The twenty-seventh

It's the twenty-seventh of October. You're paid on the last working day of the month, so there are four days to go. You open your banking app on the bus home, and the balance is sixty-one pounds forty.

You're not alarmed. It'll do until Friday. There's food in the house, and the travel card is paid for. But you feel a familiar small drop of disappointment, because at the start of the month you'd made a plan. Your take-home pay is two thousand three hundred and fifty pounds. The rent, the bills and the rest of the fixed costs come to about fifteen hundred. That leaves eight hundred and fifty. You'd thought that if you were a bit careful you could easily move two hundred into savings at the end of the month. You thought the same at the start of September, and of August.

You tap across to the savings account. It holds three hundred and forty pounds. It held three hundred and forty pounds in January. In March you put a hundred in, after a quiet month, and in April you took it out again for the car's MOT.

You try to work out where October went. Nothing stands out. There was your nephew's birthday, and a leaving do. There were new tyres, which really couldn't wait. You had a takeaway most Fridays, and bought a coat, which you did need. Nothing on the list is foolish. You can't point to a single purchase and say that's where the two hundred went. It went at six or twelve or thirty pounds a time.

Two weeks later the washing machine stops mid-cycle with a smell of burning. A new one, delivered and fitted, is three hundred and eighty-nine pounds. There's three hundred and forty in savings. You put it on the credit card, meaning to clear it at the end of the month out of whatever's left.

I'll use a few terms throughout. The leftover plan is the intention to save whatever remains at the end of the month. The transfer is a standing order that moves a fixed sum out of your current account on payday. The pot is the separate account it goes to. The cushion is the money in the pot that's there for things like washing machines. And I'll use what's left in two senses, the old one and a new one, and I'll say which when it matters.

The leftover plan has some regular features. This list is my own observation and not a research finding.

The plan is sincere. You really do intend to save, and at the start of each month it looks entirely possible, because the arithmetic says it is.

No decision is ever made to abandon it. At no point in October did you decide not to save. The two hundred pounds wasn't spent on anything in particular. It simply wasn't there at the end.

The month always contains something. There's a birthday, a repair or a trip, and it seems like a one-off. A different one turns up every month.

Good months don't help much. When there is money left, some of it does get moved across, and within a month or two it tends to come back.

And your savings don't grow. Whatever the figure is, it's roughly what it was a year ago.

Try one thing before reading on. Look up what you moved into savings in each of the last six months, and what you took back out. Write down the six net figures. You're looking for the real amounts, as opposed to what you intended. If they're healthy, you may not need this book. If most of them are nought, read on. And if you'd like to set up the transfer today and read the argument afterwards, turn to chapter 12. It will do you no harm to have the transfer running while you read.