Own Your Economy

For people aged 45 to 65 who earn well
and suspect it's leaking somewhere

You're not short of money. You're short of Mondays that belong to you. Owning your economy is how you get them back.

Once a month: one force that's moving your money, what it means for you, and one thing to do about it. Free.

I've been fired from three jobs. Every time, somebody else picked the date.

The last one was IT systems and programming. That was the one that landed — not because of the money, but because of what it told me about an arrangement I'd been in for years and never once actually looked at.

I was good at the job. That turned out not to be the point.

I wrote one line in a journal not long after.

Do I want to sell my time, or own it?

Then I did nothing about it for a good while. And when I finally did move, I made money and lost it — three separate times.

So this isn't a story about working it out quickly.

It's a story about writing down the wrong question.

Because the question isn't whether you sell your time. Most of us do, for a long stretch, and there's no shame in it. The question is whether you set the terms — or inherited them by never looking.

The part I wish someone had said earlier

You're not a customer of the economy. You're running one.

It's small — a household, maybe a business, a pension, a mortgage, some hours in a day. But it works exactly like a country's. It produces something. It allocates time against money. It has arrangements it either chose or drifted into. And it passes something on at the end, or it doesn't.

Every economy has a person making the policy. In yours, that's supposed to be you.

Try this and see if it's true

Work out your own inflation rate.

Not the one on the news. That's an average basket across sixty million people, and you don't buy that basket. You buy yours.

Take what you actually spent last year on the six things that matter most in your house — mortgage or rent, energy, food, fuel, insurance, whatever your version of school fees or care costs is. Compare it to the year before. That percentage is your inflation rate.

About twenty minutes and a bank statement.

For most people it comes out higher than the headline figure. Sometimes a good deal higher.

That gap is why you can follow the financial news closely and still feel like you're falling behind. You're being told about an economy that isn't yours.

And that number isn't really about money. It's the rate at which your working life is getting longer. Every point above the headline figure is time you'll have to sell to stand still — Mondays you'd assumed were going to be yours.

That's the whole idea, in one calculation.

Why none of what you've read has helped

You've probably subscribed to something like this before. Maybe bought the thing at the end of it. And a few months later you felt slightly stupid about it and unsubscribed.

I don't think that was a discipline problem.

Personal finance treats you as a consumer of products. Which fund, which platform, which rate, which wrapper. So all of its advice is product advice — and product advice needs you to keep shopping. It can't make you capable, because a capable reader stops buying.

That's the trap. You can optimise every product you own and still be a passenger. Informed, briefed, up to date, and not driving.

You weren't failing at it. You were doing exactly what it was built to produce.

What turns up once a month

Diagnosis, not prediction. I'm not going to tell you what happens next. I don't know, and neither does anyone charging you to find out.

  1. One force that's moving your money now, in plain language. So you're not the last to know.
  2. One chart, walked through properly. What to look at, what it means. Never dropped and left for you to interpret.
  3. The arithmetic on real figures — sourced and dated, UK first, US noted alongside. So you stop guessing when someone asks.
  4. One thing to do that you can actually finish inside the month. So you've got something to show for it besides having read things.

Then one question. A real one, that asks for a number or a name or a date, and that you can reply to. I read the replies.

That's it. Twelve times a year.

Who's writing it

I'm Paul. I grew up in Wythenshawe.

I built IT systems and wrote code for a living. Three jobs, three firings, and three separate goes at making money and losing it. I've broken my own trading rules and paid for that too.

Before any of the money work I spent years as a performance coach, which is why this reads more like coaching than commentary. And I've done karate for 25 years — 4th Dan, and I lived in Japan to train properly. That matters here for one reason: it's twenty-five years of being told, every week, exactly what I'm still getting wrong. It changes what you'll tolerate hearing about your own numbers.

I'm not above you. I'm further along the same road, and I've been in the ditch on it more than once.

Who this isn't for

There's a large industry ready to hand you certainty. It'll cost you.

The three decisions

Everything here traces back to three of them.

You decide how much you make.
You decide how much time you keep.
You decide what you pass down.

Income · Time · Legacy

You don't need permission for any of it. You need a decision.

Straight answers

Is it actually free?
Yes. There'll be a paid tier later, for people who want the work done on their own numbers. The thinking, the chart and the action step stay free permanently. That's the deal, not a teaser.
How often?
Once a month. You've got a life.
Is this going to end in a webinar?
No. When I recommend something I'll say plainly whether I'm paid for it, and I don't recommend anything I haven't used.
I'm not in the UK.
Lead figures are UK with US equivalents noted. The forces are the same either side.
What if it's not for me?
Unsubscribe. One click, and no sequence trying to talk you round.
PS

Do the inflation calculation before you decide about any of this. Twenty minutes, one bank statement. Whatever number comes out, it's yours and not the one on the news — and once you've seen the gap, you'll understand what this newsletter is for better than any page could tell you.