THE ART OF WAR

A few months after our wedding, and a bit before our move, I got 3 books. A big black book, a green book (me) and a blue book (Mr A.) The black was for household/family expense, the other books were to keep track of who our doctors are, business and other necessary contacts and notes.

I wanted to start off organized. It has worked very well since it was implemented.

In our black book is everything that takes our money each month. I considered using my financial software . I love love this software but since we don’t share a computer and Mr. A. doesn’t like to use my Mac and I don’t like to use his laptop, and I wanted our financial stuff to be easily accessible to both of us, I put it in a book.

I’ve always been self-employed and automatic payment doesn’t work for the way I need to manage my money. After we married, I cancelled all but one of Mr. A’s auto pay set ups. The 1 that was left was his internet provider and I got a reduced monthly charge for that service. Now we (really I because I’m the money manager) just open the book, go down the list of who has a claim to our cash each month, then we pay and write down the conf. number and amount paid. This is good for my recordkeeping purposes. If someone were to say something wasn’t paid, I can look to the month and get the confirmation number and amount paid.

We don’t seperate our personal and household expenses so its all in the book. It works well for us because we each have a total picture of where our money is going. We also have at a glance everything we need to track. He knows (if he wants to look) what I have going on and I know what he has going on.

My system works well for me, I can handle everything quickly. I tried to use an excel file someone built for me, but I work better with paper and pen. I’m open to ways to improve our money management system, and I regularly ponder ways to make it better. I just need it to be accessible on paper ( not a print out) and handwritten. Mr. A. works well with his pocket pc and excel files but I still use a paper calendar book, so if the info is on a computerized device, then I’m likely to miss it. I prefer opening a book and writing in it over opening a file on the computer and typing things into it.