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Seven Zen Principles to Guide Your Money and Your Life

by Flexo on October 26, 2009

in Best Of, Personal Finance

A few years ago, I visited the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Japanese gardens are designed precisely to appear natural, resulting in an interesting collision between nature and man. There is a set of principles or aesthetics that guide the creation of Japanese gardens, including the dry gardens commonly called “Zen gardens.”

The basis for these modern Japanese aesthetics has existed for thousands of years and is rooted in Buddhist writings and teachings. However, the full concept of aesthetics relating to these ancient ideas has been discussed only within the past two centuries, as the the traditional Japanese concepts have been infused with the Western idea of art and aesthetics.

These same Japanese aesthetics, the attributes that define a Japanese garden, can be further stretched by the Western mind to relate to other areas of thought. If you are particularly interested in personal finances, as we are here at Consumerism Commentary, you might attempt to apply these concepts to attitudes and behaviors surrounding interaction with money.

Here are seven aesthetics rooted in Japanese culture that can be drawn upon to make us think about the way we live with and deal with money, from personal expenses to investing.

kanso 簡素

Keep your finances simple. The extreme limit of necessity would be to have no other financial accounts but one checking account for paying your bills. Simplifying at this level may beyond the limit of practicality even if still possible. But there is no reason I should continue to have savings accounts at seven different banks, even if seven is an odd number, compliant with other aesthetics.

In addition to utilize as few banks as possible, simplify your investment accounts. Keep your investments in one account in one index fund or target retirement fund that matches your risk profile. This also makes it much easier to evaluate your asset allocation to ensure your investments on the whole match your tolerance for risk.

There is rarely a need to have more than one credit card for your personal matters. Zero is an even better number.

Simplicity in all financial matters is an attainable goal.

seijaku 静寂

Managers of actively managed mutual funds earn their pay by buying and selling investments frequently. Index funds take the opposite approach by matching a stock index, adding or removing stocks only when the index does, which is rarely. Index funds embody this concept of stillness. Unnecessary activity, like stock trading, makes the stock broker rich while you’re adding risk and decreasing your chance of beating an index fund’s performance.

Keeping your wealth still and motionless allows time to have a chance to cultivate it. The effect of compound interest increases when you let it work for decades.

If you’ve simplified your finances down to a small number of accounts, you can further keep your money motionless by removing the necessity of transferring funds from one place to another. The 0% balance transfer game or otherwise moving your credit card balances from one card to another is in direct conflict with this aesthetic.

datsuzoku 脱俗

Break free from your possessions. We buy things because they reflect who we are or who we want to be, but no thing can be a true reflection of a self. Not only do material possessions drain you of funds that could be spent on necessities, but you will have less money for sharing with others within and outside of your family.

Break free from conventional thought and following the bandwagon. You are free to be your own person and find your own path. You should never feel trapped in a job or a career. Even a steady bi-weekly paycheck is a pattern that could be broken without fear. With creativity, draw income to you through something unexpected.

Don’t confine yourself to your budget. The ultimate way to grow wealth is to spend less than you earn, so as long as that continues, you can break free from your budget and enjoy flexibility without too much worry.

koko 考古

Focus on the bare essentials. Add something to your life only if it has a functional purpose and fills a need. This concept is a nod to frugality and sparsity. For example, do you need three televisions, one for each large room in your house? Do you even need one television when you can find entertainment, including comedy, nature, and drama — possibly even crime-focused drama — for free, by sitting in a park and watching other people interact? Wouldn’t it be more fulfilling to visit a National Park than to sit on your couch and watch a documentary about it?

Decide what in your life is not essential and eliminate it. If something does not add value more than or equal to its expense, consider it a candidate for elimination. I think immediately of the interest that you pay on a credit card balance. Once you pay interest, you’ve paid more than the value of whatever you’ve purchased with the credit card. If you decide a $1,000 television brings $1,000 worth of value into your life, then it may be worthwhile. But if you put that on a credit card and pay the balance and interest over time, the new question is whether that $1,000 television added $2,000 worth of value into your life.

shizen 自然

You should represent yourself to the world truthfully and without pretense. There is no need to purchase expensive cars and houses when necessity allows for lesser purchases. Don’t concern yourself with “keeping up with the Joneses.” Without the need to show the world you have more money than you really have, you will lose the desire to buy more than you can afford. As a result, the chances of falling into the trap of debt from unnecessary spending will diminish.

