money

Despite how many people neglect it, it’s no secret that magick works best with mundane support. The cliché example of the job hunt is true: you can enchant for a job all you want, but if you don’t put out resumes then you’re not going to get anything.
I’ve been experiencing the flip side of this recently. Essentially that mundane action creates its own magickal support. (I’ve had this happen before, but the last few weeks have been fairly evident)
Warning: Lots of useless information about my finances to make a point.
I’ve recently taken a hard look at my finances. Despite having a good job and paying down my credit cards with every paycheque it didn’t look like I was getting anywhere. I didn’t use my cards for much, but alas I created a fair amount of debt with them in order to survive university. I’ve done the occasional enchantment for financial boosts when I needed something, but I was at this status quo.
I realized if I wanted to make any headway I really needed to sort out my finances. So I did all the boring stuff: I figured out all my monthly bills and figured out how much out of each paycheque to put aside to cover them, I investigated my credit cards to see what mistakes I was making there, I looked into what my banking fees were, etc.
Now, I’m pretty good with finances, despite my debt I’m still better off financially and in far less debt than most of my peers, but still have too much for my liking. My credit cards were my biggest problem. Even though I was paying them down my problem was I was still using them. I’d pay off X amount, but then would put 40% back on buying groceries. Small occasional purchases every few weeks was another 10-20% back on. Between my reoccurring expense of my groceries, and my occasional purchases, in reality I was paying off far less per paycheque when I thought. To make this worse is interest, so by using my card for groceries, when it’s carrying a several hundred dollar balance, my interest really added up. So in the end I’d estimate that only a third of every payment actually paid down my debt. It’s no wonder I didn’t seem to get anywhere, I was taking three steps forward and two steps back.
Realizing that error, I decided to switch to cash purchases, and other than automated payments that need to be on my credit card, such as my cell phone, I’d stick to a cash only policy (or cheque or debit when applicable, but 95% cash). I also realized my credit card was charging me a security premium that I didn’t need, adding an extra $15-20 a month to my interest. So I got that cancelled.
I’ve been using two different banks for over a decade. One has high savings interest, low credit card interest without annual fees, and no fees (Bank A), the other has alright interest, but a lot of fees (Bank B). B was more convenient at the time, but online banking means A is just as convenient now.
So I started switching all my stuff over to Bank A, the good one. I paid off my one credit card, and transferred the balance of the second one (which also has a low introductory rate which helps), and as of this afternoon I have cancelled all of my accounts with the more expensive bank. (Which was a fun web of stupidity I won’t relate here)
This is a lot of useless financial prattle, I get it, but I wanted folks to get a sense of what I was looking at, and what I was doing, rather than just saying “I started managing my finances better, and making better choices.”
Back to the point I made at the beginning. In the few weeks I’ve been organizing and fixing all of this I haven’t had time for financial magic, but oddly I haven’t needed it. As soon as I started getting my shit in order it seemed like reality wanted to help. The government reassessed my taxes (for the third time this financial year) and realized they owed me $200 and sent that over. My etsy store picked up a bit, some new sorcery jobs came in, and just last week due to some financial manipulation thanks to my boss’s boss and the oddity of how my pay is calculated he got me 12 hours pay for 40 minutes of work as a thanks for doing 40 minutes of BS work on a holiday.
It was as if once I got the mundane momentum going, the rest of the world chipped in. Now I won’t say this is a result of just doing the physical mundane stuff, if I could be so bold I’d say it’s a result of all my spiritual and magick stuff. My life is more connected to the flux and flow of the world around me, I’m steeped in the shifts of energy and the domain of spirits. Just as I react to the ebbs and flows of the world, I guess the world is reacting to mine. My spirits saw what I was doing, and assisted, or my actions set out a “vibration” into the world causing the change I needed. That sound woogity and mystic enough?
That magickal attunement you develop with the world works both ways.
As much as I advocate planning, tactically aiming your magick, and setting up mundane strategies and support, don’t hold off on action in favour of setting up your magick. You can always figure out ways to enchant for something after its set in motion, but you can’t retroactively take action. Don’t wait to act, set the world in motion, and magick to support as you go.
I maintain the understanding systems is an important part of magick, and in this case it seems as if the understanding the systems led to its own magickal support.
Remember that as we delve deeper into the spiritual spheres we make allies, we become connected to things, and sometimes we don’t need to do any more magick than mundanely setting something into motion. It’s like the Cosmos sees “Oh, you’re willing to actually do the work around this now? Let me give you a hand.”
Part of bringing this up is I’ve seen people (and I’ve done it myself) put off doing something -job hunting, fixing finances, trying to date, whatever- because they had not yet figured out the best way to enchant around it. (Which I might argue is actually a screen for being afraid of trying and failing) If you’re in that boat, you’re probably better off shutting up, jumping overboard, and then figuring out as you go what you need to do, because you’re not going to get anything done waiting to figure out how to magick yourself to the ends you want.
Who knows, if you’re lucky, have allies on your side, and are in tune with your world, than handling the mundane shit in your life can actually be the magickal act that calls aid to help you do just that.