Generally it seems that any organisation system is highly personal as there are many individual kinks to be worked out such that there is almost no way to have a holistic system apply to everyone. Also, the vast majority of people are not interested in these kind of things, I think.
This seems very true to me and now seems like the largest factor. That combined with it being a horrendous amount of work, although I believe that may be because there is no foundation to draw on.
Also the whole thing is overwhelming. When I tried to do stuff like track my budget I ran into the problem that I would need to type in every damn receipt I got. (...) so I abandoned it for casually taking a look at my accounts and estimating how long it could last.
I can relate to this very well. I did write down every expense for almost 4 years but it was just too much work. It was never really useful either, which is surprising given everything I’ve read about budgets/etc. It may of helped get my wife and I on the same page, however, so I don’t regret doing it.
I’d argue that this is the reason for having an overall umbrella. Why did we attempt to do this? Because we should? Because we wanted a specific answer? Does it require that kind of data? Most people who run a budget (including old me, before I got lazy!) did it because… we did. I liked the data. But it didn’t feed into anything, didn’t answer any important questions and didn’t seem to influence my behavior.
On the other hand, if I needed to know if I can save enough in time to travel to Europe for 4 weeks… that’s important to know! But it has nothing to do with a traditional budget (just cashflow), which I can do in ~15 minutes a month, if I organised myself to do it. (1)
Back to the overall umbrella/management system—the “why” should sit at the top. I do it because I need to plan for certain things, which cascades down to having a “budget” to a certain level of detail. Instead we seem to do it from the bottom up, resulting in making “perfect systems”. The idea drives it rather than the actual need. There is no “good enough” in that approach. It’s “cool”, not effective. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to define. A management system is meant to be effective, whereas we pick up a lot of good and cool ideas and try them out.
I actually have a story about that. The year was 2006 and I was heavily motivated to change my lifestyle. I’d just moved in with my then GF. We decided that we would track all our expenses (this was a good idea at this stage in the relationship, since we decided to merge finances more than normal), but further breakdown our grocery bills into nutritional groups. I have a nice table of how much I spent on meat, dairy, vegetables, grains, sweets… Talk about a lot of work. Interestingly enough, I got $29.55 in bottle returns. Anyway, I had the data but it did nothing. 50% of my food budget was still eating out. I still ate the same. Great idea, tremendous amount of work, accomplished very little.
(1) It’d be a four component thing—cash float, credit cards, direct withdrawals and paycheck.
Why should there be a general management system? To prevent fires.
Time and time again I meet people that operate constantly on the “kill any fire” mode instead of letting a couple of them burn down by themself and preventing any further fires from happening. This means instead of paying bills when they are so urgent that they are more important than looking for a better insurance right now people should set up a policy of paying bills in given intervals. Or setting up auto-pay.
What an exhausting way to live like that. I don’t care about bills and where to put them. And there are a thousand more issues that I need to have cleared up in my life, like what to wear or where to get my food from, none of which I deeply care about or is my main focus in life. Or in any way my area of expertise. Which makes me wonder in how many ways I live life like that: Putting out fires instead of preventing them in the first place.
Since none of those areas—paying bills, doing taxes, getting food and so on—are my area of expertise or something I deeply care about I am very willing to compromise: Not getting the optimal result in exchange for something extremely easy to use that I do not have to think about. I have never seen something like that.
This seems very true to me and now seems like the largest factor. That combined with it being a horrendous amount of work, although I believe that may be because there is no foundation to draw on.
I can relate to this very well. I did write down every expense for almost 4 years but it was just too much work. It was never really useful either, which is surprising given everything I’ve read about budgets/etc. It may of helped get my wife and I on the same page, however, so I don’t regret doing it.
I’d argue that this is the reason for having an overall umbrella. Why did we attempt to do this? Because we should? Because we wanted a specific answer? Does it require that kind of data? Most people who run a budget (including old me, before I got lazy!) did it because… we did. I liked the data. But it didn’t feed into anything, didn’t answer any important questions and didn’t seem to influence my behavior.
On the other hand, if I needed to know if I can save enough in time to travel to Europe for 4 weeks… that’s important to know! But it has nothing to do with a traditional budget (just cashflow), which I can do in ~15 minutes a month, if I organised myself to do it. (1)
Back to the overall umbrella/management system—the “why” should sit at the top. I do it because I need to plan for certain things, which cascades down to having a “budget” to a certain level of detail. Instead we seem to do it from the bottom up, resulting in making “perfect systems”. The idea drives it rather than the actual need. There is no “good enough” in that approach. It’s “cool”, not effective. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to define. A management system is meant to be effective, whereas we pick up a lot of good and cool ideas and try them out.
I actually have a story about that. The year was 2006 and I was heavily motivated to change my lifestyle. I’d just moved in with my then GF. We decided that we would track all our expenses (this was a good idea at this stage in the relationship, since we decided to merge finances more than normal), but further breakdown our grocery bills into nutritional groups. I have a nice table of how much I spent on meat, dairy, vegetables, grains, sweets… Talk about a lot of work. Interestingly enough, I got $29.55 in bottle returns. Anyway, I had the data but it did nothing. 50% of my food budget was still eating out. I still ate the same. Great idea, tremendous amount of work, accomplished very little.
(1) It’d be a four component thing—cash float, credit cards, direct withdrawals and paycheck.
Why should there be a general management system? To prevent fires.
Time and time again I meet people that operate constantly on the “kill any fire” mode instead of letting a couple of them burn down by themself and preventing any further fires from happening. This means instead of paying bills when they are so urgent that they are more important than looking for a better insurance right now people should set up a policy of paying bills in given intervals. Or setting up auto-pay.
What an exhausting way to live like that. I don’t care about bills and where to put them. And there are a thousand more issues that I need to have cleared up in my life, like what to wear or where to get my food from, none of which I deeply care about or is my main focus in life. Or in any way my area of expertise. Which makes me wonder in how many ways I live life like that: Putting out fires instead of preventing them in the first place.
Since none of those areas—paying bills, doing taxes, getting food and so on—are my area of expertise or something I deeply care about I am very willing to compromise: Not getting the optimal result in exchange for something extremely easy to use that I do not have to think about. I have never seen something like that.