I never used to track our expenses until our financial planner told us we have to.

It was not an easy exercise. There is that little notebook that you need to haul with you everywhere. And you have to be on your guard everytime – did I take a dollar from my wallet? And there’s the hubby that you have to nag to please write every little expense when you know he will not because he does not want to.

He still does not want to.

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Postscript: Man’s Inhumanity to Man

A crisis makes heroes and villains of people. While there are many stories of heroism, one cannot ignore horror stories of fastfood chains turning away people who wanted to use restrooms or who wanted to charge their cellphones (one gave an emphatic “no”, another charged a USD$3 fee), or those who pillage the houses of those hardest hit, or those who charged USD$500 at the height of the storm for the use of a rubberboat before a family can be brought to safety, or those selling (selling!) relief goods to those who cannot take another blow.

Please choose to be an angel during these times. And if you have employees, likewise instruct them to open your doors. The next life you save may that of someone you know, or yours.

I need only to look at my spam folder and my 139 spam emails to realize that these scams are not few and far between, and that the scammers have been getting bolder and that a lot of thought and resources are being put into this. My financial planner emailed one scammer, saying, “it is more fulfilling to do good and honest work rather than scam people out of their money”. To his surprise, the spammer had the temerity to respond: “What if you finally get this fund, what should I do to you? Do you want your payment or not?”

The first few days of “The List” were hard. The Indays were on the defensive track. They knew they were being monitored and they did not like it. They staged pseudo-hunger strikes and then asked me for a budget for them for food so they will not eat ours. I finally sat them down to talk and I explained to them that I was not at home all the time and it was hard for me to understand why the food is being consumed so very fast when my husband and I hardly eat at home, or why the Meralco is so high, or why four long bars of laundry soap will only last 2 weeks. I told them that I was sorry to have made them feel that way but The List was just a way for me to understand. I did not know how long food or water or gas should last and usually, my expectations are not very reasonable. I wanted to be free of delusions. I did not say it but I also wanted to be free of suspicions. It was not a very good way to live. For either me or the Indays.

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It could be quite frustrating to be told that you cannot buy something that you really, really want to have. But that is the function of a financial planner – he will tell you if you can, when you can, how you can. He is my personal financial brakes, someone to tell me that I am going overboard, or that I am just being silly.

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In fact, in his report, the financial planner said, “While the couple’s Emergency Fund Ratio (EFR) will be over 1x by the end of 2007, the ideal ratio is 3x. The couple would need to add around Php149,000 to their annual income to meet such a ratio. To raise their savings rate to 18.1% from 6.7%, the couple would need additional annual income of Php262,000, or add 24% to their current annual income.” After this analysis, without ever explaining what the hoot it meant, or if there was any hope for us, we never saw him again.

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