It is the end of the month. We started our Three Piece Plan the second week of the month. Payday is tomorrow. But two things interesting happened…as I expected when theorizing the Three Piece Plan.
1. It is the end of the month- and we have money left over. Wow.
2. And more significantly– tomorrow is payday– but we don’t feel like it. There has not been five days of worry about if we’ll have enough cash to make it. We have not had to clean out the cupboard to scratch together dinner. Our car is not running on fumes.
So we lose out on that “Thank God it’s Payday” feeling. Instead we’ve replaced it with THREE (Next month it will be four, sometimes five) days where we replenished our cash and felt a similar sense of “OK, we made it this week.”
There is still some work to do. Some evolution that needs to take place. In short we need to figure out how to have some of our Everyday Money left over at the end of each week. That is because there are SOOO many things unaccounted for- the car repairs, vacations, etc. This is one of the areas where we will need to learn from others (like you) about what is best to do… either way money burns holes in our pocket- the question is what is the most fireproof pocket?
A separate savings account? I don’t like this- the more you spread your money out the more likely you are to bounce a check!
At home in cash? That is OK- but it seems like you’d be more likely to spend it.
In your regular checking account? More and more this seems to make the most sense. The money just builds up there. The problem comes because if you use it once you are more and more likely to say, “We’ve got money in the bank, let’s just use that.” It may be true, you do have money in the bank- but you need to not spend it because you have not accounted for nearly all of your “Everyday Expenses”. So the problem with keeping it in the bank is that you are co-mingling funds. Hum, we’ll see. I’ll, of course, keep you updated!