Here’s What Happens When You Merge Your Values and Bookkeeping

Values-Based Bookkeeping: a tool for renaming

In the late summer of 2003, while living in Sebastopol, California, I had one of the most vivid paradigm-shifting dreams of my life. It had been two weeks since my first money mentor, Tamara Slayton, had passed away. In accordance with her wishes, her community had gathered at her home for several days after her death, remembering, telling stories, and honoring the impact she’d had in our lives.

Over the years, I spent many hours reflecting and journaling on our friendship and the legacy she was leaving. I had been privileged to spend the last two years of Tanya’s life with her, soaking up her philosophy on money. She had been my teacher, my mentor, and my friend.

When I had just started my first business doing bookkeeping for creative professionals, she was one of my first clients. We spent countless hours together, reviewing our numbers, setting our goals and intentions, and having brilliant conversations about our own philosophy on money, life’s work, and value.

In my dream, two weeks after her death, a curious package arrived at my door. I ran my fingers over the brown craft paper and through the butcher’s twine looped around it; something about it felt sacred and otherworldly. I tore open the brown paper to see a stunning, scarlet red book, and instantly knew Tamara had made this book and sent it to me in my dream. She had felted the creamy white paper, handsewn the edges, and bound it all in red vellum. Inside, I found a ledger of every single moment of Tamara’s life, every idea she had concocted and shared, every piece of artwork, and every activity–and next to each one was a monetary value.

Line after line, page after page, were meticulously inscribed in Tamara’s swirly, flourish-filled handwriting. This red book was Tamara’s Book of Life, an honoring, a remembering, and a financial accounting.

I woke up confused. Wasn’t it somehow sacrilegious to assign a monetary value to these moments and creations in Tamara’s life? My mind couldn’t fully wrap itself around the strange concept, yet my heart knew this was as far from sacrilegious as you could get.

This Life Chart of Accounts was the full integration of Tamara’s esoteric vision and financial teachings. It elevated money matters to the realm of the sublime and the sacred. Here was the bridge I’d been searching for for so long, between heaven and earth, between heart and money, between deep values and tangible moments.

While it took me a few years to fully unpack the message contained in this vision-like dream, it forever and instantly changed my relationship with bookkeeping, both in my own life and in my work as a financial therapist.

In that red book, I glimpsed a radical new way of interacting with financial numbers, one that not only reflects our deepest values in the world, but honors them, strengthens them, and brings them to life in a tangible way.

This was just one of many moments or significant moments where I knew that I had to incorporate value values into the bookkeeping. I wanted to bring in the qualities that I was bringing to every other area of my life, which was creativity, and deeper meaning, and playfulness, and compassion, and mindfulness, and on and on. And if I was going to entice people, excite people, get them to sit down and learn a bookkeeping system, set up a bookkeeping system, and interact with it, I knew that I needed to bring all these other qualities in.

And I knew that I wanted to bring in our values so that we could truly see: are we in alignment with our values in the way that we earn, and the way that we spend, and give, and save, and invest?

And so, you know, the light bulb went on years and years ago, that I needed to figure out a simple, yet profound way–because that’s how I like to roll with most of my tools and practices–a simple and profound way to bring in the values into our bookkeeping system. I knew that we needed to rename our categories: we could rename our income categories, our spending categories, our debt categories. And so, here are two examples of how this renaming works.

One example is looking at our rent, or our mortgage, and how could we rename those categories? What do they really mean to us?

In our community, folks have come up with “home,” or “sanctuary,” or “love shack.”

So imagine renaming your rent or your mortgage as something like “home,” or “sanctuary,” or “love shack.”

It simply makes it so much more playful, and engaging, and interesting. And it’s, you know, it reflects something that’s important to you, instead of just rent or mortgage, which are just more dry names. They’re fine names, but if we want to incorporate other qualities, this is one way to do it. That’s a playful version of how to rename a category.

Here’s an example that brings in a little deeper meaning to something.

When we think about debt, normally, it’s that “damn debt” that I have. It’s hanging over my head like a dark cloud; I think about it when I’m going to fall asleep, or when I’m going to fall asleep, it keeps me from falling asleep. And it’s just that damn debt. I’m not even looking at the number, or coming up with the payment plan, and on and on.

Wait a second. You know, there’s always more going on here. Because in a long life, if we have the honor of having a long life, we’re going to have transitions.

What are transitions?

Transitions can be a phase in our lives when, you know, diagnoses happens of an illness, when we’re going through a health crisis, when we have baby number one, or baby number two, or three, when we are leaving the corporate world to start our own business, when someone close to us has died, when we are separating or divorcing, and on and on.

These transitions are real. In these moments, we need resources. Where do we go?

We go to the savings that we’ve accumulated, we go to retirement, and we may have to pull out some money there, we go to family money, we sometimes go to a 0% credit card. And that is a debt, right? That is a liability.

I was working with someone years ago who didn’t want to look at the number, was not paying it down, was just, like, throwing it into the closet and ignoring it. We sat down, I said, “what was going on at this time of your life where you accrued this debt?”

She said, “Bari wow, it was a time where I took this whole adventure to Italy that changed my life, changed the course of my life, changed, really, who I am from the inside out in a beautiful, life-changing way.”

And so I said, “Okay. Well, that’s not a “damn debt.” That’s a huge moment in your life that deserves some more honor and love. And let’s rename it. Let’s rename this debt.”

And she did a more playful version of “My Big Italian Adventure.” But right in that moment, it shifted the energy enough for her that she suddenly was able to look at the amount.

She was able to come up with a payment plan on a monthly basis over so many years to pay that down.

She was able to honor this time, this transition in her life, in a completely different way, just simply by renaming.

So, that’s another example of how renaming can bring in deeper meaning and honoring of life, and who we are, and the different phases that we go through.

Renaming is one of the ways that I make bookkeeping a lot more exciting, and interesting, and creative, and playful, and include a deeper meaning that I know that I need. And that is also a way to help us look at our bookkeeping systems and just see truly who we are, what’s important to us, and if we are really in alignment with our values. We may not be in alignment with our values at all phases of our life, it’s something that we’re working towards, we are striving towards.

This renaming tool is one of my favorite simple and profound tools that we learn in the Art of Money. Thank you so much for tuning in to this Money Mocha. I hope you enjoyed some inspiration, along with your morning cup, and that you feel empowered to write a new chapter in your relationship with money.

After all, money touches everything in our lives.

If you feel called to wade deeper here, pack your financial goals, soul-deep aspirations, and grab your favorite person. My holistic framework blends therapeutic, body-based practices with the real-life tools you need to create healthy, sustainable change in your money life. So if you are ready to begin your money healing journey with the Art of Money today, you can learn more at baritessler.com.