If You Want to Stick With the New Year’s Solution, Formulate It Differently.

In 2017, I stuck to a solution for the first time in my life. What’s more, I have failed in the same decision – to budget and stick to it – over the years. If you think there is something embarrassing about being unable to manage your finances as an adult, you are right! But what’s even more embarrassing is that I literally on January 20 in a row tried to solve this riddle, called “budgeting,” and simply could not crack it. And don’t tell me about your Excel or Mint.com system and say, “It’s hard to keep track of your expenses!” For some reason, there were chunks of unaccounted for money, and the numbers did not match, and I was ashamed and angry. I always gave up by February.

But in 2017, I didn’t give up on the permission, I just tweaked the way I formulated it for myself. Instead of “making a budget and sticking to it,” I said, “For an hour a week, I will sit with frustration and shame when I learn how to budget.”

This reformulation brought two immediate benefits: First, I didn’t have to get it right in the first month – it’s okay if money left that I couldn’t account for, or if I forgot to make a budget category for haircuts. I just had to sit at the computer for an hour a week. And secondly, he admitted that the implementation of this decision was unpleasant for me, which was a kind of breakthrough, because up to this point I felt bad about not feeling well , which hindered me even more.

So, for the first three months of 2017, I sat for an hour a week (sometimes 10 minutes, sometimes an entire hour at once) and studied the “ You need a budget” budgeting program . If I didn’t understand something, I wrote to the support service by e-mail or asked on the sub-Reddit . I watched the video on how to use the program. When the accounts didn’t match, I started looking for discrepancies. If the discovery took more than an hour, I clicked “perform correction transaction” – the accounting equivalent of not knowing what happened there WTF – and continued. I told myself that it doesn’t matter if I’m not good at budgeting even after a year, as long as I stick to my solution, which was to devote an hour a week to a really unpleasant task.

I also did a few other things that increased my chances of success. I took a cue from people studying exercise motivation and hired a partner , my husband. He’s just as bad as me when it comes to budget, but he also wanted to change his bad views and stop feeling, as he put it, that the boulder was chasing us down the hill. Secondly, I linked the lousy task (sitting at the computer, trying to learn something unpleasant) with the pleasant task: eat dessert and watch the show.

So once a week we put the kids to bed, did the bookkeeping, ate a bowl of ice cream, and watched Netflix. I love desserts and television so much that I was looking forward to our budgeting evenings. But here’s the thing: it was a very slow process. I didn’t even begin to feel like I owned our new system until early summer. (I told you I had a block.) Even now, a year later, there are some things that I don’t quite understand, such as why the program thinks I’m in the red on my credit cards when I’m not.

At the moment, our accounting sessions are a weekly habit that I do feel pretty good about (experts tell us that motivation helps, but new habits are the key to lasting change ). I’m not ashamed anymore and I ran the system to teach my kids how to manage money and it works fine too (although my son hasn’t been able to stick to his holiday budget ).

Will this work for other New Year’s promises like quitting smoking or losing weight? I think so. Instead of “I’ll quit smoking,” you can say, “I’ll find something to do every time I crave,” or “I’ll even go to the gym for just twenty minutes, three times a week.” Bringing in a partner or combining something enjoyable with your task (like listening to podcasts on a treadmill or listening to audiobooks while you cook healthy meals) can only increase your chances of success.

My New Year’s Resolution for 2018? Uh, to cut down on desserts. I mean, “spend my evenings reading really good novels instead of eating ice cream.” Perhaps I can even use the budget as a reward.

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