Brush Your Teeth

Last week I read Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez. This was mostly driven by the desire to be as clear as possible about the current financial trajectory we are on. This past ten months or so has been a doozy with Elaine's chronic migraines and her inability to work (much). We are grateful to have savings and family that have helped to keep us afloat during this time, but the savings account and overall ability to save has definitely taken a bit of a hit. I may not say we're struggling, but it's about time for us to start pulling back even further on spending, seeing where we can be more frugal and live more simply so that we can be responsible with what we have.

Step 2 of the book details a simple (but not easy!) step on the path to financial health/independence. Robin says the only way to be up front and honest about your spending is track every cent in and out. It's been a LONG time since we've done this — the last time was back when we first got married and literally had our income converted to cash and put in envelopes so we could only spend what we made and not a penny more.

So, since the beginning of October, I've started doing just that. Every cent in and out is now tracked in a spreadsheet, with a few extra fields for things like account/category/subcategory, etc. Prior to this, I had a "general" idea about how much we spent on average, but it has been a good practice so far, and my goal is to continue to do this every day.

The overall point, though, I think is deeper than simply this budgeting/financial piece in our lives. Money is necessarily a big part of how we orient our lives, so it's a good place to start. But since I started doing this earlier in October, I've tried to view it like I'm "brushing my teeth" every day. I never, ever miss brushing my teeth. I have one set of them, I'd like to keep them healthy as long as possible, and I like having fresh breath. Not to mention, brushing my teeth isn't even something I think about doing. I just do it because I do it.

I've been thinking a lot about how there are plenty of other areas in our lives that probably ought to be the same way. Tracking all our transactions? Probably needs to be a brush your teeth thing. I have a set amount of money coming in every month. I would like to retire someday, and I would like to be prepared for major expenses. The best way to start to get a real sense of this is by tracking transactions daily.

Cleaning the common areas of the house? Brush your teeth.

Basic car maintenance (something I'm falling into an obsessive YouTube rabbit hole about)? Brush your teeth.

Exercise / fitness? Brush your teeth.

Perhaps one can get a little overly obsessive about this, but on some level this is like... the task of life, right? Later in the book, Robin gives other steps for her financial life plan to set you on a new path. One of those things is to go back through your daily transactions and note whether something positively, negatively, or neutrally affected your life. Did it bring you closer to the kind of person you want to be?

In the same way, perhaps "brushing your teeth" in all of these areas (or the areas that are important to you) eventually gives you some impetus to evaluate what actually matters to you. Since you're checking in on this thing daily or weekly or whatever, you start to get a sense of which things are just taking up your time and space when you actually don't want that in your life. Vice versa, even if you "don't like" brushing your teeth in some area or another, you may continue to do so because you know the outcome is worth the value it brings to your life.

Tagged: maintenance,