Do word problems and on-the-spot equations make you queasy? Maybe you’re otherwise very intelligent, but can’t seem to figure out whether it’s cheaper to buy two ½ gallons of milk or one whole gallon this week. My friends in education have told me that most students who hate math aren’t actually bad at it; they’re just visual learners.

Visual learners work best with concrete, tangible problems, so they have the hardest time with abstract concepts—making math pretty loathsome. I’m visually-oriented, and while other analytical feats come easily to me, my equations are usually frighteningly off due to the merciless journey they make through the cogs and shredders of the math-processing centers of my brain.

Luckily, no matter your reason for hating math, you only need some basic math skills and tools to have a full, healthy financial life. And, you can thank the math-people for making technological and software advances that make math-lite life possible! There’s no excuse for losing control of your finances now.

Look, don’t assume

• Bulk isn’t always better—Rules of thumb can help you avoid math at the grocery store, but get rid of the assumption that buying a bigger package (or the product with the lowest shelf price) of anything is cheaper. The only way to know for sure is to compare unit pricing. Unit pricing is usually a small number on the left side of the shelf price-sticker. It has the price per ounce, unit, pound, etc. No equations necessary— just a little “greater than or less than,” and that was fun in school
• Look at the big picture— Saving money can be counterintuitive. A $50 programmable thermostat (that isn’t necessary to heat your house) seems like an unnecessary expense, unless you take a minute to do some simple multiplication. As Trent from The Simple Dollar explains, this “unnecessary” expense can save you $60 a year in energy costs. Multiply that by the number of years you plan to live in your home, and you’ve got a truly frugal purchase

Identify your tools

• Cell phone calculator—If working equations in your head gets messy, never feel bad about busting out your phone. It’s better to humbly accept help with some simple calculations than to pay too much or blow your budget
• Math-savvy friend—Some people love crunching numbers. Find out if one of your friends gets all excited about setting up budgets and graphs, and trade one of your skills for their help
• Personal Finance services—You can buy PF software for about $30, or use a free online service that pulls information (securely) from all of your accounts to help you manage everything in one place. Thrive’s personal finance management service is exceptional because it offers adaptive advice for making the most of your unique situation in savings and budgeting. Math-savvy or not, finance management is so much easier with a good service. For the organizationally-challenged and the visual-learners it’s hard to beat the charts and graphs a PF service provides
• Pen and paper—One of the main reasons people feel like they can’t do math is that it seems abstract. Carry a little notebook and pen so you can “see” the steps of your addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Brush up your skills and boost your confidence

• Do a couple online math exercises—The Mira Costa Community College has free exercises in pdf form. The answers are on the bottom, so you can brush up your skills on your own
• Round up If decimals, cents and fractions throw you for a loop, just round to the nearest whole. I knew a woman who drove her husband crazy by always rounding when she balanced the check book. After a year or so they compared the actual and rounded final sums and found only pennies of difference
• Look up financial lingo Obscure financial terms are just as abstract as numbers for us visual people! I use Investorwords.com for simple explanations and definitions of things like “amortization,” “divestiture” and “arbitrage.”

Math should be the last thing between you and well-managed money. Whether or not math and abstract thinking come easily to you, someone gets them—and luckily those someones made it easy for you! Go revel in your right-brain thinking and budget at the same time.