The twenty-seventh again

Here's a scene from about a year later. It's an example of how things might go, and I'm not promising it.

It's the twenty-seventh of October, and you're on the bus home. You open your banking app. The balance is fifty-four pounds. That'll do until Friday.

You feel none of the old disappointment, and it takes you a moment to notice that it's missing. The month's saving was done on the first. It happened while you were asleep, as it has every month for a year. Whatever you did with the rest of October, you saved. You had a takeaway most Fridays. You went to a leaving do, and you bought a coat.

You tap across to the other bank's app, which you open perhaps once a month. The account is called Cushion. You opened it last November with the old three hundred and forty pounds, and started the transfer at seventy-five pounds a month. In April you got a rise of ninety pounds a month after tax, and that week you put the standing order up by half of it, to a hundred and twenty. In July the alternator went on the car, and you paid the garage three hundred and ten pounds from the pot. It was irritating but it didn't frighten you, and you didn't have to borrow.

The credit card balance from the washing machine is gone, too. You set up a fixed payment of forty pounds for it on payday, as chapter 11 suggested, and cleared it in March. Since April that forty pounds has gone to the pot as well.

The balance today is one thousand five hundred and twenty-five pounds. It isn't a fortune. It's more than you've had available at any point in your adult life, and the old three hundred and forty is still in there, which hasn't happened before. It's rising by a hundred and sixty pounds every month.

Your month doesn't feel any tighter than it did a year ago. If anything it feels looser. When you spend, you're spending money that's yours to spend, and you no longer carry a sense that you ought to be holding some of it back.

Things won't always be this tidy. There'll be a year when the car, the roof and the dentist come all at once and the pot goes to nothing, and you'll start again from the first transfer. There may be a stretch when you have to cut the amount to almost nothing. But you've stopped relying on the end of the month, which never had anything left in it. You save at the start, and you don't have to remember to do it.

You didn't become a more disciplined person in the past year. You spent twenty minutes setting up a standing order, and after that you left it to run.

If you do one thing after closing this book, open a separate account, name it, and set up a standing order for a small fixed amount to leave on your next payday. Make the amount half of what you first think of. After that, leave it to run.