Financial Therapy

Dear Reader,

I’m frustrated I didn’t get a post out last Saturday. Some little bastard inside me said it would be OK to wait until Monday, which it wasn’t. So now here I am, wondering if I should try to cram that failed attempt into a newsletter.

The post was supposed to be about how hard I find it, keeping my finances both in view and above water. But I keep getting sidetracked by my fear that someone close to me will read about my problems, and think I’m just a failure of a person.

But the reality is, I believe it’s important to read a real struggle that a real person is having. Yes, I do have a few loved ones reading this. But, I hope to build a readership of other people that believe success is out there for them, if only they can learn how to properly drive their vessel.

Watching someone working to fix their problem in real time, might help someone else actually fix theirs.

My finances are not pretty, and they become much more difficult to manage when my fears and handicaps take over. I forget about important bills. I let the accounting lapse, because I fear there’s not enough coins in the piggy to cover the month. I promise more than we can afford, because I fear rejection.

But there is nothing inherently impossible about minding the ship. If the system doesn’t work, implement a change.

This week I’m trying something new. We use Simplifi to keep track of things. I find it the least worst of the finance programs.

But I don’t trust it.

Instead of just living with “not trusting” this thing, I’m going to perform weekly experiments in order to quantify that lack of trust.

It’s simple. At the top of the week, I’ll look at where the program predicts our bank balances will be at the end of the week. When we get there, I’ll show my wife the numbers, and see where the leaks are. I’ll categorize what things took us off course, and try to add them to the system – maybe it’s a “ghost bill” I need to add weekly, for example.

And then I’ll run the experiment again. After a few weeks, I’ll expect to see those predictions getting closer to the actual results. Then this Simplifi homunculus will actually be a sharpened tool I can use.

And if not, I’ll just try something else.

There’s your week in progress. Now, get back to work.

Yours, Peter

P.S. Any readers from last week may wonder what happened with that LinkedIn post, advertising my SigmaK application. No responses. But, I did gain two followers, and a few “like” reactions from people I’ve never met, outside my network. I’ll reach out to these people and see if they have feedback.