It’s quite possible that you found my working budget just a little tricky to understand. If so, I believe that the drawing below will help clarify things greatly! We have enough time to get a firm hold of this idea – seeing that our working life will go on for 42 years (see the calendar/table above).
Now refer to the drawing below. Imagine that your income (salary) is the wide RIBBON coming in from the left. Your company takes off a few fixed payments. What’s left is your take-home pay, normally paid into your bank account. Think of that account as a BUCKET. At the bottom of the bucket is the famous SALARY CUSHION that you now know all about. The middle of the bucket contains the fixed payments that your bank and you make each month. You know that you cannot dip into this layer, at all. At the top, there’s a floating layer: the VARIABLE PAYMENTS that you now know come from your AVAILABLE SALARY.
ALSO READ: My Money,My Business, My Life: A working budget
Carefully note where the tap is placed. You MUST be able to see why it is where it is. It’s almost true to say that the series My money, my business, my life is an elaboration of this Ribbon/Bucket/Tap drawing. It’s a drawing that’s worth a thousand words.
Jay Pillay’s first two critical decades were spent where his first decade began – in Pietermaritzburg. After studying at ML Sultan Technikon in Durban (anyone remember that place?), he then joined the sugar industry, working in Tongaat, Durban, and Xinavane – a sugar mill village 120km north of Maputo. Oh yes – there was a brief period of unfaithfulness, when he flirted with aluminium in Richard’s Bay. Upon retirement, he and his wife Dorothy – settled in Southport.
Jay began writing about salary management (for ordinary people living on a salary) in the early 2000s. Many of his articles were published by The Ripple Effect, a Durban-based corporate newsletter. In all his writing, Jay says he attempts to emphasise the big picture in salary management: it’s not just about making it to your next payday – it’s about making it to the end of your working life. It’s not just about your working life – it’s about your retirement too. It’s not just about the cost of living – it’s about the cost of dying too. It’s not just about you as a salary manager – it’s about your dependants too.
This 16-part series is being published here for the first time. It would be invaluable for salary managers in the early years of their lives – who realize that salary management is a lifetime business. Finally, it’s not just about reading stuff on salary management – it’s about careful thought (that means time, well invested), and then taking appropriate action.
There’s a second finally. To daughter Nikki, thank you for the picture.
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