The Five Movements of Growth
the Namup Method
A decent income can disappear and leave no account of itself. One month looks like the last, the plans slip, and the same doubt turns up on the same date.
Nothing grows that you cannot see clearly. That is where this book starts. Clarity first, because clarity is what lets you honour what you owe, build what you are planning, and give your share without putting yourself at risk.
That clarity comes in five movements: recognise what you have, honour what you owe, build what you want, live on what is left, give back the share that is due.
For those five movements to hold every month, they come down to a single operation: income, minus obligations, minus the savings withheld for your plans. What is left is what you can spend freely, with neither your commitments nor your plans put at risk.
The book crosses the five movements three times. Part one tells you where the method came from. Part two puts it to work in a real household, earning in one country and owing in another, with a debt to get out of and a Zakat taken from wealth that is already there. Part three hands you a set of tools for running your money and making more of it: the month's budget, the year's big dates (a holiday, the festive season, the start of the school year, and the rest), what a purchase you have in mind is really worth, the financial papers kept where you can find them, the monthly review of where you stand.
The app works from what you declare, chiefly the income, the recurring obligations and the debts, without ever asking you to log an expense.
One sitting is enough.
The line, in full
Every page comes back to this one line, and the book offers no other. Savings are withheld inside the calculation, ahead of what is available, and never taken from whatever survives the month. That is how financial wisdom is built, and it is built on clarity.
Get the notebook
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The method notebook, the five moves, and the sheets that keep them
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Three calculations, nothing to log
Each step carries its mark, what you do, and why. The last line, marked with an equals sign, gives the result. The other five sheets are in the notebook.
Work out your monthly budget, without logging a single expense
This is the whole method, in four figures. You lay it down once a month, always at the same moment, ideally on the day the income lands.
That available amount is spent without justification and without keeping accounts. One check remains, which almost nobody performs and the application performs systematically: your savings must not bite into the minimum you need in order to live.
Work out what is left to spend this month
- AWrite down everything regular that comes in this monthIf your income varies, take the lowest of your last six months. An average is a promise the bad months will not keep.
- BAdd up everything owed to someone elseRent, bills, instalments, support to your family. A commitment given is no longer a choice to remake each month.
- CAdd up your savings envelopesThey are withheld before the first free expense, never out of what is left at the end.
- =A − B − CYour available amount for the month
Check there is enough left to live on
- DCalculate twenty percent of your income (A)Below that, a household is no longer living, it is holding on. That is the threshold the engine protects.
- EWrite down the legal minimum wage of your countryThe floor retained is the larger of the two, D or E, never the smaller.
- =The available amount must stay above the floorIf it drops below, it is the savings that are too high. Lower an envelope, never the rent.
Spread a big annual expense
A budget rarely breaks on daily life. It breaks on what comes round once a year, had been forgotten, and lands in a single payment.
Watch the division, because it is not the one you would expect. You do not divide by twelve, you divide by the number of months left before the due date. That is the engine's exact rule, and it is the more honest one: a payment due in four months is not prepared over twelve.
Repeat the sheet for each payment, then add the provisions together. That sum joins line C of tool 1. The first round is harsh, because you are starting mid year and the months are short. It will never be harsh again.
Spread the expense over the months that remain
- AWrite down the payment and its amountSchool term, insurance, a feast, a trip, tax, the car service. Everything that comes only once but comes for certain.
- BCount the months between now and itNot twelve. The number of months that genuinely remain, starting today.
- =A ÷ BYour monthly provision for that payment
Work out your Zakat
This sheet covers Zakat. Move on to the next one if the subject does not concern you.
The difficulty is almost never the calculation. It is the date, which moves earlier every year and ends up lost, and the sum, discovered at the moment it is hardest to release.
One detail almost no tool handles, and which is nonetheless written into the engine. The cycle counts in lunar years, three hundred and fifty four days. If you prefer to reason on the civil year of three hundred and sixty five days, the rate is no longer two and a half percent but 2.577, to cover the eleven extra days. The rate and the period are a single choice, never two.
Work out the Zakat amount
- AThe net wealth concerned, on the anniversary dateThe engine retains the balance on the anniversary day, the most widespread institutional method.
- BThe threshold: the value of eighty five grams of gold, or of five hundred and ninety five grams of silverThat choice belongs to the reference you follow, and to you alone.
- =If A exceeds B, then A × 2.5%The annual share due
Set the amount aside
- CChoose where it comes out of: a savings pot, a reserve, an asset you sellIt is taken from what you already hold, never from the month's available. It is not one more charge, it is a share that has changed owner.
- DNote the anniversary date, and move it back about ten days each civil yearWithout a written marker, you end up paying by guesswork every other year.
- =Your wealth falls by the share due, your month does not moveThat is the only honest entry. It leaves what you have, never what you earn.
Three lines from the book
- Count less, and you finally see.
- Nothing is built on what you refuse to look at.
- What is promised is no longer mine, and admitting that is already keeping my word.
Three maxims, lifted from the manuscript as they stand. The book carries more of them, one to a chapter.
What is inside
The contents below are the manuscript's own, in its order.
-
I
How the method was born
- Before counting
- Recognise
- Honour
- Build
- Live
- Give
- The loop closes
-
II
The method in practice
- The line, in practice
- Getting out of a debt you already carry
- Living between two countries
- When savings grow
- Protecting the line
- The line when you live alone
- The line for two
- Teaching the line to children
- Choosing a financing with your eyes open
- Zakat, the share that goes back
- Documents, the proof of the discipline
-
III
The tools
- How to use these pages
- Tool 1. The month's line
- Tool 2. The year's calendar
- Tool 3. The purchase grader
- Tool 4. The envelope sheet
- Tool 5. The debt exit plan
- Tool 6. The Zakat share, taken from what you own
- Tool 7. The document inventory
- Tool 8. The monthly review
- Set down your line
What the method asks, and what it does not
- What it asks of you. Three figures at the start: what comes in, what you owe, what you set aside. After that, ten minutes a month. The book gives the method in its barest form, the one that needs neither a subscription nor a connection: a sheet and a pencil.
- What it does not ask. No expense to enter, no category to tick, no till receipt to keep, no bank to connect. Knowing what you spent on coffee tells you nothing about what you can afford, and that is the observation the whole method starts from.
- If your income moves from month to month. The method holds, on one condition it states plainly: the line is worked out on your floor, the lowest of your last three or six months, never on an average. An average promises what a thin month will not keep. Good months are not spent either, they fill the envelopes.
- Who it is not written for. Anyone who wants to know where their money went, line by line: the book asks the opposite question and never turns back. And anyone looking for how much they could borrow: what gets worked out here is what a plan costs your month, not what a lender would agree to.
Who wrote it
Part one is a first-person account signed "the founder", with no name attached. That is an organisation's signature: responsibility for what is written sits with Namup, exactly as it does for every Namup Academy article.
Figures are either worked out in front of the reader or traced back to the body that published them. Quoted voices come from a register of sources opened and checked by hand, and a quotation we could not verify never goes to print.
The three editions
The book exists in French, English and Arabic. Each edition was written in its own language, and none is a translation of another: the ideas and the figures are the same, the sentences belong to each language.
After the book
The book hands over the method, it does not keep your accounts. On namup.net the same line is worked out afresh every month, with your own figures.