Today I am a happy family man with two (usually) charming daughters living in Germany.

However, when I first devised the system, I was in a bad place. I had just quit a very well paying job in a very large insurance company. Simply because I could no longer work for a company that had so little interest in actually getting better and did not shy away from ripping off unsuspecting customers.

I was convinced, that I would now finally have the time to make my luxury coffee e-commerce store successful. In reality, it was more like being unemployed and working long hours on a pet project :-).

Money was tight. Pretty much all the time. My wife was the only one providing an income and irregular payments, that I owed, continuously shot large holes into our budget.

Deciding that enough was enough, I started to take budgeting seriously and, over a weekend, set up a Google sheet to organize our money.

Over the past decade, I continued to improve on that original Google spreadsheet and tweaked a number of other things resulting in something that I would usually call “autopilot budgeting”, if it didn’t sound so corny.

Today, I usually spend maybe 5-10 minutes a month checking our budget. The rest is, in fact, on autopilot. I haven’t worried about not being able to pay our bills for a very long time. I also put systems into place that prevent us from overdrawing or running out of money before the month is over.