My thoughts on this are drawn to people with public-facing careers. Real estate agents, for example, often want to project an aura of success. If clients believe that the agent is rich, the clients will then believe that they are successful agents. The natural conclusion is that these agents are successful because they represent clients fairly and offer quality houses. The same is true for lawyers whose business is representing clients in court trials. Lavish spending projects an image of wealth, which indicates to prospective customers a history of successful court appearances.

This is all show and all pretense. Anyone can look wealthy or successful thanks to the availability of credit. You can’t see what lurks beneath someone else’s surface.

Do not cover up all that is natural. Do not hide money or money-related problems from your partner or spouse. Finances should be part of a communication that is open and honest, not hidden beneath layers of creative stories.

fukinsei 不均整

Create a budget, a monthly spending plan that outlines your limits for expenses in a variety of categories that make sense for you. A budget by definition starts out the same each month but will look different by the month’s final day. Life’s asymmetry is natural, and your budget should reflect this asymmetry while maintaining balance. You spend more for gifts as the December holidays approach, so you might budget more for gifts in November and December than you might in June or July. In order for this asymmetry to be balanced, an increase in one category at one time should correspond with a decrease either in another category or at another time.

This flexibility is essential for creating a workable budget. A budget should free you, not trap you.

Balanced asymmetry appears elsewhere. “Work/life balance” is a relatively new concept that is based on this idea. When my employer talks about “work/life balance,” they are not trying to imply that we should spend an equal amount of hours in our life between our career and everything else we do. It is an asymmetrical approach to living a more fulfilled life.

yugen 幽玄

Whenever your personal financial issues are public rather than private, choose subtlety over directness. Do not brag about your successes. There is no need for you to have your latest business acquisition or marriage listed in your college’s alumni magazine. If you give charitably to an organization, you do not need to publicly list your name or the amount of money you donated.

In the business world, there is a movement towards personal branding. It is good for your career to find ways make yourself stand out among your colleagues or among a sea of job applicants. While I would agree that it’s important to protect your identity, particularly online, from anything that might damage your reputation, the best way to stand out is to be the best rather than to declare you are the best.

Let others declare it for you.

A guide, not a rule

While it would be great if all of the above could apply to our interactions with money all the time, I like to look at these aesthetic concepts as a guide. Just considering these ideas and allowing yourself to think about money in a different way can be enlightening. Perhaps you can strive to achieve several of these concepts in your own life, or perhaps you can appreciate this way of living even if you choose to relate with money in a different manner.

Simplifying my finances is one way I can start applying this approach to my life. As I mentioned above, I currently use seven accounts for my savings. Many of these I open so I can review them for Consumerism Commentary, but even the purely personal bank accounts number too many. Do you or would you apply any of these aesthetics to your finances?

Disclaimer: I am not an expert in Japanese philosophy or, for that matter, in personal finance. I drew the above concepts of Japanese aesthetics from a variety of sources.

Photo credits: semihundido, laRuth, DieselDemon, 田中十洋

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Unplanned Expenses and Your Budget

by Jeff on July 9, 2009

in Planning

While a budget in one form or another is a must-have financial tool, it’d quickly become big and ugly if you tried to anticipate and include every expense you might run in to. You’d quickly lose interest and wouldn’t stick with your budget, right?

A budget is a basic recorder of recurring expenses, and trying to cover a purchase you didn’t foresee is like fit a round peg into a square hole. Unplanned expenses happen to everyone though, so what we can do about them?

Anticipate the expense

This sounds counter-intuitive to the rest of this post, but you don’t need a magic 8-ball to do it. If you’re aware of the next time your car is going to need an oil change, you can set aside that money in your budget to cover it. That way you don’t step up to the counter to pay for it while wondering where that money is going to come from.

Setting aside $30 or $50 each month for unplanned expenses will help you cover those little repairs or fees you might run into. and you’ll have even more on hand if you don’t use it during the month.

