Habit is a muscle
You know how sometimes you’re really great about going to the gym for a few weeks or months at a time? And your clothes fit better, you can just run right up flights of stairs, you see more muscle when you look in the mirror? Hurray, awesome. But then… maybe you don’t go to the gym for awhile. And at first, you don’t notice. You’re still doing okay. Then times goes on and… maybe the stairs don’t feel quite as easy anymore, or you can feel that waistband on your jeans a bit more. And you realize: Well, shoot, I need to keep going to the gym consistently, I can’t just up and quit but still keep my improvements.
Money’s a bit like that. You need to be consistent with your habits. The vast vast vast vast majority of us are not going to have some wild one-time windfall like a lottery ticket that will set us up for life. Instead, we need to build the habits that will keep us financially fit and sound for life. It really does need to be (I’m sorry, I hate this word), a lifestyle.
What am I talking about? Things like being conscious and intentional about your spending; things like knowing what you should spend on what you buy; building and keeping an emergency fund; respecting your own monty.
These aren’t about one-time changes to our lives; this is about the way we live overall in relation to our money and our spending habits. *Consistency* is really important. Consistency in saving and investing, consistency in keepings spending in check, consistency in knowing money is only a tool and not a solution in life.
Just like you lose your physical fitness if you stop working out, you can lose your financial fitness if you stop keeping up with those healthy habits. The good news, of course, is that the more you practice, the easier it becomes. I remember the time I “ran” a 5K after not exercising for ages. My family are not, to steal a phrase from a colleague, working out stock. I wanted to die, both on what I am charitably calling a “run” and for the next day or two. In contrast, I remember running a 5K after I’d been training for months and had been consistent in working out. It was so much better! I enjoyed it, and I found it not terribly hard.
Well, money habits are like that now, too. Being frugal for me has become second nature; it’s a muscle that I’ve exercised so much, exercising it now feels natural and frankly even fun. I’ve come to think of it as a sort of puzzle, one I like putting together and looking at from different angles to make the most out of it.
Habit is a muscle, and you can be strong. I know you can.
