Money, Banking and Bills

Story · all 20 words

Three Numbers on a Piece of Paper

In my first year of work I earned more money than I had ever had in my life and reached the end of every single month with nothing whatsoever. I could not explain where it had gone, and I found the question embarrassing enough that I simply stopped asking it.

The problem was not the big things. I did not buy a car – I could not afford a car and I was perfectly aware of it. The problem was forty small things that I never once noticed.

It changed on a Tuesday in March, when my card was refused in a supermarket. I was not broke in any serious sense; my salary was arriving four days later. But I stood at that till with eleven items and no way of paying for any of them, and that is a particular kind of quiet you do not forget.

That evening I sat down and did the least exciting thing I have ever done. I opened my account online and read every line of it for three months.

Here is what was there. A gym I had joined in January and visited exactly twice was taking money by direct debit every month and had been for eleven months. Two apps were quietly doing the same. I was using a cash machine that charged me two dinars every time I went to withdraw anything, four or five times a week, purely because it was the closest one to my office. And I had wasted almost a fifth of my income on food bought at the exact moment I was hungriest.

I also rediscovered that I owed my brother three hundred dinars from a holiday two years earlier, a fact he had never once mentioned.

So I built a budget. Not a clever one – three numbers on a piece of paper: what comes in, what has to go out, and what is left. Then I set up an automatic transfer on payday so that a fixed amount moved into a second account before I ever saw it. That one trick did more than every good intention of the previous year put together.

I also started to save up for something specific instead of in general, which turned out to matter enormously. Money for “the future” evaporates. Money for “October, Istanbul” somehow does not.

I paid my brother back in September. I have never taken a loan and I have no debt, which in my generation is either sensible or lucky and is probably mostly lucky. I still do not really understand how interest works when it is in my favour. I understand it perfectly when it is not.

Two things surprised me. The first is that watching the exchange rate for a fortnight before a trip and changing your currency at the right moment can save you a week of food, which is worth ten minutes of anybody’s attention. The second is that once you know exactly where your money goes, you stop feeling guilty about spending it. The guilt was never really about the money. It was about not knowing.