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It is easy to become comfortable and complacent.

You get a job. You work there for a few years. You get to know the people there and the routine. You earn a few perks for being there for a while, such as a bit of additional vacation. It’s easy to just settle in and ride.

You wake up to your financial situation. You make a bunch of moves to pay down debt and establish some new routines that aren’t as costly. Eventually, you start to simply enjoy the lower bills and it all seems to come easily. You just settle in and ride.

Settling in is the easy thing to do. Usually, it’s the path of least resistance, so unless you’re consciously making other choices, you’ll probably wind up doing just that.

The problem is that “settling in and riding” is more dangerous than you think. Settling in assumes that the thing that comes easy today will last forever.

A long while back, I wrote an article discussing class warfare and personal finance advice. In short, my conclusion was that you’re making a mistake by mistrusting financial advice from someone just because of an income gap. Financial advice given to someone making $100,000 a year isn’t useless to someone making $25,000 a year because the core principles are the same.

That isn’t to say that there isn’t some personal finance advice that applies better to certain income levels than others. Someone who is completely unemployed, for example, is going to be much more interested in advice relating to government programs and resources than someone making six figures. At the same time, someone making six figures is going to be more interested in investment advice than someone who is unemployed.

It’s a pretty common principle of time management. When you have a list of tasks to do, choose the one that’s hardest and do that first. That way, you tackle it with the most energy and the freshest mind.

What’s interesting is that many well-organized people use this principle quite well in the short term, but then completely discard it when looking at the long term. When they figure out today’s to-do list, they’ll choose the hard task, but when they look at plans that cover years, they avoid the hard task.

The easiest example I can think of for this phenomenon is retirement savings. Many, many people, when they’re first given the chance to save for retirement, choose not to save anything at all. They choose the easiest part first – not saving anything at all – and save the hardest part for later – socking away 10% or 15% for retirement.

This article first appeared on U.S. News and World Report Money.

Cell phone companies want you to sign up for expensive two-year contracts. Why wouldn’t they? It’s money directly in their pocket. They’ll use every sales technique they can to get you to sign on the dotted line for a new contract.

Sometimes, that contract winds up being a good deal, but there are several things you can do to make sure that you’re getting the best deal for the services that you need. Here are five tactics you can use to make sure that you’re getting the best deal.

Use multiple methods when shopping around. If you’re at the end of your cell phone contract, the ball’s in your court. You not only have the ability to choose the specifics of a new contract, you can also jump to a new carrier.