I am finally able to continue my story about my journey from financial ruin towards a money magic. If you missed Part 1, you can read it
here.
The Great and Powerful Witch
I am very flattered by my friends and others in the magical community. I am often told that I am a powerful witch. My spells do work, and largely the way I intended. The only unexpected results from my spells usually are added bonuses that continue to pay forward after the spell has come to fruition. I know, because I track the results. I
meticulously track the results; and I would attribute my magical success largely to my particular attention to the tiniest of details.
I keep a detailed grimore, but unlike the witches of old, my grimore is digital. My spells are all written in Microsoft Word. And my spell template (yes, I have a spell template) is four pages long. Once I complete writing a spell, it can easily be over six pages and will continue to grow as I track its progress. It usually takes me more than one day to compose a spell before I cast it and it is not unusual for me to spend a week designing. It is a lot of work, but if I am the powerful witch that my friends proport me to be, it is probably due to my meticulous planning.
Learning from Magical Mayhem
Of course, I have had spell malfunctions and failures. They are great learning tools which in turn helped me fine tune my spell template to consider as many probabilities as possible.
One of my most malignant magical mayhems I dealt with was another money spell. So, I wanted to make sure that this spell with the Fundamental Needs did not go as haywire as that one did. That meant that I would have to do some serious research into my personal habits before I even so much as looked at a wand or cauldron.
The first thing I did was open up my bill spreadsheet (yes, I have a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet where I list my current bills – I’m noticing a distinctly anal-retentive theme here). If I truly didn’t have expenses to be cut, but Fundamental Needs I had to figure out how to pay for; then it was time to figure out what Fundamental Need I was buying with each of my bills.
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| My son's Fundamental Needs chart from his Montessori Education |
Under the first half of the month I had listed my two mortgages, my car insurance, the babysitter, a few of my credit cards, my loan from my mother, and the electric bill. Under the second half of the month I had listed my internet provider, the gas company, more credit cards, and my cell phone.
Shelter
The mortgages were an easy fit – shelter, of course. After thinking a few moments, it was easy to place the electric bill and gas under shelter too as they both provided power to keep my son and me warm and dry. This is pretty easy! I thought, and I merrily continued down the bill spreadsheet.
Defense
Next was the car insurance and because it had the word “car” in front of it, I started to list the insurance under transportation. But then I stopped. Insurance really had nothing to do with getting somewhere. I wasn’t purchasing transportation with that, so what was I actually buying? I decided that I was buying peace of mind. If I was in an accident, financially, I’d be okay. With that in mind I placed my car insurance under the heading of defense. It dawned on me that my internet access was less about entertainment, and also more about defense. I paid my bills online, communicated with my babysitter service through the internet, and it was my lifeline to information. That spiraled my thought process. My babysitter was also defense, because she protected and cared for my child when I was unable to do so. And my cell phone was my connection to her and my child when I was not with them; that meant the cell phone bill was also purchasing defense.
Religion
That left the loan from my mother and all of my credit cards. What the heck were those? What was I buying when I paid those bills? Were they actually needs? Well, I couldn’t stop paying them, that was going to add to my financial problems. I decided that if I needed to pay them, then they had to some kind of need and not an expense I could just cut from my expenditures.
I remembered when I had gone to see a financial counselor at my credit union. I felt utterly hopeless when she told me to declare bankruptcy. I felt like she just wanted me to give up. I didn’t want to give up. I had already bought things with that money, I felt it was morally my responsibility to pay back my debts. Morality sounded an awful lot like to Religion to me, so I put my loans in that category.
Considering the Fundamental Needs
As I was looking at my actual bills they seemed so small. My monthly bills – those checks I sent out every month only covered shelter, defense, and religion. I realized that there were quite a number of things not on my bill spreadsheet. The water bill was irregular and medical bills were too, hence they were missing from my monthly spreadsheet. The gas I purchased for transportation, clothes I needed to buy, and the groceries that caused my anxiety to soar like no other expenditure, were not on my bill spreadsheet. And what about culture and vanity? I decided that if they were Fundamental Needs, they could not be ignored or cut out of my life.
I went back to the fundamental needs. Using my son’s homework assignment as a template, I created my own chart. Gasoline obviously fell under transportation. Were there other expenses that fell under this category? How about car maintenance (also not on the bill spreadsheet)? What else belonged under defense? After thinking about it I decided that Medical bills belonged under defense. I was protecting my son’s and my body with routine checkups and was healing illnesses with medication. Likewise, pet care fell here too. I had cats, and I was responsible for these creatures’ well-being.
Shelter was pretty straightforward, but I added the utilities and then after some consideration, I added cleaning supplies and office supplies. Yes, those were things I usually bought at the grocery store, but they weren’t food. I often tried to sacrifice them, but I couldn’t. I needed stamps to mail bills, and pens to write checks and I certainly wasn’t going to live in a filthy house.
Vanity
I made a change from my son’s chart when it came to clothing. I made the decision to file the expenditures for the costumes I made under Vanity. This was because I was very proud of those one-of-a-kind costumes and the process of making them brought a lot of joy into my life which was otherwise full of financial anxiety. I also filed under Vanity the gifts I gave to my son and other people in my life. When I did that, placing the charitable donations I tried to make into the category of Vanity made sense too. It went back to that day I watched my son attach that picture of his chess trophy to his Fundamental Needs homework assignment and then watching him proudly carry the project into school. For me, selecting gifts for people I cared about and giving to those less fortunate than myself had that element of passionate effort that I had so admired when I watched my son with his project. This led to a bit of an epiphany of compassion. Because when I added makeup and personal care to the category of Vanity I realized that getting my haircut and making the occasional purchase of a tube of mascara was not something to berate myself for or to be ashamed of. The giving of gifts, even to oneself, was not a frivolous want, it was a part of being human.
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Material Needs
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Transportation
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Defense
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Shelter
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Clothing
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Food
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Auto Fuel
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Medical
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Water Bill
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Child Clothing
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Groceries
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Car Maintenance
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Pet care
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Mortgage
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Personal Clothing
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Dining out
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I-pass and Tolls
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Child care
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Home Maintenance
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Work Uniforms
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Parking fees
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Cell Phone
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Electric
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Alternate transportation
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Internet
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Gas
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Registration
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Insurance
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Cleaning Supplies
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Gym Membership
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Office Supplies
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Spiritual Needs
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Culture
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Religion
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Vanity
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Outings
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Debt repayment
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Kid’s Activities
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Vacation
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Education
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Costumes
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Mementos
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Fees
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Gifts
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Taxes
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Donations
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Makeup
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Personal Care
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This was a start. This was certainly some much needed perspective on my financial situation. But this wasn't quite magic, not yet. I will be back with the magic in another article.
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