I Close the Books for Four Companies. I Never Looked at My Own.

For eleven years, my job has been managing other people’s money.

I work in Seoul. I do accounting. Every month I close the books for four companies, consolidate them into one set of statements, answer the auditors, file the taxes, and post the disclosures. If a number doesn’t add up, I find it. That’s the job, and I’m good at it.

My own money was a different story. I knew roughly what came in. I didn’t know where it went. The card statement arrived, I paid it, and I moved on. I told myself I’d look at it properly “when things calmed down.” They never did.

There’s a kind of person who plans her work by the year, the month, and the week, and doesn’t know what she spent on lunch last week. I was that person. I don’t think it’s rare. Ask any accountant you know.

Then I Lost Some Money

What changed was losing money. Stocks, then crypto. After that, my salary alone was not going to put it back. Not on its own. I needed something else.

I have written here about spending five million won on lifting treatments. That is also true, and I don’t take it back. Those I decided on purpose. It was the rest I couldn’t account for.

I want to be honest about this part: I did not want a side business. It’s a lot of work, and I already have work. Left to myself, I would have kept ignoring the whole thing. But if I was going to make anything, I first had to know what I actually had. So for the first time in my life, I opened my own statements the way I open a company’s — every line, no skipping.

Korea Has a Word for This

The no-spend challenge — 무지출, mujichul, a day where you spend zero won — was in the news a few years ago. Then came the “beggar rooms,” open chat rooms on KakaoTalk where strangers post every purchase and get scolded for buying a 3,000-won coffee. I only know these from the news. Nobody in my office talks like that at lunch.

I never joined a beggar room. I’m too old and too private for that. But the idea underneath it stuck with me: you write down what you spent, and that counts for something.

So I built a spreadsheet. Of course I did. It doesn’t have forty categories, because I know from experience that nobody fills in forty categories past week two. It asks one question per purchase: was this on autopilot, or did I mean it? Then it counts the no-spend days, and shows you where the money you didn’t spend went instead.

I made it for myself. Then I cleaned it up, wrote a guide in English, and put it on Etsy. That’s how this started.

The Fifth Set of Books

One more honest thing. I couldn’t have done this ten years ago. Not the spreadsheet — I could always do spreadsheets — but the rest of it. A 13-page guide in English. Nine listing photos. A 15-second video. A language I don’t write well. What made it possible was that I could describe what I wanted and get most of the way there without doing every step by hand. I’m grateful to be trying this now and not in 2015. It’s still work. It’s just work I can actually finish after a full day of other work.

I still close four sets of books every month. Now I close a fifth one, mine, every day. It takes ten minutes. The habit is the point. If you don’t write it down, you don’t see it.

P.S. The spreadsheet is on Etsy, if you want it: sansoostudio.etsy.com