How did you get on with preparing your balance sheet last week? Judging by the responses I have had, or elicited, knowing one's financial condition appears to be held in similar regard by some people to knowing their medical condition. They would rather not know, in case it's bad news.

One reader said that doing his financial sums made him feel "smug", another said that she feared doing it and so didn't, and a third wrote to say that I'd ruined his weekend. Here's the thing, and I can't stress this highly enough: money has no emotions. In dealing with it, you will do best to bring no emotional baggage to the table.

Whatever your financial worth may be, it will fall into the middle of the 6 billion balance sheets that could be drawn up for everyone in the world.

Many people, most people, are less well off than you, because half the world gets by on three dollars a week, and you're better off than that.

Some people, relatively speaking very few people out of 6 billion, will have bigger totals than yours. What matters is not how you stand in relation to anyone else, but how you stand in relation to your hopes, dreams, and practical realities.

Stop being afraid of money. Stop allowing the fear of money to rule your thinking. If you didn't complete your balance sheet last week ? for any reason ? complete it this week. You'll be no use to me (or yourself) six months from now unless you have a balance sheet of some kind to look at and learn from.

If you've lost the instructions, they are in last week's column. You can find that online (, or e-mail me () and I'll send it to you. You have no excuse for ignoring this demand. Do it. Even if it confirms your worst fears, this column exists to ease those fears. I can't help you unless you help yourself.

Fear is a sub-set of not knowing. Working out your figures, even if the answer is worse than you thought, is the first step to all sorts of things, such as improving it. You have nothing to fear but fear itself, in this particular area.

Positive thinking is likelier to lead to a positive outcome than negative thinking. You are likelier to become more financially comfortable if you adopt an inquisitive and emotionally neutral approach to your money. I'm not saying that thinking about money will make you rich ? it won't ? but the more you learn, the more you know. In this case, the more you know, the likelier you are to make informed decisions.

I can hear half of you sighing and saying "Tell me something I don't know," but we're trying to make a whole nation wealthier here and you have to allow the stragglers to catch up.

Although I have now run out of clich?s to throw at you, the column is not long enough, so I shall append to it another column full of good ideas that didn't last the distance. I'll close this part by saying that if I meet you, I'm going to ask whether you wrote down your balance sheet (I don't want to know the number).

If you didn't, I'm going to go on and on ? and on ? about why you should have. Save yourself the aggravation. Do it for me, even if you don't want to do it for yourself.

Will you? Huh? Huh? Pretty please?

I was watching David Letterman the other night, and his guest was a 13-year-old musical prodigy called Kit Armstrong. The lad's piano playing was so advanced that it made me shed a tear.

The more relevant contribution that this child made came in a conversation with Mr. Letterman. No mental slouch himself, Dave was clearly outbrained by this tiny teen. Attempting to learn something from the interview (which is what makes him such a good interviewer), Mr. Letterman asked his guest if he was also good at mathematics, because "mathematics and music are the same thing, really aren't they?"

The boy replied: "Everything is mathematics," or words to that effect. I had recently watched another extraordinary TV programme, which finally explained Einstein's most famous discovery, e equals mc squared, in a manner that a physics simpleton (that's me) could understand.

Mr. Armstrong's answer reminded me that not everyone enjoys mathematics. Some people would rather skinny-dip in the Arctic Ocean in January than calculate the five percent discount on their groceries on a Wednesday. If that's you, you might not be adequately equipped to join the rest of us on the glorious quest to get rich slowly.

Everyone has different skills and shortcomings. I can't fix a car (or even open the doors on my car sometimes, because it is childproof, and I can't understand the switch); you might be one of those people who doesn't "get" mathematics. If so, I'm not about to suggest that you enrol in night school, but it would help you to become more comfortable with your finances if basic maths were not an insuperable hurdle.

I can offer a couple of hints, but the best advice I can give you is to buy a school textbook, and make improving your math power a personal improvement project. It won't take long, because now that you're an adult, learning is easier. Learning something you want to know is easier still. Brushing up on your basic math will help you, as Mr. Armstrong pointed out, with everything.

Here are a few hints on maths, then. If you know all this, I apologise again, but we can't only include the smarty-pants in this column.

Do you know how to figure out ten percent of something? (Knock off the last digit.) Or five percent of something? (Knock off the last digit and divide the result by two.) Or multiply by five? (Add a zero and divide the result by two.)

Can you tell at a glance which of the following is five percent of 100?

It's the second one.

Do you know that five percent of something is one in 20? More to the point, do you know why five percent of something might be important?

There is no "normal" percentage of interest payable on an investment, but there is a theory that five percent is as good a yardstick as any other when judging investment performance. Over the last 20 years, it would have been possible to earn four or five percent by leaving your money in the bank. If doing nothing makes you five percent (today, it would make about three and a half percent in US dollars), then running a business, with all the work and the risk involved, has to do better ? or there'd be no point in running the business.

The greater the risk involved, the higher return investors have a right to expect. That's only fair. It's also the basic rule of investing; it's what makes some investments likelier to give you a better ? or worse ? rate of return.

So, to tie all this together, take out your balance sheet and see what five percent of your net worth is. That number, one-twentieth of what you have now, should be your minimum target for savings in the year ahead. At this stage, I don't care if you achieve it by earning interest or dividends, or by saving money from your job.

If you have at least five percent more next year than you have this year, you will have protected your money against inflation, and gotten richer slowly.

Wouldn't that be a nice thing to be able to say you had done?