avoid it. Analyzing our household expenditures year-to-date, I was ashamed to see how much money I have spend at Wal-Mart. Of course, al lot of this was no doubt groceries, but you and I both know, a lot of it was not. It’s difficult for me to get a handle on grocery spending when shopping at Wal-Mart because, inevitably, I’ll buy a pile of fabric remnants, a birthday gift, and a new toilet seat, in addition to $100 worth of groceries. Yes, I suppose I could pay for the groceries separately, but that’s one reason I dislike going to Wal-Mart; I don’t want to be stuck behind that woman who is paying separately for purchases for work, her Grandma, and each of her own 4 kids. I find I’m not nearly as tempted to buy stuff we really don’t need if I shop at Dollar General, simply because they really don’t have anything I actually want. Sure, their laundry soap and toilet paper may be a little more expensive, but if I go in to buy laundry soap and toilet paper, I only come out with laundry soap, toilet paper, and a gallon of milk, which we always need anyway.

I’m planning on a grocery trip in the next few days; we’ll see how it goes…