When I’m stressed about money, I get smaller.
I don’t mean it in a poetic way. I mean it in a specific, observable way. I walk past the subway saxophone player I’d usually stop for. I look at the check at dinner and resent a friend who ordered a cocktail when all I had was a Diet Coke. I tell myself I can’t afford to give to the Central Park Conservancy, even though I haven’t actually looked. The stress diminishes me. The diminishment makes me ungenerous. And the ungenerosity, ultimately, puts distance between me and who I want to be.
I know this about myself with unusual precision because I’ve been “keeping my numbers” for eight years.
The phrase isn't mine. A friend, who was in a 12-step program for people with money problems, told me about it the year I was thirty thousand dollars in credit card debt and quietly drowning. The practice is called keeping your numbers. You write down every dollar that comes in and goes out. I tried it using an app called AndroMoney, and within two years the debt was gone.
Then I just kept going.
For eight years I logged everything: the Starbucks and the rent and the insurance copays; the cat food and the utility bills and the E-ZPass fines. I didn’t think much about the data I was collecting after the debt was gone. But I kept it up the way I still eat smaller portions two years after losing the COVID weight — out of habit, not yet knowing I was also keeping a record of who I'd been.
Last month I exported all of it, ran it through AI, and asked some questions.
As it turns out, I had stopped for street musicians ninety-three times. I had given to KittyKind cat rescue seventeen times. I had handed money to people on the street forty-eight times. I learned that I gave more in some years than others, and that the years I gave more were not the years I made more. The correlation wasn’t with income.
This was disappointing in a way I didn’t expect.
Eight years, ninety-three musicians. That’s one musician per month — and I’m a musician. I had told myself a story about the kind of person I was, but the data belied the image I had of myself. These were the numbers of someone who meant to be generous, but wasn’t.
Here is the thing I learned, which is also the reason I built Carlo: generosity, for me, is not a personality trait. It is a function of awareness. When I don’t know how much I have, I’m afraid I have less than I do, and the fear makes me tighten up. When I know — when I can look at a number and see that yes, I have budgeted ninety dollars for spontaneous giving this month and only twelve has gone out; or that yes, I can pick up the check for a friend who’s been having a hard week — my hand opens. Not because I’m a better person that day. Because the ambiguity that was making me a worse one has lifted.
I’m embarassed to write this, by the way. A better person might not need to count the cost of generosity. But counting gets me from my worst self toward something a little better.
If you have never kept your numbers, the practice sounds tedious. It is, the first week. After that it stops being tedious and starts being a thing you do — a small daily habit, like throwing your socks in the hamper where they belong. After months, it adjusts more than your relationship to money: it adjusts what you know about yourself. It tells you what kind of giver you are, what kind of saver you are, what kind of friend you are at dinner. It gives you the chance to look at the data and say, this is less than I thought.
And then, sometimes, to do something about it.
This morning I closed out April — my first month using Carlo every day — and I came in $212.29 under budget. I’m sending it to the Jazz Foundation of America, which helps working musicians stay in their homes when illness, age, or accident takes the next gig away.
If you keep your numbers, they’ll tell you the truth. And the truth, for most of us, is the only thing that lets us be the person we hope to be.