There’s a post up at The Simple Dollar that echoes a thought I’ve had for a long time. Trent writes to tell us Why Traditional Budgets Don’t Work. This is an idea that I’ve also had in the past as I’ve tried to count each penny and wondered where it all went. He makes a great point in comparing it to most diets that do the same thing by making you count up the calories for every single thing you take into your body. These methods seem logical enough, but why is it that the vast majority of us fail miserably when it comes to sticking with a budget or diet?
His answer is that in that counting up each penny or calorie and restricting yourself to an outside definition of what your spending or eating should be, you’re trying to fit your own personal style into someone else’s. This does make some sense, but to me it’s even more simple than that. It’s just plain hard to record every penny and calorie. It’s tedious.
Most of us have a difficult time making ourselves do hard things. Take for example, that New Year’s Resolution you’ve made to run every day. If you start out the first day with the intention of running 5 miles, you’re likely to fail. Not only are you likely to fail, you’re probably going to quit running far short of your 5 miles and still be so sore for the next few days that you won’t even attempt to run again for a while. By then it will be well past New Year’s and you’ll wonder if it won’t just be better to try again next year.
This is the equivalent of putting yourself on a crash diet or budget. I won’t argue that sometimes this works for people and is just the thing that they need. For most people, however, it would be much better to start out by running half a mile (or even less) at not much more than a fast walk. Do that for a couple of weeks and then think about kicking it up a notch. Budgets and diets work the same way.
Trent’s idea of breaking yourself of bad spending habits by slowly creating good, alternate ones is brilliant in it’s simplicity. I also really love the idea of finding the biggest waste of money in your budget and eliminating it. I might not start with the biggest one, though. I would probably try to find a small expenditure or two that could be lowered and then make sure that I put that savings where it could do the most good, namely, paying off debt.
If we carry this idea back over to our other analogies, it would be like eliminating a couple hundred useless calories from your diet every day. Have a cup of water at lunch instead of that super-sized soda pop. Or maybe get the chicken sandwich instead of the Big Mac. We can even adapt this idea to our exercise goals. Can you walk up the steps from the parking garage each day, just once in the morning, instead of taking the elevator? Yes, it’s only a few calories burned, but it’s a small price to pay for one, small good habit.
Once that habit has been ingrained, add another one. The same goes for any one of these ideas we’ve talked about. Start your good habits one little bit at a time. It’s okay if it’s relatively painless. Worry about that no pain, no gain thing later on. That’s if you’re training for the triathlon, not when you’re just trying to make it every day. We can regain control of our finances, our bodies, and our lives one little habit at a time. Think about it, but don’t just think. Do it now.
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