The most common New Year’s resolutions deal with health & fitness, money, career, relationships, and travel.
Sorry to be blunt, but if you’re not making steady progress at your top resolution right now — September 6th — you haven’t set up systems to maintain ongoing accountability, and chances are you’ll fail again in January.
On the other hand, if you’re systematically working towards a specific goal you set, the world is your oyster. What’s the next challenge I can set for myself? How can I top myself last time? Bring it on. These are the phrases of top performers I know.
The time to think about resolutions is not January 1st. It’s in the middle of the year, when nobody else is thinking about them.
One of the most common reasons people can’t get ahead is expenses they just didn’t expect. I constantly hear things like this:
“I was just about to pay off my credit card debt FOREVER, and then I had to get a new ___ for my ___”
“God, I didn’t expect to get that traffic ticket.”
“Every time I think I’m getting ahead, my car breaks down or I have to replace some appliance.”
These “unpredictable” expenses are very predictable
Here’s the trick: A lot of what seems unpredictable is extremely predictable — over the long term. What seems like surprise expenses is actually not a surprise if you analyze your spending for the past 5 years. Which of course nobody does.
For example, that “surprise” car repair? It might not happen in the same month, but every year, you might average spending about $400 on car repair. That’s $33/month. Once you know that, set up an automatic deposit into your sub-savings account and you’re done.
Keep a “Stupid Mistakes” sub-savings account
I keep a sub-savings account called “Stupid Mistakes” in my ING account.
I’ll explain some of the other ones later
What I use “Stupid Mistakes” for:
Traffic tickets
Late fees or penalties that I can’t negotiate out of
Re-buying things that I lost
I save $100/month into it. If there’s anything left at the end of the year, I take out 20% to reward myself, and roll the rest back into my main savings account.
Keep a “Stupid Mistakes” sub-savings account. Just the simple fact of having one will sharpen your focus on avoiding the mistakes in the first place. And when you do make a stupid mistake, you’ll be able to use your sub-savings account as a buffer to keep your automation system on track.
