Before you start
Every macro breakdown ends the same way: here is what is structurally wrong, good luck. You close the tab, you feel informed, and on Monday nothing about your household has actually changed.
This manual is the other half. Four parts, forty-seven numbered strategies, and a worksheet for every one of them. There are no predictions in it that you have to take on faith, because a household plan that depends on a forecast being right is not a plan — it is a bet with extra steps.
"What follows is built to hold up whether the next two years are a boom, a grind, or a bust. That constraint rules a great deal out. It rules out timing. It rules out concentrated positions justified by a story."
Work through it in order. Part I asks what you own and what you would do if it moved. Part II finds the money already leaving your household every month. Part III teaches you to read five public releases so you stop outsourcing your view of the economy. Part IV is the ninety-day system that turns the first three into something that has actually happened.
01 Start with what you actually own
You cannot allocate what you have not counted.
Before any decision about what to hold, write down what you already hold. Not what you believe you hold — the real figure, read off the real statement, today. Almost everyone doing this for the first time finds something they had forgotten: a dormant account, an old workplace pension, a policy with a surrender value, a currency balance left over from a trip.
Do This
- List every account, holding and policy in one place, on paper.
- Write today's value beside each, from the actual statement.
- Note where it is held and who you would contact about it.
- Mark anything you could not value as "unknown" and move on.
The Trap: Estimating. An estimate feels like progress and quietly becomes the number you plan around for the next three years.
02 Separate the buffer from everything else
Money you might need next month is not an investment, whatever it is invested in.
Split your holdings into two piles before you think about allocation. The first is the buffer: money whose job is to be available at short notice without you having to sell anything at a bad moment. The second is everything else.
Do This
- Total your essential monthly outgoings — housing, food, utilities, insurance, minimum debt payments.
- Decide how many months you want covered, and write down why that number.
- Hold that amount somewhere you can reach within a day, without selling.
- Ring-fence it on the balance sheet so it stops getting counted twice.