Ask a man in his forties how much he earns and he will tell you, roughly, with a shrug.
Ask him what his household actually needs to get through a month, to the nearest hundred, and plenty of capable men would have to go and look. Not because they are reckless. Nobody has ever asked them, and at some point knowing started to feel more frightening than not knowing.
There is a third question that matters more than either. How long would you last if the money stopped?
After the 2008 crash I had to answer that question for a company, and the answer decided how it ended.
How the money stops
People imagine financial trouble as one event. A call, a letter. It can just as easily be a set of ordinary terms changing at the same time.
I had built a construction company in the UK to seven figures, subcontracting to large main contractors. After the crash, three things changed together.
The main contractors moved their payment terms to 95 days from the end of the month. In practice, that meant roughly four months between doing the work and seeing any money for it.
The banks withdrew overdrafts and stopped lending.
The builders merchants withdrew credit accounts and went cash on delivery.
Any one of those is a problem you can work. All three together meant this. My wages and materials came to around £20,000 a week, and I would have had to carry that for about four months, with no credit anywhere to bridge it.
The income had not vanished. It had moved four months away. For a business with a weekly bill, that is the money stopping.
The income had not vanished. It had moved four months away.
The decision the numbers made
I finished the contract I was on. I could not afford to take the next one. I wound the company down solvent, with money in the bank.
The crash ended the company. I chose how it ended, and I could only choose because the numbers were plain: a weekly figure, a number of weeks, and no way to cover one with the other.
The accounts were not the hard part. Telling my men they had no job was. I spent the following week placing most of them with other firms that had stayed afloat.
That is what "how long would you last" looks like when it stops being a feeling and becomes a sum. You do not get to like the answer. You do get to act on it while you still have choices.
The three numbers
Twenty minutes. A piece of paper, not a spreadsheet, because a spreadsheet becomes a project and a project becomes next month.
Number one. What actually comes in. Average take home over the last three months. Not your best month, not your quote for what you are worth. What landed. If it varies, add the three and divide by three.
Number two. What has to go out. Not what you spend. What has to go out for the lights to stay on and the family to stay housed and fed. Rent or mortgage, utilities, food, the minimum on anything you owe, insurance, transport to work. This is the floor, not the lifestyle.
Number three. How long you would last if number one stopped tomorrow. Savings, divided by number two. In months.
Three numbers, one page.
The word that does the most work
Some of you will not be able to fill in number three, because you do not know what is in the accounts, or you are not sure what you owe, or there is a card you have not looked at.
Write "Unknown."
Write it in full. Do not estimate, do not put a question mark, do not put a range you have made up to feel better. The word Unknown is not a failure and it is not an admission of anything. It is a finding. It is you, tonight, being more honest about your position than you were this morning.
Unknown is survivable. Unknown has a fix, and the fix is usually one phone call or one login.
What is not survivable is a decision made on top of an Unknown. That is how people end up remortgaging to fund a business that was already failing. It is how people take the bigger job when they should be taking the safer one. They are rarely stupid. They made a real decision using a number they had invented.
What this is not
This is not a budgeting article, and it is not financial advice. I am not going to tell you to stop buying coffee.
I have no interest in the moral version of money, where being short is a discipline failure and the answer is a spreadsheet and some shame. Plenty of men are earning a reasonable amount in an expensive decade, with children or parents or both depending on them, and the maths is genuinely hard.
Knowing the three numbers does not fix that. It does not create money.
What it does is take one thing off the list of things you are frightened of, and it does it inside half an hour. Fear of a known number is manageable. It is a problem, and problems can be worked. An unknown number is a fog, and you cannot work a fog. You can only avoid it, which is exhausting in a way you stop noticing.
Why money often goes first
Money behaves differently from the other areas of a life.
It is rarely the thing people care about most. Ask what matters and people say their kids, or feeling useful, or not dreading Monday. Money comes well down the list.
But money is the one that makes every other decision feel more dangerous than it is.
You cannot think clearly about whether to leave the job when you do not know whether you could survive a month without it. You cannot have the honest conversation with your partner while you are protecting them from a number you have not looked at yourself. You cannot take the small risk that might change your work, because with the fog in place every risk looks the same size, and they are not the same size at all.
That is why it goes first, when it goes first. It is the thing standing between you and being able to weigh anything else properly.
The one thing to do this week
Three numbers. One page. Twenty minutes. Write Unknown where you have to.
Then go and find out one of the Unknowns. Just one. The login, the letter, the phone call.
That is your brick for this week. One useful thing you could do tired, on a Tuesday, that makes the next decision easier than the last one.
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