THE REBUILD
My Mojo account has two jobs and one balance. Scott Pape’s The Barefoot Investor gives it one job, which is to sit somewhere out of reach on purpose. I wrote about that structure here last Thursday. For a while I kept the difference in my head, but putting things in writing has always been my jam.
So, in the sheet, Mojo splits. I sized Own Mojo the way Pape’s book sizes it, at three months of what everyday life costs to run. Wantok Mojo covers the calls, and I sized that one from twelve months of my own ledger instead, because no rule I have read knows what a haus krai costs in Wewak. Five accounts still, four for the everyday and one for the safety net, as on Day 4. The ring-fence between the two lives in the sheet, because the bank account will only ever show me one figure.
That ring-fence is a line rather than a wall. When one sub-balance runs short the other covers it and a later pay squares them, which is what the reconciliation block on the Mojo tab is for. Own Mojo carries the curveballs that belong to this life. Wantok Mojo runs the other way as well, because the calls arrive and so does the help, and this ledger only records the first.
The Wantok ledger tab is where I capture the difference. It records the date, the person, the occasion, the amount, and which sub-balance the amount came from. The last column asks whether the amount came back, and I built that one expecting yes or no. It finished with four answers, because money repaid in full, money repaid in part, money still owed and money nobody was ever going to repay are four different facts about a year.
The ring-fence between the two lives in the sheet, because the bank account will only ever show me one figure.
Here is the thing it showed me that I had yet to work out for myself. The sheet divides the gap by the fortnightly contribution and reports how many pay cycles that takes to close. I put a year of giving through it, and the rebuild ran longer than the gap between the calls.
I had been thinking of the balance as a destination.
It refills at a rate, and the rate is the number worth watching. A target on its own says little about whether a year is easy to carry. The percentages came down to meet it. Sixty, ten, ten and twenty is the published split, and I left every one of those in as an editable opening figure.
Then the sheet does the sums the book never has to do, subtracting the obligation line as well and reporting what is left on the bottom row. I built it to show that squeeze rather than settle it.Own Mojo reaches its goal eventually, and the sheet says which payday. When mine did, I moved that fortnightly contribution across to Splurge, Smile and Fire Extinguisher, which had all been running below the target ten, ten and twenty. A deposit tab takes twenty per cent of a house price and counts the pay cycles the Fire Extinguisher balance needs to reach it.
The worked example runs an invented household in Lae, and every kina in it is made up. I put that sentence inside the file, on the first tab and under the example.
My sheet knows one year of one household, which is mine. If you have kept any record of a year of giving and would like to share the shape of it, write to me.
Download your free copy of my template below.
TOMORROW
The first book on my list. An American mapmaker created parables on pamphlets for banks to hand out in the 1920s, stories he set in a city that had been ruins for the better part of two thousand years. He established the rule every account in this spreadsheet still runs on. I quoted it last Friday and tomorrow the book gets a verdict.
