Forget New Years, Start Making Your Financial Resolutions Today

As the calendar pages get torn off and the end of the year nears, many people start planning to turn the page to the new year: vacations during winter break, planning holiday/new year’s parties, thinking about new year’s resolutions.  It is the last item that deserves more careful consideration, specifically with resolutions revolving around finances.  Many people make financial health a big part of their resolutions–paying down debt, starting a retirement fund, increasing savings, etc. With money and finances being such an important aspect of everyday life, maybe it is time to think about your money in just that way: every day.

Every day the state of the economy changes.  Every day the state of peoples’ individual financial health changes.  If you follow that line of thinking, then every day you should be making efforts to either maintain your financial position or to take steps to fix your financial position.  Making a resolution one time at the beginning of the year is great because you are at least making some concerted effort, but too often the luster of such ideas wears off and people fall back into their poor habits, forgetting about their “resolutions”.  Financial well-being is a step by step, one day at a time process.  It takes determination and persistence especially in the beginning when attitudes and routines need to be reinforced, but as time passes it gets easier until you get to the point where some tasks become second nature (transferring unspent cash into a high-yield savings, clipping coupons from the Sunday paper, funding a retirement account, etc.)

Don’t get caught up in setting a “target date” on which to start implementing a new plan of action, as you will only open yourself to self-sabotage and failure.  By tackling changes and challenges immediately, you have a better chance at overcoming your biggest hurdle to achieving your goals: yourself.  Get out of your own way and allow yourself the chance to succeed at reaching those goals you set.  What that means is simply not allowing life to get in the way before even starting to make the changes you need.  Wasting time and putting those resolutions off only allows for other issues to arise and push those resolutions to the back of your mind, or for you to simply forget about them altogether.  Let’s be honest here, no one’s life is so simple that they don’t have to worry about work, family, health or anything else getting in the way of plans.

Make it easier on yourself, start today or at the exact moment that you have the realization that something is either working or not working for you.  Write it down, send yourself an email, tell a friend and ask them to remind you about it, whatever you have to do to get the process going.  The saying “Why put off until tomorrow what you can do today” holds true especially when dealing with finances. Correct a problem today and you greatly reduce the chance that it will get bigger or reappear in the future.  Continue on with a course of action that is working for you today, and it will become more routine and easier to follow going forward.

Don’t put off dealing with a situation, either good or bad, thinking that it will always be that good or that it will be better to start fresh with the new year or even the next new month that comes along. Problems don’t go away on their own, and the longer you wait to take corrective measures, the longer it will take and the more difficult it will become.   Even the smallest of issues may snowball into a major headache down the road, and you’ll be kicking yourself for not dealing with it when it was manageable like you had planned on doing.  

Do you wait until New Years before making any kind of resolutions?  If so, why: is it because you don’t think of those types of things until the end of the year, or because you like to have a “deadline” to start, or some other reason?

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