Lately, life here at Travel Write Money has shifted towards regiment and discipline. Personal finance and weight loss seem to have much in common. It is likely that many other aspects of life would also benefit from what weight loss and personal finance have to teach.
Weight Loss
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Weight loss is not as easy as one imagines. We all know that it's a matter of less calories in and more calories out. Yet, for its simplicity, it is the most difficult thing to achieve. I, Mr. TWM, have been dieting for the past few weeks. I have chosen the Atkins diet, which has yielded results. So long as I stick to the system, I lose weight. If I disregard the system, I gain weight back.
The biggest challenge is making the decisions regarding what to eat more routine. It is extremely difficult, at first, to figure out what you can eat and how much. It is cognitively challenging to learn new meals and recipes that are palatable and easy to make. With Atkins, some of that is solved by their line of food products you can buy at most grocery stores. These can get you started until you figure out how to change the way you eat. This is the part where you establish a routine.
I suspect that once I have reached my weight target, I won't be able to simply give up the routine. It will require discipline to continue to carry out the routines that allow me to lose weight in order to maintain my target weight. Being routines, it should not be difficult to carry them out. The discipline will be to remain conscious about what those routines are and why I am following them.
Personal Finance
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Many people have jobs and earn money. The greatest distinction between good money management and poor money management has to do with systems. More than that, you have to have a routine that takes advantage of that system. And, you have to have the discipline to stick to the routine.
Budgeting
For example, in personal finance, budgeting is essential. It is important to know where each dollar is going every pay period. Here at TWM, we use a spreadsheet that is broken up into pay periods for the entire year. Payments are filled in between the pay periods. This allows us to subtract the expenses from the paycheck. What is left over is money we can use to spend. That's another thing we learned. It's important to have spending money budgeted. If your entire paycheck is going to pay bills, you end up having to use credit to get to the next pay period.
These insights are essential to making sure you can keep your financial obligations. This helps preserve your credit. This also allows you to plan things for when you have money available.
All the benefits of budgeting are useless unless you devise some way of tracking and planning your expenses, having the process of budgeting down to a simple routine, and then having the discipline to conduct that routine when it needs to be done.
Saving and Investing
Saving and investing are also another game of inches. There aren't many of us who will have thousands of dollars to plop into an investment all at once. Most of us will put aside some money every pay period to build on our savings and investments a little bit at a time. This money, obviously, must first be budgeted. However, beyond budgeting, savings and investing require you to have a system in place for transferring funds and conducting transactions. These have to be simplified into a routine. And, you have to have the discipline to save and invest regularly. It is important to be conscious about your savings routine and why you are doing it. Lasting wealth does not happen by accident. It is a conscious and constant effort.
Other Aspects of Life
This same approach can likely be applied to other aspects of life. Sports. Education. Maintaining a home. We need to develop systems that work for us. Then, we need to make those systems into routines that don't require us to reinvent a solution every time. Then, we need to maintain the discipline to carry out those routines. In this way, we can have measurable results that can lead to predictable success. And, we can achieve it with little effort. And, we can ensure that our success is enduring.
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