Why do we fall?

It's been a particularly challenging week. Last minute travel for work coupled with a slew of birthday and graduation parties has taken it's toll, leaving little time for simple pleasures like curling up with a book, cooking or writing.

I thought I'd share a little progress on my commitment to write an hour a day: I traveled for work this week and did not once even attempt to write Monday through Thursday. My trip was particularly stressful and my writing at those times is often convoluted or clouded with negativity, so I opted to avoid writing all together. If I ever hope to be a serious writer, I'm going to have to overcome the challenge to write during stress. After all, to say my "normal" life is absent of stress is far from the truth. But I'm not giving up just because I wasn't able to meet my commitment this week. In fact, now I'm even more resolved to stick with my writing. If only I had someone to help with all my other commitments….

Making any significant change successfully has a lot to do with self reflection. You will fail - likely more than once - more likely much more than once. The list of people who have achieved something significant on the first try is very short - if it even exists (believe me, I looked). This is true for a multitude of creation, from developing the light bulb (thanks Thomas Edison) to developing a working budget. So, since this is a blog about money, let's bring it back to something relevant to personal finance...

Mr. Common Cents and I analyze our budget every month. It's not that we continuously go over budget, (after all, we have been analyzing our spending for the past year). The reason we look month after month at categories like groceries, gas and gifts is because life isn't always constant. Sometimes, life gets in the way of our budget. It's during those times that we look at our spending and find ways to work our goals into our lives. We ask ourselves serious questions for the things we spent money on:

Did this category meet our expectations?
If it did, what can we learn? If it didn't, what happened and what can we do differently next time? (This month, we will end up over budget on gifts because of the aforementioned celebrations, as well as an upcoming wedding. Although it's more than we generally spend, we will likely still end up meeting our annual budget goals.)
Do our expenses reflect our values?
At the risk of sounding cliché, you really can tell what your priorities are from your calendar and your wallet. (Showing appreciation to loved ones is important to us. Over the last 4 years, we've learned to find other creative ways to show our love, but with a large family we still have a minimum amount of gifts we are willing to commit to.)
What can we do to prepare for next month?
This question is a culmination of the answers from the previous 2. (With the gift budget, we can continue to find creative ways to show our loved ones how much they mean to us. Sometimes this means spending a lot more time making a personalized card than picking it up at Hallmark. Sometimes, this means shopping on Amazon for something we know they will love.)

Life happens no matter how many contingency plans we've made to prepare for the unexpected. Sometimes, we have to learn to roll with the punches. It's at those times that we realize why we failed in the first place… but I'll let someone else say it better:

I'm learning to pick myself up again. Life is so much more fulfilling when our mistakes have a purpose - to teach us what we're really here for.

Habits

Great news for Our Common Cents! I've recently joined the Money Hacker Network, and that involves a certain level of commitment from me - that I will post new blog entries, at minimum, three times a week.

The good news - Writing allows me to express myself in a creative way, I'm enjoying the process and have plenty of ideas to share.

The not so good news - No more excuses when I lack the time to write due to hectic work schedules, business travel, personal time, or any number of excuses I've used this year.

To be honest, I'm a little nervous about making an official commitment. Through various report cards, progress reports, and performance reviews, I know my strengths - I am wonderful at generating ideas, gaining passion and starting a project with enthusiasm. Following through, on the other hand, not so much. If only there were a way to trick myself into changing that habit….

Thinking about change takes me back to my academic roots in psychology. Not the psychoanalytic variety (personally, I'm not too fond of psychos or analysis). No, my passion was motivation - motivation for change, driven by the belief that all people are capable of significant, lasting change in behavior. I still feel that way and have learned to approach myself with the same sense of optimism. From a scientific perspective, what prompts successful change in people? The jury is divided, but there are some common themes that can apply to just about everything, from starting a diet to following a budget to making time to write a blog:

1. Commit to your vision. Don't kid yourself that you want to do something if you really don't. Early in my career I worked at a weight loss chain and often asked people where their motivation for losing weight was coming from. The dieters motivated by a timeline or external focus, whether it was their high school reunion or their own wedding, didn't keep the weight off for the long term and rarely made it to their target weight. The only people who were successful were committed to changing and were internally driven.
   
   
2. Make it public. Don't ever underestimate the power of humiliation on accomplishing a task.
   
3. Find support. Yet another reason
   why Weight Watchers meetings are so successful. Perhaps you can accomplish 2 and 3 in one fell swoop if you find the right support group.
   
4. Be consistent. Studies have shown it takes approximately 21 days to form a habit. The science behind this is complicated - in a nutshell, that's about how long it takes to create neural patterns in the areas of the brain associated with habits, addiction, and procedural learning. Make it 30 days and the inertia you've created will be much easier to sustain than to revert back to your old ways.
   
