Living on the jars.

Aren’t they beautiful!  I’m not talking about the physical jars, although I do think they are pretty (especially since they only cost $2 for a pack of 3 at Dollarama), but it is what they represent that makes them so appealing to me.  They are a solid manifestation of our taking control of our finances.

Considering we have zero debt it may seem strange to talk about taking control of finances.  But this plastic society we live in makes it easy for your money to run wild and leave you wondering how it all got away from you.  A former employer had a framed quotation from Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield” hanging on his office wall: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”.  It was especially appropriate since he was an accountant who often had to educate his clients on the folly of spending more than they made.  At that time I was more familiar with the “misery” side of the equation since we were wallowing in debt.  Now we are debt free the “happiness” part rings very true.

Although I read that quote many times and have revelled in the joy of having no debt for quite a few years now it never occurred to me to wonder how we went so far off the rails.  I just thought we were “bad with money” and now we were learning to be “good with money”.  Since we started happily saving money and living within our means I felt it didn’t matter.  But about a month ago we started watching Gail Vaz Oxlade on “‘Til Debt Do Us Part” and “Princess”…

That was an eye opener.  Having the mistakes these people made spelled out for them was like watching a show about who we used to be.  We had no idea what our income was and we paid even less attention to what we spent back in those debt filled days.  If we were depressed about being in debt we would go to the mall and buy something nice for ourselves to make us feel better.  Our overdraft, credit line, and multiple credit cards were seen as buoys of extra income to float us up, instead of the heavy anchors of debt that they really were dragging us down.

This realization made us take a step back and really look at ourselves and how we view money now.  Although we had learned caution from our early experiences and now kept track of our spending we still didn’t have the respect for money we should.  For one thing, although having a budget, we are generally spending over budget.  This has not hurt us yet since we have budgeted lower than we make.  But it has meant we have saved less than we could have.  We have lost track of cheques and even had them bounce on us while we had more than enough money sitting in the savings account to cover them.

We decided to follow Gail’s advice and live on cash.  After using her brilliant budget worksheet we filled our little jars with our week’s worth of money and then made our budget notebook.  Then came the scary part: taking the debit and credit cards out of the wallet and putting them aside.  We are now operating without a net.  This means we will have to actually think about spending money instead of just handing the cashier a piece of plastic.  Eleanor Roosevelt is quoted as saying “Do one thing everyday that scares you”.  Well this terrifies both myself and D.  But I am already looking ahead to the confidence of knowing we can live on cash and that we control our money instead of our money controlling us.