The Number You Are Avoiding

What is in your current account right now, to the nearest hundred?

Most people cannot say. Some can manage the nearest thousand. You earn a reasonable amount, you are not in trouble as far as you know, and that last phrase is doing an enormous amount of work.

What you have instead of a number is a feeling. It turns up when a bill arrives, when somebody mentions their pension, and at four in the morning. It does not tell you whether you are fine, and it did not improve when your income did.

Money anxiety at a reasonable income is not a shortage of money. It is a shortage of information about money.

And income does not supply information. It supplies more of the thing you are not looking at.

Inside you will discover:

• The Monthly Look: six numbers, one page, ten minutes, on a fixed date
• Why your guess is not your best estimate but your worst plausible one, held permanently
• The first Look, step by step, including the order that makes it survivable
• Why written beats an app, and why monthly beats daily checking
• The three trajectories, and why direction matters more than amount
• What to do when the numbers are bad, written without reproach
• What to do when the numbers are fine and the feeling does not go
• How to raise it with the person you live with without it becoming an argument
• The four ways this habit curdles, including the spreadsheet that becomes a hobby
• A six-month sequence with one addition per quarter

No budgeting. No categories. No app. No requirement to change a single thing about your spending.

This book contains no financial advice. It is about the habit of looking. Where the money should go is a question for somebody qualified, and the book says so repeatedly.

Book Nine of The Control Line Series. Reads perfectly well on its own.

Buy your copy and find out what you have been guessing at.