5. Monitor progress. Self reflection is key in all areas of life. Winston Churchill said "People occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened." Don't make a mistake just to give up. Make your
   mistakes useful and success will be even sweeter because you will not only have learned the path to your goal, but also the path that leads somewhere else.
   

   
   

   I'm making it a goal to write every day this month for at least an hour. I'll follow up (public commitment!) at the end of the month.
   

   
   

Social experiments (AKA, why we cut out TV for a year)

Mr. Cents and I decided to give up TV, in-home movies and video games (mostly just affecting him) this year. When we tell people this, we get a mixture of responses, usually stated in some tone of horror. Really, it’s not so terrifying - honest.

Because Mr. Cents loves efficiency, I came up with a short list of answers to our most frequently asked questions:

Is this a New Year’s Resolution?
Not exactly. Typically, when someone starts a New Year’s Resolution they expect to go on a lifelong journey of giving up or incorporating some type of behavior. For example, one common resolution is losing weight. No one says, “This year I’m committed to losing 10 pounds! And then next year I’m going to gain it all back starting January 1st!”

Mr. Cents likes to call our TV avoidance a “social experiment” rather than a resolution. The basis of the experiment was to find out how much TV actually permeates our lives. When Mr. Cents quit smoking two years ago he discovered that the only way to know how much something affects you is to completely remove it from your life for an extended period of time and then compare your life before and you life after. (he's an engineer so it always has to come down to some experiment or another)

If you don’t watch TV, what do you do?
It’s really enlightening to see how much time we wasted (yes, wasted) watching TV. We get so much more done with the extra couple hours (or more) a day. We socialize more, try new hobbies, contribute to volunteer organizations, and we even talk more to each other. Our quality of life is better because we have so much more time. The change in our lives has been significant.

Don’t you ever get bored?
Not really (well, sometimes). There have been a couple of evenings where we run out of things to do at home and felt the need to bundle up in the middle of a blizzard to go to a movie or dinner. All in all though, just like when you have extra money in your paycheck, you'll always find ways to spend it, we have always found ways to spend our extra time. In a nutshell, we’ve changed our habits. If you’re used to sitting in front of the TV for two hours a night, at first it is going to feel like you are missing something. Eventually, the mist clears and you find something else to do that feels as good as or better than watching TV mindlessly.

When the year is over, are you going to lock yourselves in for a month starting in January and watch TV constantly?
We could return to vegging out in front of the TV most weeknights but after nearly four months of doing without, I don’t think we will. One exception to our social experiment was that we would allow ourselves to watch TV when one or both of us are traveling. Because I’ve gotten so used to going without, I rarely turn on the TV when I’m alone in a hotel room or when Mr. Cents is out of town, even for background noise. There are just too many other things I’d rather be doing.

Are you saving money since you aren’t watching TV?
That’s debatable. Mr. Cents and I live in an area where DSL is not an option and we must therefore purchase high speed internet via the cable company. Having high speed internet without cable is not an option, so we still have super-basic cable (technical term of course) that we’ve had since before our experiment. No change in spending there.

Because we are more active, our budgeted money for going out has increased. Sure, we could look for cheaper means of entertainment, but we really want this year to be an exploration year and find new passions. Mr. Cents and I plan on taking lessons for racquetball and golf – neither of which qualifies as cheap entertainment, and certainly not as cheap as TV. We’ve mildly reduced our energy consumption by keeping the TV off, but any money from this is eaten up by dinners away from home, activities, or the cost of gas needed to take us out of the house.

One big impact cutting TV has on our bottom line is removing us from temptation. We’re not watching ads; we’re not comparing our living space to our TV “peers”. The logic behind retail marketing is to convince you to buy something you don’t really need, but by way of advertising you realize that it could, in fact, make your life better. Keeping out of big box stores reduces my urge to consume. So does turning off the TV.

According to Juliet Schor’s The Overspent American, even more damaging to your wallet than advertising is the impact of creating a new “reference group”. We start to identify with the actors in the shows we watch. By watching TV, we no longer want to keep up with the Jones next door; we now want to keep up with The Girls Next Door, to the impact of over $200 dollars an hour.

Trent over at The Simple Dollar posted last year about financial reasons behind giving up TV. The financial reasons were interesting, but what drew me more to the article was what to replace the time you have now that you’ve turned off your TV. Things like taking on a major project, going back to school, having more time for self reflection, and encouraging a budding hobby are many of the reasons Mr. Cents and I are loving life without TV. In the end, Trent summed up his post with a quote that sums up our feelings about our social experiment, one which is likely to encourage us to keep the TV turned off for much longer than we originally intended:

“In short, by cutting out television, you can not only directly save money, but live a much more rich and fulfilling life.”