Your own list

The question and the no are the tools. This chapter is about what you're deciding with, which is your own list, and most people who keep up have never written one.

What you'd spend on if nobody were watching. Sit down once, with a pen, and write what you'd actually want to spend money on this year if no table existed. The holiday you've talked about. The thing for the house you've wanted for three years. Time off. The course. The savings that would let you sleep. This is the wanted column, and it'll be shorter than you'd think and more specific.

The matched column. Next to it, the list from chapter 1. The splits, the weekends, the presents, the trips, the brands, the kitchen. The matched column is longer, and it has the month's total at the bottom.

Compare the totals. For most people, the matched column's total over a year is large enough to fund a good part of the wanted column. That's the arithmetic of the book in one line. The money exists. It's going to the table.

Use the list at the moment of the price. When the organiser gives you the number, hold it against the wanted column. Would you rather have this evening or that much of the thing you actually want? Sometimes the evening wins, and then you say yes, and it's a yes you made. Often it doesn't, and then the counter-offer.

Where the difference goes. If you've read the earlier book in this series on saving, you know the answer. The money that doesn't go to the table goes somewhere on payday before it can drift back. If you haven't, the short version is that money left in the current account gets spent, and the wanted column needs its own account to arrive in.

Rewrite the list once a year. Wants change, and the list should. What shouldn't change is that there is one, and that the price of the evening gets held against it before the yes.