Save money, save the world

10:00 AM 6/16/10

Why Bookkeeping?

The murderers attacked me because I 'bragged' about bookkeeping. They've attacked me many times in the past when I've written about how I learned something or created something or achieved something.

So I am going to explain, Why bookkeeping? Why do I love it? Why was it important enough that I decided to learn it? How do I feel about it?

My father was a radiologist. He moved us to West Virginia because there were big changes at the hospital where he used to work, in Greensburg, PA, and he found a new job in West Virginia.

After we bought our new house, we were deeply in debt. Nowadays, this isn't very expensive, but back then, a $250,000 house seemed really expensive, in the mid-eighties.

Dad didn't like the stress of his job, and he didn't want to work forever to pay off his debt. So he started saving more money and spending less. Mom and Dad had fights about money. I remember that we used to buy cheap brands of food, in bulk, lots and lots of something I didn't like, because it was cheap. We'd buy the cheap generic brands of cereal, the copycat cereals that LOOKED like Fruit Loops but tasted funny, that kind of thing. And no, I didn't enjoy that. I didn't like always hearing about how we had to buy cheap stuff so that we could save money.

But after I got my first job, I understood how bad it is to get stuck working in a job you hate, forever and ever, to pay off a debt. I was able to imagine how that would feel. So I understood why someone would want to save as much money as they could.

Dad saved money for a long time, paid off the debt, and retired early. He was able to do this because he made a lot of money at his job. But he could have wasted all that money buying lots of new cars and other big expensive things the way some doctors do, and he didn't do that, he saved the money instead.

He gave me a book called 'Your Money Or Your Life.' I read that book, and some other books about money and investing - one of them was written by Harry Browne - and I decided that I wanted to try saving enough money to quit my job, or at least, quit the job for a couple of years, and then maybe go back to it. If I could save just a few thousand dollars, I could take time off work. Since I'm working at minimum-wage jobs, that's a realistic goal. I can't save enough money to retire for the rest of my life, but I can save enough to take time off for a couple of years and do things I want to do.

I've been trying to do this for the past few years, but I used to always get laid off from my jobs, or the jobs would end and I would have to find a new job - that was back when I worked for the temp agency and I was doing data entry on computers in offices. I got a job in fast food and discovered that you can ALWAYS find another job in fast food, unless you do something so horrible that no one will ever hire you again. And it's hard to do something that bad. So I was able to keep a job for a long time without getting laid off, and that's why I've stayed in these jobs for now - stability.

Then I started having disasters of all kinds, and I have written about some of them. Those things have prevented me from saving money.

I wanted to start my own business so that I could have more control over the money I make. I wanted to do something I enjoy, instead of just working in fast food and grocery stores.

One day I decided to read about double-entry bookkeeping. I saw it mentioned someplace. I had been reading about money and investing for several years anyway because I became a libertarian, and libertarians believe that the government shouldn't control the money system - they should let people choose what kind of money they want, on their own. Some libertarian article or book must have mentioned double-entry bookkeeping and I decided to learn about it.

It took a couple of years. I actually started reading about it a few years ago online, and I looked at some websites that taught how to do it. I learned a little bit from them, while I also lived through my drug contamination disaster. I wanted to run my own business, and I wanted to know bookkeeping so that I could do that. I saw many businesses failing and going bankrupt. I knew that you have to understand profit and loss to make sure you don't go bankrupt.

I'm not sure why I decided to do this, but sometime along the way, I found a Schaum's Outline book. I must have been browsing through the bookstore. I loved it right away. I never liked the 'Idiot's Guide' books. I've been taught that you shouldn't call yourself an idiot. It might have been something I read in the objectivist books, that's probably where it was. Objectivists take themselves seriously. So I wanted a 'serious' book that didn't worry about whether or not I was an idiot. The Schaum's books are serious.

I started doing the exercises. I love to do book work. I enjoyed school, up to a point. There was a time in the past when I was able to do the assignments and get straight A's in all my classes. I couldn't do that in high school and college, but in the earlier years I could. And this Schaum's Outline of Bookkeeping and Accounting was an easy book, with lots of examples, and it gives you the answers, so you can always check to see if you understood. So even though I was living through several disasters, I gradually worked through that book.

I finally finished it around the end of last year, 2009, in the winter. I learned the basics of bookkeeping. I started doing my own expenses in the books as though I was running a business.

