Describe someone you know who is good with money

I want to talk about my mother. She is a primary school teacher in Casablanca, and she is the person who controls all the money in our family. My father is a taxi driver, so his income is changing every month, and that's why my mother needs to be very careful.

The way she manages money is quite old style. On the day she gets her salary, she divides it into envelopes, one for rent, one for food, one for our school and one for emergency. She also writes every dirham she spends in a small notebook. And she is in a 'daret' with the other teachers, it's like a savings group, every month each person puts the same amount and one person take all the money.

I know she is careful because she never buy anything with credit. Also, when I was accepted at university in Rabat, I was very worried about the costs, but she told me she already saved money for my first year since I was in high school. Nobody knew about it, not even my father.

I learned a lot of things from her. The most important one is to wait before buying expensive things. Now if I want something, I wait thirty days and usually I don't want it anymore. She also taught me that saving money is depend on your choices, not only your salary.

Someone who's remarkably good with money is my mum. She's a primary school teacher in Casablanca, and she's been the finance minister of our household for as long as I can remember. My dad drives a taxi, so his income goes up and down from month to month, which means her salary is the one thing we can rely on.

Her system is quite old-fashioned, but it works. The day she's paid, she splits her salary into labelled envelopes, rent, groceries, school costs and emergencies, and once an envelope is empty, that's it for the month. She also keeps a little notebook where every single dirham gets written down. On top of that, she's part of a daret with some other teachers, which is a kind of rotating savings club: everyone pays in the same amount every month, and each month a different person takes home the whole pot.

The best proof of how careful she is came when I got a place at university in Rabat. I was dreading telling her, because I assumed we couldn't afford it, and she calmly told me she'd been putting money aside for my first year ever since I've started secondary school. Not even my dad knew. And in all those years, I've never seen her buy anything on credit.

What I've learned from her, more than anything, is to wait. If I want something expensive, I give it thirty days, and nine times out of ten the urge passes. She also drilled into me that saving depends on the choices you make, not on how much you earn.

The person I'd point to is my mother, a primary school teacher in Casablanca who's quietly kept our family afloat for twenty-odd years. My father drives a taxi, so his earnings are unpredictable at the best of times, and it's her steady salary and, more importantly, her discipline that hold everything together.

Her methods are almost endearingly low-tech. On payday she divides her salary into envelopes, rent, food, school fees and a rainy-day fund, and when one runs dry, there's simply no more for that category until the next month. Every dirham she spends goes into a battered notebook. She also belongs to a daret, a rotating savings circle with half a dozen colleagues, where everyone contributes a fixed sum monthly and the whole pot goes to each member in turn, which is essentially enforced saving with no bank involved.

I didn't fully appreciate how careful she was until I got into university in Rabat. I'd been bracing myself for a conversation about whether we could afford it, and instead she produced a savings book: she'd been setting money aside for my first year since I was fourteen, and hadn't breathed a word of it to anyone, my father included. In my whole life I've never known her to buy a single thing on credit.

The biggest lesson I've taken from her is the value of delay. Whenever I'm tempted by something expensive, I make myself wait thirty days, and more often than not the craving fades. She also convinced me that being good with money has far less to do with income than with the small, dull decisions you make every day.