Carole and I have now been married 49 years.  I tried, but I couldn’t find a happy 49th wedding anniversary card.  Wait till next year.  But, each month for the entire marriage, we have prepared a budget.

The first thing we did was purchase a very nice, substantial ledger book.  This adds significance and formality to the drill.  Picking up that formidable book and carrying it to the kitchen table was part of the ritual.  That’s important when you don’t have any money.  A budget is most important when you are managing very little money.

I don’t know anything about accounting.  I took beginners accounting in college and learned to line everything up neatly, but that was about it.  The only thing I know for sure is that debits go in one direction and credits go in the other.  But, I don’t know which is which.  I review my daily activities at Wachovia Securities on line.  Some numbers are in red and some are in black.  Then, some numbers appear twice, both in red and black.  I don’t have a clue.  I haven’t tried too hard, because I can tell that the bottom line is where it should be.

We started off married life with me going to law school.  Carole worked as a secretary, first for the University and then with the law firm of Smith and Lewis in Columbia, Missouri.  I vaguely remember that she cleared somewhere around $180 a month and my dad sent us $50.  So we budgeted $230 a month.

Almost everything in the budget was a necessity – no hair and nails or golf account.  We budgeted for rent, groceries, utilities, the car, household expenses, insurance and $3.50 for each of us for clothing.  After three months, we would have over $10!

For the first few months, I tried to make things add up, but it was too hard.  So, we just went through the process of writing down what we were spending.  Then, we would look and see if we were spending more than we were making.  It’s not very sexy, but I recommend it to anyone trying to live within their means.

Of course, we didn’t have credit cards, so if you didn’t have it, you couldn’t spend it.  I guess life was simpler.  No tickee, no laundry – no money, no spendee.  Our budgetary key was to find at the end of the month as much money in our check book as we had in our budget accounts.

There was no perfection in our system.  I will leave the accounting perfection to the DC Tax Department.  They kept superb books, while they were stealing $50 million!  They  just paid out tax refunds to themselves and to bogus companies they had created.  Fifty million.  That’s a lot of designer purses.  The patients were running the asylum.

In my system, I would move a lot of money among the accounts.  If we took a vacation and exhausted our vacation account, I would take money out of  “car and gas” and “entertainment.”  That’s not much of a stretch, especially if we drove.  But, I also might take money out of the “linen” account.  Why?  Because there was too much money in the linen account.  So sue me.  There is no auditor to keep me honest and Bed, Bath and Beyond will never know.

In the early years, I would run an account in the red for a few months.  But, in some accounts, the red number would just keep getting larger.  We would them have an executive meeting (Carole and me) at the kitchen table and decide to put $10 more in the particular account.  “The ayes have it.”  Then, we would write off the red number and start over.  I think my budget process is more an art form than a science, particularly that portion of the process where I manipulate the numbers.

There is a fine line between being cheap and being frugal.  For most of the early years, we straddled the line.  By doing so, now if we want to, we can go crazy (but of course, we don’t).