Manage Your Money - Step# 4: Make Your Own Personal Bank

"Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that's real power." -- Clint Eastwood

 

At this point, I am assuming that you already adjusted your allocations to match your actual take home pay. If not yet, please go back to step# 3.

Basically, you are making a lifestyle change, although momentarily until you can afford your desired lifestyle. What's next?

The next step is to make your own personal bank to where your allocated funds will be deposited. (Who says only big time businessmen can create banks.) How? This is very simple.

1st: Buy long mailing envelopes, your personal banks
2nd: Label the envelopes - 'RICE' for rice allocation, 'ELECTRICITY' for electricity bill allocation, etc.
3rd: Get a lengthwise piece of papers and put one inside each envelop
4th: Keep the envelopes in a cabinet and locked it.

That's it! Now you are ready to roll. All we have to do now is wait for your next payday.

I learned this simple yet very effective technique of managing my money during our Pre-Cana Seminar with my wife. The couple speakers that afternoon were not really teaching us how to budget, but when the wife mentioned how she used envelopes to store her husband's money, I did not forget it. I have been using it for 10 years now! It's very effective.

The advantage of the envelope over the real bank, and cooperative is that you can withdraw from your personal bank very quickly. The downside is that you should be very disciplined in your withdrawal; you should only withdraw money for the intended expense. Otherwise, your budget will not become effective. So it's very important that the person holding the keys to the cabinet should be more of a Spartan than a Monarch.

We will talk later when we can use banks and cooperatives to manage our fund. Yes, these are part of our money management strategies.

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