A friend said an interesting thing to me this week about money, that at first I couldn't understand.

Having thought about it, I see that it his comment is the key that allows us to enter into another way of thinking about money. Let's call my friend Albert, as in Einstein. That's suitable because he is a genius, an actual certified brainbox, whose thinking proceeds at a level far beyond yours or mine. Mine, anyway.

The reason I couldn't understand what Albert had said was that his statement is the product of a chain of logic that he forgot to explain, because it's obvious to him. It took me a day to work it out. Geniuses ? what can you do?

What he said was: "Groceries are free." My first thought was that he was stealing from the supermarket, but that's ludicrous. Albert is the model citizen, and takes his family responsibilities far too seriously to risk jail time.

But ? butterflies are free; groceries cost money.

It took the accountant in me to understand what he meant.

Plainly, groceries aren't free. This I know from too many visits to supermarkets that end with the check-out person saying: "That'll be ?" and then citing an amount of money that in Bermuda, lately, exceeds the national debt of small countries.

Albert, being a genius, has internalised the need to save money.

Whatever he thinks will incorporate the cheapest way of doing a thing, commensurate with the quality of the thing being done. Everything else being equal, Albert takes the path less expensive as a matter of routine.

He is one of the very, very few people I have ever met who 'gets' this better than I do. So smart are Albert and his (uncertified) genius wife that for years, they saved more than 50 percent of all the pennies that came their way.

I am aware of such behaviour, but haven't recommended it here, because I'm trying to raise the average Bermudian saving rate from about zero to, say, five or ten percent, and I realise that proposing my readers make the jump to 50 percent or more would be like a wolf with laryngitis howling in the wilderness.

What Albert meant was this ? if you're alive, you have to eat. The cheapest way to eat is to buy groceries, rather than dining out, where you have to pay for the labour of cooking, serving, dishwashing and all the other work it takes to run a restaurant, plus the profit its owners would expect to earn.

So Albert, presupposing that a person would work and therefore have an income, regards groceries as an unavoidable cost of living. More precisely, his statement that groceries are free means that they are decision-free and guilt-free. Buying groceries, as opposed to dining in restaurants, is the best economic decision you can make, short of growing your own food.

Geniuses are too busy to grow their own food, so Albert had ruled that out. Plus, he doesn't live on a farm, and would probably kill himself if he ever tried to use a mechanical device of any sort. Geniuses!

You need not feel guilty about buying groceries, because the alternative is more expensive and, therefore, in Albert's model value system, less desirable ? unless he feels like eating out, in which case he chooses to spend more for dinner than is strictly necessary.

We meet regularly for strictly unnecessary, but excellent, meals together.

In accounting terms, Albert is saying that groceries are a "fixed cost", like rent or payroll tax.

You have to live somewhere, and if you don't own a home, you have to rent one. If you earn a salary in Bermuda, you have to pay payroll tax.

You have to eat. These are unavoidable functions of being alive and/or employed, and their costs cannot be avoided.

Restaurant meals, on the other hand, are a variable expense. They could cost anywhere from zero to millions of dollars a year, depending on how often you eat out, and where.

Other variable expenses include the cost of vacations, alcohol and annual membership fees in clubs, for example.

The simplest way to separate these expenses is to ask yourself: if I stopped work and simply existed, staring into the void, what bills would I still have to pay?

Now, I have other friends, almost as smart, who view saving money as some sort of crime. One of them in particular, is horribly unpleasant towards me every time the subject of money comes up. His view is that saving is something he does not want to do and therefore something he will not do. That I do it merely adds insult to injury.

However: this person feels deep guilt at his profligacy, yet is unable to criticise himself for any reason whatsoever.

If he ran a small child over, he'd blame the child. He views his own attitude to money as enlightened, because he never thinks about it, and mine as money-grubbing, because (he thinks) I always think about it.

That's not strictly true. I think about money, without fail, once at the end of each month, when I look at my assets and liabilities, and what I earned and spent in the previous month.

I think about money once a day, for a few seconds, as I log my expenditures in the monthly tracking chart that is still available for free from crombie@northrock.bm.

I think about money only occasionally, otherwise, when I pay the bills, bank cheques, or do a little staring into the void. Most of the time, I don't need to think about money, because I've thought it through and instituted the rules that will enable me to meet my objectives. Like Albert, I have internalised good financial behaviour.

I'm guessing that if you interpreted the phrase "thinking about money" to be a process accompanied by worry, concern or downright terror, you haven't got much money.

You probably also don't have a plan, and deep down you probably fear money.

If you interpreted the phrase to mean "planning about money", you may be, like me, someone for whom the fear of money is less keenly felt.

The goal of these columns is to move you from the former group to the latter, to make you more like my genius pal than my critical pal.

The good news is that reading this column shows you're already on the way to being a genius. And for geniuses, groceries are free.

crombie@northrock.bm