Manifesting Money: How Nickles Look After Themselves
I was thinking about different times of my life where I’ve manifested financial abundance, or lack there of. Normally I contemplate big expenses and windfalls, but today I was thinking about why some rather ordinary months seem to be tighter than others. My thoughts meandered about, and eventually came to my dear old grandpa.
He used to say, “Look after the pennies and the nickles will look after themselves.” What he meant by that is, if you have a chance to save a few pennies, do it! Don’t be saying, “oh it’s just a few pennies, why bother?” Little expenses add up. Save a few pennies here and there and you’ve got a handful of nickles. lol. Of course, no one cares about nickles anymore. My grandpa was born in 1901 and lived through the Great Depression, so to him, a nickle was something of value. Today I think we’d say, “Look after your 5 dollar bills and the twenties will look after themselves.” But you get the point. Save a few bucks here and there and it truly adds up.
Grandpa’s saying may sound simple, perhaps naive, and certainly a little stingy in a Great-Depression-survivor kind of way. But he came to be a fairly affluent man later in life, so he must’ve been onto something.
It’s not his penny-pinching that interests me. It’s the way he let “nickles look after themselves.” There’s a degree of surrender happening here, and that’s important, because surrender is precisely the element that seems to effect my ordinary, month-to-month finances.
There’s three basic observations that I’ve made.
If I get very lazy about watching my money, and lose all track of how much is coming in vs. how much is going, I do eventually start racking up debt. Laziness and complacency do not amount to surrender. Nor do they amount to healthy finances!
If I get my act together and start tracking where my money’s going out, I get a better grip on my finances and do gradually get myself back on track. Things will at least improve initially. Over time, it seems to get harder and harder to stay on budget, though. In fact, the more I try to watch my money the more I have to struggle to stay in the black! Expenses will keep popping up each month that are beyond my control. Of course, the more I try to control things, the more energy I’m putting into my fears and harder it gets to keep my finances in check. It’s not always big expenses that hurt me, either. It can be little ones here and there. Pennies turning into nickles and fives turning into twenties, but with minus signs in front!!
The trouble is I over do things. I swing from the lazy side of the financial pendulum to the micro-manager / control freak side. And life is really hard for control freaks. It’s almost better to be lazy. In fact… as I write this, it occurs to me that when I do readings for people in serious financial duress, it’s virtually a sure-thing that I’ll find some super strong, control freak traits. I can’t honestly recall ever seeing laziness in someone with a severe financial crisis though. The more I think about it, the more certain I am that control freaks fare much worse than lazy people. All that stops the control freaks from losing fortunes is shear determination but they can brush dangerously close to it.
Anyhow, here’s where things work out, and grandpa really proves himself. Sometimes, I decide my monthly expense tally is always about the same from month to month, anyway. So why bother tallying them up each month? I lose interest in my bookkeeping initiatives, and coast along for few months without crunching any numbers. Whenever I do this, something funny happens. I gradually find more money in my bank account! Many times, I’ve added up numbers from past months to see where the money came from. Is there some bill I forgot to pay? What’s going on? What I find is that there is NO major difference between the good months and the tight months. My grocery bills are about the same. Utilities and cash withdrawals barely change. Nevertheless, when I add it all up, my expenses are lower. A few bucks here, a few bucks there… and somehow, while I was looking the other way, the twenties looked after themselves!!
There’s no magic in the spreadsheet I use for record keeping. There’s certainly no profound “Secret” behind my erratic bookkeeping habits. What really makes the difference to my bottom line (and presumably many other people’s) is surrender. To me, surrender is the sweet spot on a pendulum’s swinging path between complacency and control that we only really find with the absence of fear.
The only modification I would make to grandpa’s idiom is this, “When we let the universe (or whatever higher power(s) you like to call upon) look after the pennies, the nickles look after themselves.” But then again, perhaps my grandfather knew that, and I was just slow to catch on. 
Themocracy
btw, I’ve been getting a TONNE of generic comments lately and I’m not 100% sure it’s all spam. Please be aware that if your comment is so generic you could’ve left the exact same text on anyone’s blog, I’ll have to mark it as spam and delete it. Thanks!