Prepare for a metaphor that is too complicated to follow:
I am currently working on a data center for a medical institution in Texas, and there is a special room with electrical equipment that is dedicated to the functions of the data center. Because this is being built in a renovated building (originally built in 1958ish) this room must be located deep within the bowels of the building, next to all of the air handling equipment and storage on the lower levels.
These rooms contain batteries that could potentially off-gas hydrogen, a highly combustible element. As such, mechanical codes require continuous ventilation to the outside of the building, and the continual intake of fresh make-up air. Well, the mechanical engineer decided that it would be wasteful to simply send thousands of cubic feet of air conditioned air to the outside, after considerable energy had been expended to cool that air (If you've been in Texas in the summer, you'd understand.) His solution was to place an ERV (Energy Recovery Ventilator) that would recapture some of that lost energy and transfer it to incoming air. This is not technically correct, but it explains in rough detail what this system does.
How is that a metaphor? Great question. Prepare to board J.T.'s brain vomit express. I would say that budgets are the ERV's of finance. When we send all of our money out, none of it is recaptured. When we don't track our spending, we simply lose that money to the world, and it is gone from us. With the budget, we can curtail the spending and put more back into our pockets for the things that we want or need. As I write this, I can see on top of our living room credenza a piggy bank in which we place all unused funds from cash withdrawls. We are recapturing some of that money rather than spending it on the next item. As a result, the piggy bank is getting heavy!
Recently, we started using Mint, found at mint.com, and so far we are very impressed. Immediately it pointed out to us areas where we are losing money or not making as much money as we could be making elsewhere. It also has a budget feature where you can set budget goals for different categories, and when the budget is complete, it will tell you your monthly savings. After setting up what I believe is a very generous budget, we stand to save over $1,000 a month, which is not an insignificant amount of money. With over $12,000 a year extra that is no longer going to waste, we can do incredible things with that money.
We should not so generously give away the money that we worked so hard for. We exchanged a priceless commodity for it: our time. I want to recapture as much of that energy as possible to yield back some of my life and my time.
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