“A business which takes no regular inventory usually goes broke.” (Page 64, Big Book)
“We could wish to be moral, we could wish to be philosophically comforted, in fact, we could will these things with all our might, but the needed power wasn’t there.” (Page 45, Big Book)
I recently asked someone how they were at managing her finances. They said that they had things pretty much under control. I enquired further, and they elaborated that they were good at avoiding frivolous spending and were reasonably frugal. I asked whether they recorded and analysed their spending systematically, and they said that they did not.
Simply trying to be moral at the point of behaviour without ever doing inventory won’t work.
Data are required. Knowledge is required. Without data and knowledge, there is no understanding. Without understanding, there is no real decision-making, only impulse.
It is the same with finances. For years I tried to be careful at the point of spending but was always in debt. I started recording and tracing every single penny, categorising it, and analysing it, and my debt problem disappeared overnight. I thought my spending was ‘under control’ only because I was the one doing the spending. I was really entirely out of control. There were no control mechanisms in place at all.
When turning any area of my life over to God, the first thing I must do is get things under control by ascertaining the facts.
Turning my life over to God is neither mystical nor spooky. It means turning things over to Good Orderly Direction, and the Good Orderly Direction means Sort Your Shit Out.