When artists tell me that money isn’t important, I can be reasonably sure that it is because they rely on someone else to pay their bills.
The truth? No matter who you are, money matters. It really does.
For the next month — just as an experiment — start thinking about the small stuff. Not just the big expenses, but the items that have you digging in your purse to count coins. At work, the” small stuff” might be office supplies, lunch tabs, or add-ons to special events. In your personal life it might be a daily caramel macchiato or a lottery ticket.
These small amounts are the items we don’t keep track of, the things we do to unconsciously (or consciously) “treat” ourselves after a hard day. It’s the stuff we justify as “essential” even though it’s really a statement about our own feeling of powerless-ness. We feel we “deserve it” but the truth is we feel we can’t do any better anyway; things will never change; it’s too small to make any kind of difference in our lives.
In organizations, money has a close relationship to power and control. At age 20, I worked as an administrator at a large corporation and one of my responsibilities was to draft a $1.5 million annual budget for my department. Part of that process involved collecting sensitive information about salaries and annual sales goals from other departments.
Standing at the copy machine, the sales manager turned to me and asked, “Are you authorized to have access to this information?” But what she really meant was, “You’re basically just a ‘secretary’ – I don’t want you to know how much I make and you shouldn’t be involved in deciding what needs to happen here.”
Actually, my boss was really smart. He trusted me to draft the expense budget and then we finalized it together. He worked on the salary projections himself and added them to the final numbers. In doing so, he shared the department’s goals for the year with me as well as the management responsibility for meeting them. I knew exactly how much folks got paid and I also knew how their professional experience and academic qualifications contributed to that figure.
But his approach is rare. Most managers treat the budget like a secret document, sealed with wax and passed around the c-suite. It seems easier –it prevents those awkward conversations about why so-and-so gets paid more than you – but it means that your staff will never feel accountable for what they spend, or have any incentive to make changes that improve the financial health of the organization.
Are you buying donuts every Friday out of petty cash? Maybe it seems like pocket change or maybe donuts seem like a reward to a tough work week, but if your staff had to spend “their” money, they’d probably make different decisions. How can you make your budget more transparent to staff? How can you involve them in the budgeting process? What salary increases can be secured for them if they meet those goals? Because the answer to that salary question is the one that will get them to buy-in when you ask them to give up the donuts. And by the way, you have to ask (not tell) to make those changes voluntary and be transparent about the cost savings; otherwise, you’re on the fast track toward mass resentment. Brought on by low blood sugar.
Individual artists might find it helpful to change a regular habit and set the money physically aside in a jar or envelope. I did this when I quit smoking some years ago. I was barely making ends meet at that time in my life, but I always had $4 for a pack of cigarettes. $1000 a year was a lot of money to me in those days; even more so now when I think that, had I been able to put just one year of cigarette money into the stock market and kept adding $60 a month to the account instead of buying cigarettes… it would be worth more than $19,000 today.
Being dependent on someone else financially (when they can’t afford to give) isn’t creative freedom. Being broke sucks a lot more than working, and it sucks a lot more than bringing your lunch to work four out of five days a week. Last year I put a coin counting jar in the laundry room and pulled $87 in coins out of the washing machine in one month. I kept the money, spent it on a spa day, and quid pro quo, my family stopped leaving change in their dirty jeans. Do not underestimate the power of the small stuff.
In the beginning, it’s hard. You don’t get to do everything you want to do, but the fact is? You never will. Once you finally do get some money together, you’ll realize how hard it is to come by and you’ll stop throwing it away on stuff that doesn’t really matter. That’s the secret to acquiring assets and keeping them to spend on what you want. And that’s the secret no one seems to have shared with Michael Jackson and Ed McMahon. Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it does buy a whole lot of time in a recording studio, new paint brushes and trips to writers workshops.
Challenge:
For the month, starting today – June 9th, 2011 – take your coins and put them in a jar at the end of each day. On July 9th, 2011, take your jar to Coinstar at the grocery store and get it counted. Give yourself one of Coinstar’s vouchers and spend that money on whatever you want. Drop me a comment and tell me how much you’ve saved and what you bought yourself, and I’ll feature you on the blog.
