Learning to control your financial faults
- B.J. Yoder: Young Money
- June 23, 2021
- 705
If you’re reading this, you are a human, and every single human has weaknesses. It is that simple. The weaknesses are different for every single person, even Superman himself had kryptonite as his weakness. These faults not only apply to life in general, but they also apply to the financial area specifically. Everyone has their faults, and they really can’t be turned into an asset, but they can be controlled.
Shortcomings financially can come in so many forms: clothes, technology, experiences, even credit card, but mine is eating out. None of these things seem like a problem until you start tracking how much you actually spend on it.
The Mint app can be hooked up to you credit card and whenever it is used, then Mint has the technology to (almost always) classify the expenditure into the correct category. Of course, when I would go to Buffalo Wild Wings, Plain & Simple Diner and Chipotle, Mint will catch that and put it under the “restaurants” category. Opening the app and seeing the cold, hard number staring right back at me, it set off alarms in my mind. There was no way I spent that much on food. It looked like I was over budget and it was time to recalibrate.
We all need wake up calls in our lives, and most of the time it will take something ugly to wake us up before it gets better. Mine wasn’t a life-changing story, but it made me aware and that is what needs to happen to everyone. If you’re reading this and you thought to yourself, “what a fallible guy, he should be like me because I don’t have any weakness spending,” then it most likely means you are unaware of at least one, small weakness in your life.
Being conscious of a failing part of you is naturally the first step but disciplining and working at overcoming that weakness is where the rubber hits the road. It might not even be a certain category in itself; it could honestly just be using the credit card for the sake of using the credit card.
Discover, Visa and American Express have made it far too easy to use their products for good reason — it can become dangerous. The card itself could be a weakness. I never received the name of the person who said it, but he stated, “discipline is not going to your credit card and cutting it up, it’s having the credit card and learning to use it correctly.” The same goes for anything else. It’s being able to go to the store for groceries and walking out with only the groceries you came in for. It is getting onto Amazon looking for a water bottle that you need replaced and only purchasing the water bottle, not a new lamp or anything else.
Not one person on this earth enjoys saying or admitting that they are less than perfect, but it will help in the long run. “I’ll start next month when I can finally budget” or “It’s not that big of deal, I’ve made it this far” are terrible excuses to avoid facing a problem head on because facing the problem head on will take time and will take effort. Activating a change like this is something that no one enjoys doing, because we are cutting off an action that releases dopamine for us, for a short time.
Eventually, we see our closet full of 20 shoes, but only two feet to wear them (I’m guilty), a dozen hats but only one head to put them onto (guilty as well), and we have a larger credit card bill than normal because we “had a hard day” and deserved to go out to eat Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Trade the short shot of dopamine for the long-term goal of financial health, at least for six months, and see what happens.
Holmes County native BJ Yoder is an insurance agent by day and a finance enthusiast by night. This column is for informational purposes only. He can be emailed at benjamin.john.yoder@gmail.com.