Financial confidence isn’t reached by making $150K a year, or saving 50% of every paycheck. It’s not achieved by making more than you ever thought you needed, or by depriving yourself to do something radical.
It’s about doing what you can, when you can.
I saw a quote once that said something like: behavior is a greater predictor of financial success than someone’s mathematical ability.
And it’s right, because math happens in your head. Behavior is what you actually do.
That’s why you can have all the right answers and still not have a plan. If you’re not doing it, it’s not a financial plan. It’s a financial idea.
Plans are tied to action. Or at least, they should be.
So how do we actually do it?
Start with your accounts, not your budget
The most tangible part of a financial plan starts with your account setup.
Think like an architect. Design a structure that’s simple and purposeful, where every card and account serves a unique job. You only open or keep what you actually need, and you don’t have a bunch of extra stuff floating around.
Easier said than done, I know. Most of us are carrying accounts we opened for a sign-up bonus in 2017 and never touched again.
But the goal here is bigger than tidiness. When your setup is clean, doing the right thing stops requiring willpower.
Here’s the structure we recommend:
All household income flows into one main account.
From that main account, set up monthly transfers to:
- Savings and investment accounts
- Individual spending accounts, if you have them
- Pay off a shared credit card, which should be paying for household bills and joint spending
That’s it. The money moves before you have a chance to think about it, which is the whole point. You’re not relying on yourself to be disciplined on a Tuesday when you already deserve to treat yourself. You built a system that’s disciplined for you.
The four numbers that tell you if it’s working.
Once the structure is in place, there are four numbers to watch. These are borrowed from Ramit Sethi’s Conscious Spending Plan, which is an incredible resource we highly recommend.
Together, they tell you what you’re actually prioritizing and how healthy things are overall.
| What it is | Target range |
|---|---|
| Fixed costs | 50 to 60% |
| Investing | 10 to 15% |
| Savings | 5 to 10% |
| Discretionary (guilt-free) spending | 20 to 35% |
Instead of forty line items, or a color-coded spreadsheet that’s impossible to keep up with; it’s just four numbers.
The tricky part is that these numbers have to respond to your life. If your situation changes and you don’t adjust, you’ll drift out of range without ever noticing it happened. Nobody decides to let their fixed costs creep to 70%, it just quietly does.
The Money Map
To translate our ideas into an actionable plan, we built a Money Map. It translates your account structure and real money flows into those four markers of financial health and priorities.
I actually built it to help with my own situation. I wanted to be able to see how upcoming changes would affect my overall financial health and priorities, without having to do a bunch of calculations every time. That’s exactly what a Money Map does.
As a visual thinker, using a Money Map is what finally made me feel clear and confident about what my husband and I were doing. We could see exactly what trade-offs we were making, and how each decision affected the bigger picture.
We’ve used it to navigate:
- A job loss
- Promotions/ raises
- Saving for a fancy new vacuum cleaner
- Irregular expenses like vet bills and car repairs
- An incredible trip to New Zealand!
This one tool has helped us navigate a wide variety of circumstances, and is the foundation of every money decision and conversation we have together.
Where to start this week
You don’t need to rebuild everything at once. Pick one:
- List every account and card you have, and mark the ones that no longer have a job
- Set up one automatic transfer you’ve been meaning to set up
- Fill out the Conscious Spending Plan to check out your own four numbers, and see which one surprises you
Each of those actions turns an idea into a plan.
When I built the Money Map, I knew it would immediately bring clarity and direction the structure of our plan.
But the part that surprised me was how much it helped my husband and me work as a team while we used it! Every time we sat down to plan for a job loss or trip, the system worked fine, but it became something that brought us closer together, and truly made me feel like we were on the same page because of the conversations that came up while using it.
More on that next, because talking about money with a partner is its own skill, and very few of us are taught it.