Try using on your personal accounting three of the business accounting "tricks of the trade" that are getting attention after Arthur Anderson's problems were the subject of media focus.  You will suddenly find that these three simple tricks can make you much richer than you and your spouse thought you were.

1. Expenses are really investments. Take the expense of the monthly groceries and think of it as an investment in what you can earn ten years from now if you do not starve to death this year.  That way it will not be an expense on your personal balance sheet, instead it will just show that you have changed cash into a long term ten year investment asset.   Lot's of corporations decide that expenses are really "investments;" that keeps profits high, since expenses are so low.
2. Expenses are really partly income. Send out some business cards asking people to hire you to show them the town's sights.  Then report income as though half of those people had already hired you to do that.  (American Online sent out free trial subscriptions and immediately reported income as though the subscriptions were paid for, until regulators stopped that practice.)
3. Expenses have equal income - right now. Buy fruit baskets and send them out to friends.  Then report them as both expenses and also as sales (because you expect that much in sales from the expense of the fruit basket).  Your financial reports then show that your sales are growing this year.  Although the report shows that expenses ate up sales amounts,  of course you can assure everyone that large expenses are normal in a high growth period (thus you can expect them to pay you money to buy stock so they have a share of the fast growing business).  Centennial Technologies did a variant of that!

If you are an outside director, you are supposed to know about the major sources of your corporation's income and expenses.  If you are an investor, you want to be assured that the corporation is not pulling some of those accounting tricks.  

Maybe it is time for the corporation to have a Legal Compliance and Ethics Officer.   At least the corporation can tell investors it has a program in place to expose major accounting tricks.   And maybe the outside directors can sleep better.

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