What keeping up costs you

I've argued mechanism. This chapter is the bill, and the first line is the one you haven't seen.

The month's total. Add up the list. That number, twelve times, is the year, and the year's number is a holiday you wanted, or a chunk of the mortgage, or the thing you've been saying you can't afford.

The saving not done. The earlier book on payday saving is about arrangements, and the arrangement that beats keeping up is the transfer that leaves before the table gets to the money. Every month the total went to the table was a month the pot got what was left, and what was left was less.

The cards. If any of the total went on credit, it's still being paid for, with interest, and the next book in this series is about that. Here I'd only say that a split on a card is a split you'll pay twice.

The evenings not enjoyed. An evening spent watching the bill isn't an evening. Sixty-eight pounds bought you three hours of doing sums, and the sums were the only part you remember.

The anxiety. A person keeping up lives with a low, constant question, which is whether they can, and the question doesn't go away between evenings. It's there at the school gate and on the drive at work and when the group chat lights up, and it's expensive in a currency that isn't money.

The friendships built on a pace. Chapter 12 said that most groups aren't organised around spending, and that's true. But a friendship in which the price has never been discussed is a friendship with a topic missing, and the topic is one that half the people in it are worried about. Keeping up keeps that conversation from happening, and it's a conversation that would make the friendship more honest, not less.

The decisions you didn't make. This is the cost that's hardest to see and the one I'd put first if the bill had an order. Every split, every "count me in", every matched present was a decision about your money made by somebody else, and a person whose money is spent by decisions made at tables has less of a say in their own life than they think. Not because the sums are large, though they add up, but because the deciding has quietly moved out of the house.

The things bought to match, sitting in the house, enjoyed for a year and then just there.

And the children, learning the pace, which is the next chapter's subject as well as this one's.