Fifth movement of the Namup method

Give

Set your share, with its amount and its date.

Money held back sleeps. Money that moves keeps people alive.

One movement is left, and it is not a flourish at the end.

Giving belongs to the method exactly as paying the rent does. A share of what passes through a household is made to leave again, and that is not a loss. It is a movement, as old as the idea of wealth itself.

This gets passed on without anyone making a lesson of it. What is hoarded for oneself alone ends up missing from everyone, starting with the person who held it back. Money is made to circulate, like water. Held still, it goes stagnant.

And the gesture does not diminish the one who makes it. That has been measured too. Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton published the finding in Science in 2008 under a title that says the whole of it: spending money on others promotes happiness. Many know it by instinct, on the day they send something home. All the method does is give that gesture a clear and planned place, instead of leaving it to whatever the heart and the leftovers allow.

It is also the movement that closes the loop. The five have run through once, whole. The next month begins, and the line starts again a little wider than before.

The same household, at this movement

And 130 a month leaves this household for good. It is not what survived the month. It carries a line of the plan, exactly as the emergency envelope and the deposit do.

See this household in full

Back to the five movements

Work out what I can spend