The drawer

It's Saturday morning and you're at the supermarket checkout.

The total is forty-three pounds twenty. You tap your card. The machine thinks about it and then says "declined". You feel your face go hot. There's a queue behind you. You say, "That's odd," in a light voice, and get out the other card, the credit card you try not to use, and that one works. You wheel the trolley out to the car park with your heart going.

The thing is that it isn't all that odd. You haven't looked at your bank balance in three weeks. You knew payday was a week off and that it had been an expensive month. You had a rough sense that there was enough, and you'd been careful not to test it.

At home there's a drawer in the kitchen, the second one down. Letters go in there. You don't put in every letter. You put in the ones with windows, the ones with a bank's logo or the council's crest, and the brown ones. You can usually tell from the envelope whether something is safe to open. Cards and catalogues get opened. The others go in the drawer, to be dealt with at the weekend, and the weekend doesn't come. There are eleven envelopes in there at the moment. One of them has red print showing through the window.

That evening you finally open the banking app, because now you have to. What happened turns out to be quite small. Your car insurance renewed itself twelve days ago, for three hundred and twelve pounds. That's sixty-four pounds more than last year, and it came out in one payment. The renewal letter was in the drawer. It had been there for five weeks. It gave the new price and invited you to ring if you'd like to discuss it. Also in the drawer is a parking charge from the council. It was thirty-five pounds if paid within fourteen days. It's now seventy, and the letter with the red print says it's about to be a hundred and five.

Nothing here is a catastrophe. You're not in serious debt. You had one embarrassing minute at a checkout, and you paid about a hundred and thirty pounds more than you needed to on two things. The rest of what was in the drawer turns out to be two statements, a pension update, three marketing letters from the bank, a notice about a change to terms and conditions, and a cheque for eighteen pounds from the water company. The cheque was dated in the spring.

I'll use a few terms throughout. The drawer is wherever your unopened money post goes. It might be a shelf, a bag, a pile by the microwave, or an inbox folder you never click on. Not looking is the habit, covering post, email, apps and statements. The number is your current balance, or more generally the true state of your money. The rough idea is what you carry in your head in place of the number.

Not looking has some regular features. This list is my own observation and not a research finding.

You sort post by its envelope. You've become expert at telling what a letter is without opening it, and that expertise serves to keep it closed.

You look when you expect good news. The app gets opened on payday and hardly ever in the third week of the month.

You run on hope and rough ideas. The idea is usually a bit more cheerful than the truth, and a bit out of date.

And you only find out when something fails. A card is declined, or a payment bounces, or a letter arrives that can't be ignored. Then for an evening you look at everything, feel terrible, sort out the immediate problem and go back to not looking.

If you'd like to open your own drawer right now, don't let me stop you. Chapter 11 gives an order for doing it that makes it easier, and you could skip ahead to that and come back. If you'd rather read on first, then for now just count. Count the unopened envelopes and the unread emails from your bank and your suppliers. Work out how many days it's been since you last saw your balance. Write the three numbers down.