Lock down your emergency fund

This is extremely important. You are the only person who can determine what you consider an emergency, but don’t run for cover the first time you run into a problem. Your emergency fund shouldn’t be the first place you go when you find yourself short a couple of bucks, it should be the last.

Cut back In other areas of your budget

Did you plan for three tanks of gas this month but ended up using only two? Don’t spend that money on just anything, move it over to cover an unexpected expense. If you’re living within your budget, you’ll probably find that you’ll be able to do this quite often. When you have months where everything runs smoothly, you’ll be able to save that cash!

Make extra money

If you’ve got the time and the desire you could earn a couple extra bucks to meet your needs for that month. Are you going to babysit for your neighbor, or have a garage sale? That extra income can help you when you don’t have another way to pay for something.

Find another way

Can you borrow the item you need? If you can get someone to loan you the item you’re considering purchasing, you can keep from incurring another expense. Taking a bit of time to consider your options and see if there’s another way to solve your problem may help you save money.

Unexpected expenses are a major factor of what I call “the month-to-month monster,” living paycheck to paycheck. If you can work to reduce the impact of these purchases on your budget, you’ll be able to strengthen your financial foundation and get to the point where you can begin to establish real wealth.

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Dealing With Financial Mistakes

by Jeff on July 2, 2009

in Personal Finance

My wife and I went way over our budget in a couple of categories during June. Part of it was to be expected because I’m commuting to a new internship, and part of it was planned, but unfortunately, most of the over-spending can be chalked up to a simple fact: we made some spending mistakes.

Any time you make a mistake it hurts, but financial mistakes have the possibility to cause quite a bit of damage. Mistakes are especially costly when you’ve been making progress with your efforts to get out of debt and put your finances in order. They stifle your desire to keep trying and give you one more problem to fix. When you’re dealing with multiple banks and bills and paychecks, however, mishaps are bound to happen, whether small or large. While mistakes may be unavoidable, disaster is not.

Here are some simple steps you can take to mop up after a mess.

Minimize the damage

Because accounts and bills are all linked together by transfers, there is a good chance the mistake might become a bigger one if you don’t take action. If your overdraw your checking account, make sure that you have enough money in there to make up for the overdraft and any associated fees your bank might charge you. Nothing is more frustrating that withdrawing too much money from your checking account, depositing money to cover it, and then overdrawing again because of a fee.

If your financial misstep is something more long-term, like spending more than you planned, you have a bit more time. Slide the money in your budget around, and if you do have to add more money, make sure you only add as much as you need, and unless it is a real emergency; don’t pull from your emergency fund.

carinmud1

Take steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again

Double check any automatic transfers or bill payments you have and record them all on a calendar so you know how much is going to who and when. It’s easy to forget about the electric bill that’s due while you’re on vacation or the check you gave the kid who mowed your lawn that finally got cashed. Getting into a rhythm takes a couple of months, but once you get the swing of it you can be sure to always have your money where it needs to be.

With mistakes in budgeting or spending, go back over your purchases and find out exactly where all that money went. Make sure you can account for all of your purchases, and try to find a couple that you can leave out next month. If your situation is dire, you might want to see if you can return something or cancel a service.

You can keep more money in your checking account or come up with a bill reminder calendar to help you get an overall picture of what you need to be doing.

Learn from the experience

Do some research to find out exactly what happened. Did you forget about a bill payment or checking account fee? If you see a charge you don’t recognize, don’t just pay it and brush it off. Learn why you were charged and if there was anything you could do about it. If you understand what happened, you are more than likely able to prevent it from happening again. The worst thing you could do is ignore it.

Catch your second wind

Don’t let the setback discourage you! Everyone runs into trouble of one kind or another as they get their finances in order. It’s important to pay attention and do all you can to know what’s going on with your money, but when you miss something or something bad happens, don’t get stressed out, just fix it and do what you can to improve future.

Learning to handle mistakes in a way that suits you takes a little bit of practice, but you will cut down on the majority of mistakes and recover quickly from the others.

