Feed items

During 2004, 2005, and early 2006, I made a lot of feeble attempts at turning our finances around. I’d make these little commitments to myself to stop spending so much money or to start paying off credit cards. It never took very long before those commitments fell apart and, before long, I didn’t even really believe in those commitments.

I basically fell into a mindset that I would never really change my financial situation and that somehow in the future some miracle would happen to turn everything around.

Looking back on it, I think there were four key reasons why I was never able to commit to that change.

First, I didn’t ever have a real sense that I would lose anything. Although the debt piled up, I never doubted that I would be able to pay the bills. I never had any trouble with them at all until early 2006.

This summer, my family is going on a very long road trip to multiple national parks, a stop at Disneyworld, visits with relatives, and many little side trips and journeys along the way. We are going to see large parts of the United States and do it all in an automobile.

No matter how we slice it, it’s going to be fairly expensive. Fortunately, Sarah and I have already planned out a bunch of tactics to bring down the cost of such a road trip.

Air up the tires before we leave. A quick stop at the gas station enables us to fill up our car tires to the maximum recommended air pressure before we depart. Every one PSI on any one tire improves our fuel efficiency 1/8 of one percent.

Quite often, I encourage people to visualize their future in five years or ten years. I usually suggest that people try to visualize their perfect future so that they have a goal to work towards.

However, some people don’t thrive on looking forward at a goal. Instead of running toward something, they make more progress running from something.

Today, I want you to visualize something a little different. Try imagining your future if you don’t change some of your worst habits.

Perhaps your worst habit is overspending. If that’s the case, you might imagine a future where you don’t have enough savings for retirement or you’re unable to afford the home you’ve been planning on buying. Maybe you’ll be facing a complete financial meltdown. What does your life look like in five years if you don’t change?

A few days ago, I called my internet service provider. I had an issue I wanted to discuss with their customer service people.

Don’t get me wrong – I actually really like my internet service provider. They have fast service when there’s a problem and there’s rarely a problem. The speeds are consistent and don’t vary much at all throughout the day.

The problem is that they’re expensive. Our monthly internet bill isn’t cheap. We pay for a pretty fast speed so that both Sarah and I can work while the children watch high quality streaming video without anyone hiccuping, but it’s still awfully high.

We’ve been a customer with this company since we moved to our current house in 2007. We’ve never even been late on a bill in those years.