I believe that money and math are just not the same thing. Math is predictable, and you can actually count on it! *cough*
Honestly though, in math, 2 + 2 = 4; always.
Money is alot like truth, it’s relative and it usually has an emotion or two attached to it. You just got paid, money is your friend. You just paid your bills, money left you sad and lonely. You went to the bar and drank a bit more than you usually do and you wonder how you paid a bar tab that high? Mostly it’s If you have money, all is well, but if you don’t you most likely have worry, stress and possibly frustration.
Money isn’t the enemy, here. Money is just math. You have $10, you spend $8 you have $2 left. It is really just that straight forward, and when you think of money as a tool that you use to get the things you need and want, it will always make that much sense and there really isn’t even any emotion about it.
As business has evolved, sales people have figured out that most of us will pay $99 for something, but $100 sounds like way too much. That is how we get the .99. It’s $99.99! Imagine if we consumers realize that that is really just $100. I learned how to round numbers in elementary school, you can’t fool me. Life would be a bit easier around money if we changed how we thought about the cost of the things we purchase.
Here’s a good case in point. It’s Saturday and I just got paid yesterday. Out of that pay check, I paid the bills that are going to be due before my next paycheck and I let’s say I have $500 left over. I’m going out today and I need to get groceries and run some errands. I stop at the gas station and I put in $42.68 worth of gas. I go into the convenience store and I purchase a drink and some chips for $5.22. After that, I’m fueled up and ready to do my errands, right? I stop at a department store and pick up some new shoes for $68.72 that I need. I then go to the grocery store and get $210.12 worth of groceries. If you’ve followed along, that should leave me $173.26 remaining out of my paycheck.
When you use your debit card and don’t use cash, that’s not usually how it goes. Most of us don’t hold onto the receipts, we don’t write each charge in our check book register. We know we have mobile banking and an app that will tell us where we spent all this money right? As I’m running around, I’m kind of keeping a tally in the back of my head, right? After the gas station, I thought. Ok, I have about $455 left. After the shoe store, I thought, I got $385 left. After the grocery store, I thought I have $185 left. I’m close, but somehow I’ve rounded this all wrong and I’m thinking I have $12 more than I have.
How many of us check our bank account each day? I don’t. I do try to keep better track of my spending and when I don’t know if I’m right I’ll check it. Money is easy to lose track of and frankly, it can be depressing just watching your money go down all the time. Paychecks can come weekly, every 2 weeks, twice a month or even just once a month. Think of looking at your checking account every day watching that total go down, and it only goes up once each month. That sounds horrible, right and you kind of just want to stop looking at it.
In elementary school we were taught how to round numbers. If it ends in a number 1 through 4, round down. If it ends in 5 or higher, round up. What if we forget that when it comes to money and we just round up. Like, all the time. I didn’t spend $40 on gas, I spent $43. I didn’t spend $5 at the convenience store, I spent $6. Yes, we are still spending money to get the things we need to get, but this way, that number floating in the back of our brains will be telling us what we should have in that bank account will be higher than we actually spent, not smaller. We’ll probably still say “Hey … that’s not right!” but it will be because we have more than we thought, not less.
That’s a stress I can handle.