awesome post.

Sometimes we don’t even know there is unnecessary spending in our lives w/o a good hard look at our spending

I knew I had to stop overspending when I finally accepted I needed to leave the highly-paid job that was making me miserable. I couldn’t fix the situation. I had stayed in the job years longer than I ought, simply because the high wage enabled me to spend more. But I certainly wasn’t being made happier by my spending. I was willing to earn less in order to be happier, so I needed to spend less.

Once I realized how little of my income was actually going to “needs,” it became very easy indeed to say to myself, how much longer do you WANT to work in this hellhole? The answer was always, five minutes. So the temptation to spend pretty much went away overnight.

I disagree with this statement. The implication is that Americans are bursting with willpower, but that willpower simply doesn’t work. That just isn’t true. Willpower is like a muscle; you have to build it up a bit at a time.

When we stop “cold turkey” it’s a bit like trying to bench 200 lbs starting out – very few people (if any) can do that. So, we try to bench the 200, fail, and assume that willpower itself just doesn’t work. But the problem is that we’ve overestimated the strength of our own will. No one wants to think they are weak-willed, so we say the system doesn’t work. It does work. You can build willpower the same way you build muscle – a little bit at a time.

Studies have show that people have limits to their willpower – but no one wants to admit that their own will is weak. We have to admit it before we can begin to strenthen it deliberately. The great thing is that strength will extend to other areas than the one on which we first focused.

The unfortunate truth is the exact opposite: in the replacement of one habit usually begins another; so it is VERY important to follow these steps accordingly:

1)ACKNOWLEDGE the habit.
2)Make a concrete decision to CHANGE it.
3)Decide on which REPLACEMENT you will use
4)IMPLEMENT your strategy.
5)RECORD your results, reward yourself if successful & improve your strategy if not.

Wonderful article April.

PS. J.D., you and I both have educational backgrounds in psychology, so I would love to read more of your personal thoughts on the psychology behind handling our money. After all, it is the mind that is in control/ lacking control.

I also think that tracking your progress is a huge motivational boost when trying to break bad habits. In the case of the shopper, if he started the vacation fund like you stated, a regular tracking of his progress could help foster his dedication to it, thus aiding his effort to break his habit.