Ten years ago you earned roughly half what you earn now. Your position has not moved.

The savings are a little higher or a little lower. The debt is roughly what it was, in a different form. The feeling at the end of the month is identical.

And you were not reckless. There was no boat, no gambling, no crisis. A slightly better flat because the old one had damp. A car because the commute changed. Better food because you stopped having time to cook. Every step defensible. Collectively, the entire pay rise, absorbed without a decision ever being made.

You have tried budgeting. Four times. It works for about eleven days, then a week happens, and the plan and the tracking go together.

You are not bad at budgeting. Budgets require daily compliance from a person who cannot predict the month.

• The Locked Gap: one decision made once, not a discipline exercised daily
• Why nobody notices a pay rise disappearing, and the three-month reset that does it
• How to choose a first number you will still be running in three years
• The pay rise rule: half of every increase, in the week it lands. The highest-return five minutes in this book
• The forty-eight hour windfall rule, decided before the windfall arrives
• The four structural reasons budgets fail, and permission to stop trying
• The three purchases that actually move the gap, and the two that look big and do not
• What to do the month you break it, which is not cancelling it
• How to raise it with a partner as one number rather than an audit
• A ninety-day sequence that is mostly one afternoon of setup

No budgeting. No tracking. No categories. No app. After the transfer, spend the remainder on whatever you like without accounting to anybody.

This book contains no financial advice. It stops at the gap. Where the money should go afterwards is a question for somebody qualified and regulated, and the book says so repeatedly.

Book Ten of The Control Line Series. Reads perfectly well on its own, and pairs with Book Nine.

Buy your copy and work out where the decade went.