Photo credit: neilspicys

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Podcast 5: Pursuing Your Passion and a Dual-Income Budget

by Flexo on May 24, 2009

in Podcast

Today’s podcast features an interview with J.D. Roth from popular blog Get Rich Slowly. J.D. talks with Tom Dziubek and me about how he was inspired to begin writing about personal finance and his decision to leave the corporate world behind and take his passion to the next level.

Tom also speaks with Bryan J Busch from Stop Being Broken. Bryan is a usability expert, and Stop Being Broken is a series of videos pointing out problems with a wide variety of user experiences. One such user experience is the budget, and in this interview, Bryan explains what works for him and his wife. Here is the video and Excel spreadsheet mentioned in the interview.

 

To listen, use the player above (Adobe Flash required), download the podcast here, subscribe to the podcast RSS feed, or use the iTunes link. Note: open links in a new window (Ctrl-click or Command-click) to avoid interrupting the podcast.

[00:00] Introduction from Flexo
[00:48] Interview with J.D. Roth of Get Rich Slowly about following passions
[01:38] — The beginning of Get Rich Slowly
[04:04] — Leaving the box factory to write full-time
[05:50] — The effect of self-employment on social interactions and benefits
[07:37] — How to prepare for leaving a career
[09:07] — Seeking professional advice
[10:30] — The progress of Get Rich Slowly and unforeseen obstacles
[15:12] — Tips that apply to passions other than writing
[16:39] — Pursuing multiple streams of income and the effect of the recession
[19:28] Interview with Bryan J Busch of Stop Being Broken
[20:20] — A family budget system for dual income
[21:41] — Adapting the budget for a single income family
[23:48] — Using joint savings accounts in addition to checking accounts
[25:23] — Alternative approaches to the budget
[27:00] — Automatic transfers based on the budget
[28:44] End

If you have suggestions for the next edition of the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, or reactions to these interviews, feel free to leave a comment here or email your thoughts to podcast at this domain name.

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How To Be Twenty Times Better Than Barack Obama

by Flexo on May 21, 2009

in Planning

I offered to write articles for Quicken occasionally, and the first of these articles was published yesterday. It focuses on trimming budgets and expenditures.

President Obama has proposed cutting the federal budget by $17 billion. That’s a large amount of money, but it’s a tiny slice, 0.5%, of the total federal budget.

Here is an excerpt:

I would love to cut back my expenses like POTUS, so here is what a 0.5% reduction would do for me: $20. That’s one dinner out over the course of a month or perhaps a movie date for two, not including refreshments. If your budget is closer to average, your 0.5% may be lucky if it approaches $5… I think you — and I — can do twenty times better. Cutting 10% from the federal budget would be a tall order, bound to infuriate interest groups and pundits… But cutting 10% from your budget won’t anger anyone…

Read the full article at the Quicken blog.

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Money Basics: Budgets

by Flexo on April 29, 2009

in Planning

April is National Financial Literacy Month in the United States. In most cases, schools do not extensively teach financial skills. Teenagers, highly susceptible to messages from the media, often do not have guidance from teachers, who are not trained to teach financial skills, or from parents, many of whom do not model healthy financial behavior. This series of articles at Consumerism Commentary serves to help inspire discussion about basic financial concepts. Please feel free to forward this article to someone who might benefit from a basic financial overview.

Forming a budget is a key to taking control of your finances, and they are best begun when you are young. This is the fourth article in the Money Basics series; so far this series has covered checking accounts, savings accounts, and interest.

I will be the first to admit that I don’t like budgets. My personal approach is to review and adjust my spending rather than create spending limits in advance. However, there was a time in my life that budgeting was necessary, and there was a time that I should have focused on a budget but didn’t.

When I was a teenager, I spent some time visiting one of my friends. He had material desires, like many teenagers, but relied on his parents. Often, his requests were met with a common parental response: “I’d love to help you, but it’s not in our budget.” My impression was not that his parents actually kept a formal budget; this response was just an excuse to curtail the collection of useless things. Regardless of the truth behind the words, a budget came to mean a restriction or limitation designed to eliminate fun and the things we want.

It’s true that budgeting, assigning categories to your expenses and deciding how to focus your spending, is not a fun exercise. And I think those who try to make it artificially fun are missing the point. Like bathing and cleaning your house, it’s just something that needs to be done — at least, at first.

