We used to make money and spend even more money. It didn’t matter because once upon a time we had credit cards and didn’t mind borrowing as much money as a lender would let us borrow. Who cares, right? It was all on plastic, so it wasn’t real to us. But as much as I struggle with math, I do understand negative numbers. And once upon a time, we were swimming in negative numbers. Hence the math problem.
I think many people—it seems particularly problematic here in the States, though I can’t speak for people in other countries—seem to believe that negative numbers will work in the real world for real life finances. That is a problem. Negative numbers work in the classroom when working a math problem on the board, but in life, negative numbers spell trouble.
So here is the basic math problem as I see it: income minus expenses equals ???. Many people seem to think that expenses should be whatever number they want while being unwilling to work extra to increase the income part of things. That doesn’t work. I’m speaking from experience here.
I mentioned ways that we used to act, but now we make sure that income is a larger number than expenses on a monthly basis. How do we make that happen? We work. I currently work 2 jobs, 7 days a week between them, because life is a math problem. One of the results of us having changed our ways, and of us working hard, is that we actually have money in the bank now. We know that real world numbers have to balance in the end.
There is more that I want to say on this topic, but I will save it for anther post. I have blogged on other major topics over several posts, and this particular topic seems pretty major. More soon.