Welcome to Under 2, an email series delivering short insights to empower your money life – in 2 minutes or less.
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One of the trickiest aspects of managing money is feeling like you have confident control over the uncontrollable.
An organized monthly budget is lovely—until one of your wheels is suddenly smoking on the highway (this happened to us last week). A tight system for paying bills is great—until utility rates spike and you can’t exactly stop using water or electricity.
When these problems happen, our instinct is usually to zoom in. We blame ourselves for not staying more organized and try to craft schemes for greater control. If only I had tracked this more closely…
But often the solution is to zoom out.
Because when life gets messier, our ability to manage more details doesn’t increase at the same rate. Instead, we need to learn to manage differently, from a wider perspective that allows space for the irregularity, rather than attempts to control it.
Think of a typical week. You can relatively easily account for groceries, gas, and a few household errands. But this predictive accounting is much more difficult to do for the stuff that lives on a different timeline: a broken water heater, new brakes and rotors, a medical bill, or ordering a gift for your friend’s big milestone birthday.
That’s because these expenses aren’t weekly or monthly. They’re not part of our usual financial routines.
Instead, they occur on a much broader time scale. And while they often feel random, the total amount you spend on them each yearis surprisingly steady.
True, the water heater should only break down every 15 years, your brakes should be good for a decade, you can only get your appendix out once, and your BFF only turns 40 once.
But even when any specific expense is rare, a mix of similarly rare expenses happens every year.
This is why zooming out matters. Because while many expenses or types of spending might be very uncommon, your yearly patterns of spending on such things are usually much more predictable.
And because highly irregular expenses also tend to be the biggies when it comes to the magnitude of their cost, they matter in your planning—easily accounting for a third or more of your total annual spending.
As we approach the halfway mark of 2025, now is a good time to evaluate your expenses on a broader time scale. Download your debit and credit card data and check on your ‘year to date’ numbers or the past 12 months. Take a look at your outgoing cashflow on that 6-12 month timescale and get curious. What can you learn from that view?
Repeated over many years, you’ll likely notice that expenses tend to add up more consistently on the year-to-year scale than they feel when we experience them in day-to-day life.
And when you have a good handle on that reality from a broader point of view, managing them in the moment becomes a whole lot easier.
Time is the wisest counselor of all.
Pericles
I hope you enjoyed this edition of Under 2, an email series designed to share quick bites of wisdom to empower your financial journey (while keeping it short). Be sure to sign-up below to get these messages in your inbox.
All for now,
Lindsey