I used to type my money into the computer, into Microsoft Money, which was included with my Windows 98 system. But that isn't quite the same as double-entry bookkeeping.

In double-entry bookkeeping, you actually do write everything twice. You write it first in one place, and then you write it on another page. Everything has to balance. It is a soothing, satisfying activity. (Until you try to do something that doesn't work, and you go hunting for a mistake, and you dig through thousands of numbers for hours and hours, and change something, only to find that that didn't work either - that happened when I tried to do a trial balance for my own books for the first time.)

When I do the bookkeeping, it makes me feel like I have control over my life. I can predict the future. I can know how much money I will have at a certain time in the future if I keep earning what I am earning now. I can test different scenarios - what if I earn this much, and spend that much? How long will it take to achieve some goal?

The murderers made it impossible for me to use my mind. When the attacks first began, when it was the worst, I remember I talked to my mom on the phone, and I was very upset, and I said to her, 'The people who are reading my mind are destroying my future!' I might not remember the exact words but it was something like that. The first thing they did to me was they started zapping me anytime I looked into the future, no matter how short of a time in the future, even if I only looked into the next couple minutes to see what it would look like if I did a certain task, like clean the house, or make a phone call. I used to be able to prepare to do something by looking into the future, imagining that I was doing it, doing it all the way to the end, and seeing the consequences and benefits of doing it. The murderers destroyed that. That is the type of thinking process that they zap. Now, if I try to do that, I feel electric shock sensations in my head, and hear voices, and my hands and muscles twitch, and there are loud clicking and banging noises in the room around me, and every other disturbance that could possibly happen, happens to me. They are murderers.

When I do the bookkeeping, it can't substitute for being able to look into the future to do a small task or practice for a difficult conversation. But it feels like it's some kind of substitute, being able to control the future, even though I can't do what I used to be able to do. I can do something similar, but I'm doing it in an artificial way that involves a lot of writing and numbers.

It's funny, I remember that the Weasley family said that they had a Muggle cousin somewhere, but they never talked about him, and he was an accountant. It's funny that they chose for him to be an accountant, because accounting feels like doing magic, to me. It's an indirect and artificial way of doing magic, but that's how it feels.

I used to read The Onion, after my brother showed it to me. I haven't read it in a long time. But there used to be a guy named Herbert Kornfeld, and he wrote about working in the accounting department, except it was a gang war. Eventually he stopped writing, and they said that he was killed in the line of duty - I wonder what happened to the real guy. But I liked him because you'd think that accounting was boring and cold and lifeless, but to him, it was a big, exciting, terrible gang war and it was something important, not just boring. (I should go look at those articles again.)

Then what made this even more interesting to me was, just recently, when I was reading about the Myers-Briggs ISFP, my type. There are some authors who are hard to read, very technical, like David Keirsey. I started out reading him, and as a result, I didn't really understand my type, and I got a negative impression of SP artisans, especially because the test incorrectly labeled me an INTJ, INTP, and INFP when I took it several times and tried to answer a little differently. And if you go talk on the internet forums, you get an even worse negative impression of sensing types. The war between the sensors and the intuitives. It took me a long time to understand my Myers-Briggs type and get over the negative beliefs.

But there's a different website that gives a much better impression of sensing types, and I read about the ISFP and the ISTP types on there, and I feel that the ISFP does describe me quite well. They said that the ISFP wants to live by their values, live by what they believe is right and wrong. And they also said that, strangely enough, ISFPs often went into accounting jobs.

I was surprised by that. I always thought that I was unusual for being interested in bookkeeping. I thought only an ISTJ would like bookkeeping. But no, they say the ISFP often goes into that kind of job.

And it DOES feel like a big, huge, important gang war. It IS a war. There is a world war going on right now, everywhere, as the money system collapses, and as the world finds out how many trillions, or quadrillions, or quintillions of dollars bankrupt our government is. I've been reading about it for years, about the government destroying the money system by taking away gold and silver, and by doing a lot of other things. I want to understand it. I want to know what's wrong with the world and why these things happen and what to do about it. That's what bookkeeping means to me. It feels like saving the world.

So I am going to set up my bookkeeping station again, and get some new books and papers. This is one of my projects that I need to do soon. Even though I know I will be attacked, I need to do it anyway.