Whether your income is from an allowance, a part-time job, or a full-time job, it’s smart to create your own budget. The point of the budget isn’t to curtail fun, it’s to ensure you have the money for fun when you want it. If chores entitle you to $75 a month, you have $75 to split into categories of spending and savings. If you have no required expenses like car insurance or gasoline, you may decide that $40 could be directed towards savings (a good idea) while the remaining $35 can be used for movies, concerts, or anything else you may enjoy. Savings should be the first part of your budget, and with no expenses you could put at least half your income into savings with the rest available for fun.

Budgeting gets more complicated when you have more responsibilities and therefore more expenses. For example, if you own a car you will need to factor in car insurance, gasoline, maintenance and repairs. Suddenly you are not having fun with the money you earn, or at least, not as much of the money you earn. Unfortunately that’s the stigma of budgeting.

Visualize your budgeting

In today’s world of electronic transactions, debit cards, and online access you your bank, it’s quaint to think about placing cash in envelopes with labels. This is a great way to visualize your budget, however. Start with a set of envelopes labeled “savings,” “car” (or “transportation”), “food,” “rent,” “utilities,” “charity” and “fun.” In each of these envelopes, you will place a portion of the income you receive. If you imagine you receive your income in cash at the beginning of each month, this envelope system makes sense. Start by putting 10% of your income directly in your savings envelope. This is a good habit to fall into early.

Rent and utilities are generally predictable expenses that are roughly the same very month. On day one, when you receive your income, place the exact amount of cash you know you will owe for rent and utilities into the appropriate envelopes. After these set expenses, you can decide how to divvy up your cash.

You know you will need to eat throughout the month, so that might be your next focus. It may be harder to imagine how much money you will need for food without tracking your spending for a time, but make a guess for now. Do the same for your transportation envelope. The remainder can be split between charity and fun, but consider beefing up your savings envelope, too.

Don’t seal the envelopes. You will need to remove the money once your expenses are due, but you are also allowed to transfer money from one envelope to another. Going on a road trip? Transfer some money this month from your savings envelope to the transportation envelope. (If you don’t have enough in the savings envelope, it may be a sign that you’re not ready to go on the road trip.) If you eat less this month, you can transfer some cash from the food envelope to another, such as savings or fun.

For your first budget, use a pencil and paper, even if you don’t use actual cash and envelopes. Look at the numbers and get used to working with them, doing simple calculations to make sure you’re spending less than you’re earning and saving at least 10% of your income. A pencil and paper system is great because it’s practically free and completely customizable. There are free online tools that help you budget, like Quicken Online and Mint, but their features can be overwhelming if all you want to do is set up initial flexible guidelines for your spending. Software designed specifically for budgeting, like Mvelopes, You Need a Budget, and PearBudget have thorough features, but you must buy the software or pay a monthly fee for its use. And unless you have room for a budget category called “software,” you may want to skip this in favor of the simpler but just as effective pencil and paper.

Suggestions for advanced budgeting

Here are a few tips I shared when I wrote about taking control of your finances.

Consider the 60% rule. I’m not a fan of rules, but sometimes a guideline can help get you started on the right path. As an individual, you can decide what’s right for you, but sometimes an example helps. The 60% rule suggests that the first 60% of your gross income (before income taxes are taken out) should be designated for your non-discretionary, essential expenses, like housing, food, clothing, and taxes. The rest of the income should be split with 10% going towards savings, 10% towards retirement, and the rest for “fun,” or your discretionary expenses.

Reward yourself for staying under budget. If your budget is realistic — not too difficult nor too easy to achieve — then you should reward yourself when you spend less than you plan. With your “fun” expenses, your spending may be variable month to month and difficult to predict. If you make a conscientious effort to spend less than you expected, perhaps by seeing fewer movies in the theater or cutting back on vacation plans, you have extra money left in your envelope (virtual or otherwise). First, move that excess money to savings. If you don’t perceive savings to be an intrinsic reward, treat yourself to something you’d like.

Use ING Direct’s subaccount feature. Since you can split money in ING Direct’s high-yield savings account into separate buckets, you can label these subaccounts to match your budgeting categories. this lets you earn a decent interest rate while keeping your money organized.

