3 Rules of Financial Enlightenment
I thought of these on the drive in to work today: initially I only had two, but three sounds better. They’re a work in progress.
Rule number 1: Track your money.
You will never know just how wasteful – or thrifty – you are unless you know where and how you spend your money. It’s that simple. Or, put another way, you cannot control what you cannot measure. Do you like being out of control?
Don’t trust the banks. I have, on several occasions, caught bank errors in my favor through my good habits formed over years of practice. Strangely I never seem to catch errors in their favor. That’s probably because the rules err on their side. Because they wrote them. Think on this. Then tell me why you don’t track your money. You worked for it, right? You traded your most precious commodity – time – for someone else’s money. They’re already getting the better end of the deal. You have no extra time to give in your finite life and even the richest person in the world will eventually die. So when you fail to track your money, you fail to track the very lifeblood of your existence.
