Back to black through the eye of a needle

One sexy solvent

When you’re in the red it’s a long, slow crawl into the black. 
Spending less that you earn is the simple strategy for maintaining solvency and sanity. So why is simplicity so complicated for the human mind?

Many people are not wired for simplicity. Their mental circuitry can make even the most straightforward recipe turn out a disaster. For example, if you gave a hundred people the same key ingredients: sugar, butter, flour and eggs and asked them to bake a cake; I promise you that you’d end up with quite a few variations of the finished product.

are you dreaming what I'm dreaming?

 It might be that some people would use a little less or a little more of each of the ingredients, particularly the anti-sucrose militants! The way each person folds the mixture introducing air into the fine blend also plays a significant role. Cooking time is also another factor since people will miscalculate the length of baking  and end up with some burnt offerings. No two people can produce exactly the same results. If we believe each person is unique then that is the source of the anomaly.

When it comes to managing money brain function is often de-railed by emotional and psychological malnutrition. When you’ve been starved of love – the right kind – you’ll be suffering from a number of chronic ailments. Low self-esteem is the essence that’s missing from a financially healthy psyche. When people have been subjected to a whole host of abuses either by self or some other they become weak willed and depressed. If money has been a difficult issue in their families then it will continue to be so.

Riding to financial freedom

The biggest problem around money is that we’ve heard too much about the wrong things like – there isn’t enough of it, the evil taxman is trying to take it away from me, the phone company is robbing us blind, it grows on trees, it speculates and accumulates, it’s not a bottomless pit, its fun, its misery, other people have more than us and the greatest reason ever : a camel can pass through the eye of a needle easier than a jet setting millionaire!?
And anyone laden with debts will have to leave them at the pearly gates!

Living on the edge (of money)as I do I feel I’ve been following some bad examples. I understand the golden rule of spending less than I earn but I never seemed to be able to share that with my family and significant other. I’ve come to realise that being in harmony with family, friends, husbands and boyfriends means to have common goals. That includes common financial goals and that’s where it gets tricky!

How do we find/attract/get born to financially savvy people? That’s an answer that eludes me.

I guess you might say that if there’s love in a relationship then there’s a degree of commonality, so much so that personal goals are aligned. Not so in my experience. Since opposites attract you can bet your bottom dollar that a frugalite is going to get together with a spendthrift. When two worlds collide its a financial car crash. The biggest casualities are your future plans and dreams all wrecked like a ten car pile-up on life’s highway.

Shark's starter and main course

Maybe you were dreaming of paying your mortgage off in two years, travelling coast to coast, hiking around the Pyrenees, scuba-diving in the Great Barrier Reef, starting up a little cafe or buying a log cabin for weekend escapes.  Sometimes you can dream different dreams even though you might be both in the same relationship. Eventually those dreams will either unify or destroy what you have created together.

In any case the dreams we have cost money, time and shredded nerves. For the first, we can make dollars by working two jobs or investing wisely, time is precious and we’ll do the necessary to make it, as for our fragile feelings, we’ll probably go spending and sabotage the first two.

The financial merry-go-round has us all in a spin. The emotionally whole will know how to control it and even get off  but many of us stay on for the ride....save, spend, borrow, groan....save...spend...borrow...groan!

Kiss that debt frog

I’m still up for getting back to black and it’s good to know that, at this time of my life, the credits outweigh the debits. A simple strategy...apart from “spending less than you earn” is to meet a Prince Financially-Charming and..... if I kiss or kick a few debt frogs who knows? 


A man may have cost me solvency for a part of my life but I know I’m on my way up....riding that camel.....through the eye of the needle...returning to black.