He who loves money will not be satisfied with money,
nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity. When goods
increase, they increase who eat them, and what advantage has their owner but to
see them with his eyes?
King Solomon of Israel
Ecclesiastes 5:10-11
My purpose this weekend is to encourage you to examine what you
spend your money on, so that you can achieve greater contentment, do more of
what you want or live more consistently with what you believe. There is only
one way to do this: to track every penny that you spend. This means recording
the purchase of every bill, chocolate bar, magazine, coffee, snack bar, bus
ride and the loose change that you drop into a charity box.
You may question whether you need to take such a detailed
approach. If your income comfortably exceeds your living costs (by which I
mean, all of what you and your family need and much of what you want in
addition), so that you can pay all of your bills on time and in full without
having to sacrifice anything else, and if you have at least three months living
expenses in savings (six months would be better), then for the basic purpose of
controlling your money you probably do not need to track the purchase of every
burger or can of cola.
But there are good reasons for doing it anyway. Tracking every
penny helps to bring alive the reality of your lifestyle. One reason people
spend so much on leisure activities and luxuries is that they have lost touch
with how much they need to pay for routine things, like rent, electricity and
taxes: the things that are paid automatically.
The creation of direct debits and similar automated payments,
which have been used in one form or another for over 40 years, distances us
from the cost of our lives. We receive bills, glance at them and then trust
they will be paid automatically; previous generations had to write a cheque and
then post it or take it with the paying-in slip to a bank or to the supplier’s
office. This process made more of a dent in our daily schedule and one
consequence, I think, was that it acted as a check on extravagance.
Carry with you a piece of paper and write down every purchase as
soon as you make it. Do not think that you will remember everything at the end
of each day or couple of days but each one as you go. At the end of each week,
transfer the information to a more permanent record.
A handy cross-check is to count the cash you have on you each
evening and compare it against the list of things you bought. If you do not
have the right amount of cash, it may remind you of a purchase you forgot to
record. Also, be careful not to count as spending the cash that you withdraw
from your bank account: only record what you buy.
At least once a month, go through your bank statement and add to
your record all the bills paid by direct debit, standing order or cheque. Also,
go through your credit and charge card statements, especially if you do not
clear the balances each month and the purchases do not even appear as a lump
sum in your bank statement.
_____________________________________________
You
have been sent this e-mail because you subscribed to Reflections on God & Money.
Copyright © All Souls Clubhouse Community Centre & Church and Philip Evans
2013.
Scripture
quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright
© 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by
permission. All rights reserved.
Handling
money and dealing with debt can be complicated and neither the author nor
anyone else involved in the production of these Reflections is responsible for
any action you take, or fail to take, based on what is written here. You are
invited to put a link on your website to these Reflections. You are welcome to
copy these Reflections for personal study or for circulation to family and
friends on a non-profit basis. For any other purpose, whether or not for
profit, you will require written permission in advance from the author before
copying, reproducing or transmitting extracts in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or using any
information storage and retrieval system.
