Automatic Finances
- Intro (you are here)
- Cash Management
- Investing
- Insurance
My friend Amy Hoy recently tweeted about financial planning and personal finance. This particular tweet stuck out to me:
you'd probably think given my love of money that i'd be all over financial planning, but truly i only enjoy earning it and spending it. saving it feels like… freezing cake. i guess you could do it, but why, you have cake
— Amy Hoy ✨ (@amyhoy) February 19, 2019
Last year I radically simplified my family's personal financial system and made everything as automatic as possible. Amy and Joel Hooks asked me to write up how it works, so this is the start of a series of short posts about how and why I set everything up.
A Little Bit of Why
I prefer to think of myself as a realist. Due to my health history my wife is likely going to be around longer than me. Her family has some very long lived female members as well. Her grandmother is 103 and her great aunt just passed in 2018 at the ripe old age of 95.
I want to make our finances as simple as possible so she doesn't have to worry about them when the inevitable happens.
In 2016 my wife and I welcomed our first child into the world and in late 2018 we welcomed our second. They are two more very important reasons why I want things to be simple. If something happens to both my wife and me, I want our intentions with regards to our finances as plain as possible.
This system got a trial run in late 2018. My wife was admitted to the hospital at 29 weeks pregnant for preeclampsia, a very dangerous condition that needs close monitoring. My daugther was born at 34 weeks and spent the next five weeks in NICU.
I didn't have to touch this system at all. Not once. I logged in a handful of times to check up on it, but everything just hummed along.