Grams and Grandpa Black gave me a book for my birthday called “The Automatic Millionaire” by David Bach. I read the introduction, and so far I’ve been amused at the style of his writing, which is a bit like a traveling medicine proprietor from the early 1900s, and by the obviousness of what he’s saying.

He claims that budgets don’t work. Discipline doesn’t work. Paying bills first and saving some of what’s left doesn’t work. Buying on credit doesn’t work (except in real estate). I agree with him, but the funny thing is that this is not really new to me - my other grandparents (the Donovans) have been telling me and my sister this for years, particularly that last point.

The most important thing about all of this, and the reason why discipline doesn’t matter, is that your finances should be automatic. This is again something the Donovans told me many times. I have a number of automatic financial transactions set up, but not all - some of which are intentional. I’m not sure why, but I thought that having to manually pay my credit card bill every month would give me more control, or at least notice, of my financial situation. It hasn’t. I always pay in full, so that doesn’t vary. It hasn’t made me more aware of my spending, as I’d hoped it would. In all it’s made me more worried about it.

The funny thing is that I could have easily applied the lessons I’ve learned from Agile Programming to my finances, the biggest one being that of automation. In software, you have certain assertions that, given such and such parameters, must be true. There are ways of codifying these assertions into what is usually called a Unit Test. After a while you end up with a suite of tests that, if comprehensive, will tell you how well your software is abiding by its contract. The problem with unit tests is that they atrophy very easily. It’s so easy to forget or intentionally skip the tests when developing. That’s why they need to be automated. When they are automated, you can’t ignore your software’s contract violations because they are in your face. The point is this: automate, or it will never happen.

The same applies to finances, though to a lesser extreme. I do pay my credit card bill even though it’s not automatic because there are serious and immediate consequences to my not doing it.

I’d taken a few steps on my own before I got this book that I think have helped my finances and my sanity:

No, I don’t want a receipt

I tried, unsuccessfully, for a long time to record every financial transaction I ever was involved in. This was detrimental because I spent more time on the overhead of bookkeeping than the money involved was worth. I constantly worried about stacks of unfiled receipts, staring at me on the kitchen table. I wanted to aspire to some level of financial mastery as the banker in Atlas Shrugged, who balanced his huge banking empire down to the penny.

I can’t do that, nor do I really want to anymore. Do I ever really want to find out how much I’ve spent on movie rentals in the last month? Or on eating out this last week with employees from j2? No. Not really. The need has never come up, and I don’t think knowing would benefit my financial situation much.

Quick, what’s the balance?

I wrote a script a while back to get the balance of my Wells Fargo accounts. It worked, but wasn’t that great. I’ve since improved it and added one for my credit card, and both of these show up on my desktop, updated automatically every three hours. This helps me track my finances much better than tediously recording receipts ever could.

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