New Year manifesto for financial success

December 11, 2013 | Filed under: Personal Finance | Author: Editor

Financial resolutions are as easy to stick to as diet resolutions. For most people, it’s easy enough to establish fresh saving and spending goals for the upcoming year, yet difficult — if not impossible  – to make it all the way to February with new habits intact.
In January, with your enthusiasm still fully intact, you loudly declare, “This is the year when I’m finally going to get out of debt!” But two weeks into the new year, you find that your plan is too tough. Too rigid. Not eating out for a year feels like an impossibility when your lifestyle has accustomed you to eating out every day.
This leads to a difficult struggle. You resist letting go, but no matter how hard you try, it’s almost impossible to follow through with your resolutions.
So, you slip a little.
Then, you slip a little more.
Eventually — and all too soon — you throw in the towel.
By the time you’re tearing February from the calendar and staring at March, you have almost no recollection of your “getting out of debt” goals, and certainly no strong habits to back them. You’re swimming in the midst of a debt-ridden sea, continuing down the same path of spending you were on the year before (and probably the year before that) while watching your credit card statements climb higher and higher.
June brings summer and complete indifference to your New Year’s goals.
By now, you feel bad. Awful. Your financial situation has only grown worse, rather than better.
You dread going to the mailbox, or answering your phone, because you know someone’s on the other end waiting for their payment. But, you lie to yourself like you do around this time every year: there’s no point in trying to change now.
There’s only three months left until Christmas, and everyone knows it’s impossible to avoid over-spending in December.