Pay yourself first. No matter what, make sure some of your excess income is diverted to your savings. If you set up direct deposit into your checking or savings account, this will require less work. Your savings envelope contains 100% of your income (minus income taxes) after you are paid, and from there you can distribute funds to your remaining envelopes.

(The following tip is new.)

Budgets are not set in stone. Once you have the process down to a science, don’t be afraid to loosen your grip and introduce flexibility. You can borrow from one category to pay for larger expenses in another, and you can borrow from one month to pay for the next. Just don’t get caught into the trap of borrowing from your future.

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The Recession Finally Hits My House

by Smithee on April 3, 2009

in Career and Work

I work for a small Interactive Agency of twenty-four people. This is a company that managed to survive the dot-com bust and, like any company, has good times and bad times. Our president always makes every effort to keep great people, even if it means cutting her own salary. I consider myself lucky to have found a place there, not only because I love my work, but for the atmosphere and common sense of purpose.

Now, I consider myself even luckier. Yesterday, instead of twenty-four people, there were twenty-six. We simply don’t have enough work in process to keep going the way we were, so the management team had to find $60,000 a month to cut out of our operating costs. We had to let go of two project coordinators, ’cause we simply didn’t have enough to keep them busy.

Less drastic, but more personal, is the 10% salary cut that will affect everyone else for the foreseeable future. This will bring my before-tax salary of $80k to around $72k. I’m not going to complain about this. $72,000 a year is a lot of money, especially considering I don’t work under hazardous conditions, or with unruly children, and I don’t have to take steroids to stay competitive.

However, this will require my wife and I to tweak our budget somewhat. $72,000 is a huge salary for someone with no debts; unfortunately I am not that someone. It was that extra $8,000 that was enabling me to make so much progress toward finally erasing my credit card debt that began in 1997. As of today, the balance is down to $3,522. My first instinct for modifying the budget is to say, “Okay, let’s just ignore that credit card until things get better.” I know that’s not wise. The last finance charge on the card was about $37, and if I start making just the minimum payments each month, that number will just get bigger and bigger. It’s a complete waste of money.

But there are other considerations, too. My wife and I have things we want to do this year. In fact, we’ve already paid more than $1,000 to go to a conference in California, but we haven’t arranged any plane tickets or figured out where we’re going to stay for the vacation days when we’re not at the conference itself. And then there’s the pet sitter, the meals in nice restaurants, etc.

Or maybe this is the kick in the pants that I need in order to spend more time working on my freelance work. Given the different ways that a salary and freelance work are taxed, in order to make up the difference, I’d need to earn about $1,000 a month (putting half away for taxes the next April). I don’t imagine that’s going to happen anytime soon, but it does give me something to work toward. Flexo is always happy to have me write more for this site, and there’s a side business in Web Analytics that I’ve been flirting with. My two pro bono clients (I wanted to practice) have been thrilled with my work so far, so maybe it’s time I start courting paying clients.

As I said, I can’t really complain about my cut in salary. If it weren’t for the two car loans from 2006 and my history of dumb materialism, my wife and I would have quite a bit saved up. I have faith we’ll get to a point of having a three-month buffer, but it won’t be this year.

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Your Recession Budget

by Smithee on March 3, 2009

in Money Management

Many of us are going to be faced with tough decisions this year, and probably next year. We might even have to grapple with “how do I get these creditors to stop calling me?” or “well, where do I live now?” If owning a home is the American Dream, then being homeless is surely the American Nightmare.

Before it gets that bad, there are things you can do to trim your monthly budget. But instead of just presenting you with a list, I thought it’d be fun to try and take advantage of the wisdom of crowds once again, as I did in my article “No More Credit Card Debt: Now What?.” (Incidentally, the credit card debt is down to about $4,100. It hasn’t been that low before in this entire millennium.)

So, here’s a list of things that I have previously considered removing, or actually did remove, from my family’s budget when we needed to be spending less. Vote “Yay” for the things you think should be removed from a struggling household budget. Vote “boo” for the things you think are necessary for survival in a civilized world.

If you think something is missing from the list, go ahead and add it.

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