Learnings from the All-Cash System
Since we’re doing the Dave Ramsey Dance, one of the things Amber and I are trying to do is to pay for all our day-to-day expenses in cash.
I know, weird huh! Paying for things with actual currency! Strange, I know, but that is part of the dance.
For me, that means twice every month I get a little wad of bills — $120 to be precise. There are basically three things this is used for:
- Gasoline to get me back and forth to work. That’s about $40/week, or about 2/3 of my allowance.
- Food eaten out of the house, i.e. lunch on weekdays.
- Personal expenses.
Mostly I eat lunch in my office now, apples and carrot sticks and cottage cheese and stuff like that. According to my budget I figure I can go out to lunch about once a week. As for personal expenses, well, I’m not really doing too much of that. It’s okay though, because I can see we are making progress.
Paying for things in cash is a slight inconvenience but not as bad as I thought. The biggest complaint is in buying gas; I have to go into the store and prepay. But it isn’t all bad. Sometimes, for example, when you actually have to interact with people you end up getting a decent blog post out of it.
We’ve been doing the all-cash system for 6 weeks now, and I must vigorously recommend it to anyone, for this reason: It will teach you to love your money.
I know Paul told us we should not love money. I agree with Paul. In particular, we should not love money that is not our money. Also, we should not love our own money if it keeps us from doing good things with our money.
But I must say, I think we should love it a little bit. We should love it enough to care for it and not waste it.
This is the biggest insight we’ve had about ourselves after having gone to the all-cash system. I am very zealous about guarding how that $240 gets spent each month. I know that if I am not careful, I won’t have enough to get through to the end, because it is very tightly budgeted. So I don’t buy candy, or treats, or soft drinks, or anything, really, except inexpensive food that I use to get me through the day.
As an example, I really love motocross (you should know this by now). It wasn’t uncommon for me at all to drift through the magazine section when I was at the store and see if there was a motocross magazine that interested me, and if there was, then I’d just get it. I mean, it’s only like $5. But now, $5 might be the difference between whether I can go to lunch with a friend this month, or whether I can refill my trail mix container at work. Suddenly, it isn’t worth it to me to get the magazine anymore.
In fact, most things I would spend money on before aren’t worth it to me now. I want to be sure I have the money to do what I need to do with it, so I guard it carefully.
The funny thing is, the money comes from the same place it did before. I work just as hard for this money as I used to work for the money before we went to all-cash. Why didn’t I take care of that money like I do now?
