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The quiet confidence of knowing exactly where you stand
My grandmother kept a small spiral notebook in her kitchen drawer, next to the rubber bands and the takeout menus nobody had touched since 1998. Inside, in very neat cursive, was a record of every dollar that had moved between her and anyone else.
“Lorraine, $20, bingo.” “Me to Bev, $12, lunch.”
As a kid I thought it was hilarious. Who writes down twelve dollars? But I get it now, and I think about that notebook more than I’d like to admit. She wasn’t stingy. She was one of the most generous people I’ve ever known. She just liked knowing where she stood, and I think that knowledge gave her a kind of ease I didn’t have for most of my twenties.
Because for most of my twenties I had no idea. I owed my sister something for a concert, I think? My buddy Andre owed me for half a hotel room in Austin, unless he’d already paid me and I’d forgotten. There was a fuzzy cloud of small debts floating around my life. None of them were big enough to really worry about, but all of them together made this low hum of uncertainty. Like a browser with forty tabs open. Nothing’s technically wrong, but the laptop fan is running and you can’t quite relax.
What I didn’t realize is how much that fuzz was costing me. Not in dollars, really. In awkwardness. I’d see Andre and feel a twinge, and I couldn’t tell if it was because he owed me or because I owed him. And I’d wonder if my sister was quietly keeping score while I wasn’t.
The shift happened kind of by accident. I moved in with a roommate who was extremely organized, and she started writing shared expenses on a whiteboard on the fridge. At first I felt a little policed. Within maybe a month I realized I felt lighter. I always knew the number. If I owed her $34, I knew it was $34, and I could just pay it and stop thinking about it. If she owed me, same deal. The whiteboard didn’t make us more transactional. It made money boring, which is exactly what you want money between friends to be.
I think that’s the core of it. Clarity doesn’t make you cold. It frees you up to be warm, because you’re not running a background process of “wait, are we even?”
When you know where you stand, you stop over-apologizing. You also get to be generous on purpose, instead of by accident. If you want to cover your friend’s dinner, you can do it because you want to, not because you’ve lost track and figure it’s probably your turn.
You can ask for money back without it feeling like a confrontation, too. It’s just a fact. “Hey, I’ve got you down for $60 from the Airbnb, whenever works.” That’s not a demand. It’s information, shared kindly. Most people seem to appreciate it, because they’ve been carrying their own version of the fuzzy cloud.
The modern version of that spiral notebook is probably an app. OweMate does pretty much what my grandmother did, keeping one running balance per person so nobody has to reconstruct anything from old Venmo history. It’s less charming than her notebook, I’ll admit. No cursive. No grease stain from the time she set it down next to the fryer.
But the job is the same. When someone asks if you’re square, you can just look and say yes or no, and either answer is fine. The calm was never really about the money. It’s about not having to wonder.
My grandmother would’ve hated the app, by the way. She’d have said a pen works fine and never needs charging.
She’d have been right, too.
The OweMate blog is written by the people who make OweMate, a simple way to keep track of money between friends and family.