The Simple Dollar (22 page)

Such simple tasks are often just what’s needed to help a community to grow and thrive.

With the wide array of communities each one of us finds ourselves with a toehold in, each of us likely knows a substantial number of people who are doing interesting things in the world. You might have a sister-in-law who’s involved with writing grants for the National Science Foundation and a childhood friend who’s a successful architect, for example.

Those connections you have are themselves a valuable resource to be shared with others. Simply doing something as simple as calling in a favor to an old friend can often be transformative in the life of someone else. This gift, simply done on your part, can create a tremendous sea change not only in an individual life, but in an entire community. After all, a rising tide lifts all boats.

Excited to observe the power of giving in your own life? Here are five simple ways to get started.

1. Take a look at the needs of the communities you’re involved in.
   You’re a part of a wide array of communities, from familial communities and professional communities to geographical communities and political communities. What’s needed in these communities? What can you easily give to these communities that fulfills a need?
   
2. Make giving a habit.
   Commit yourself to a regular diet of giving something of value to someone or to a community as a whole. Make it a daily thing. It can be as simple as serving as a moderator for a low-traffic email list or it can be as big as collecting cans every day for the local food pantry. Do something every day.
   
3. Alternate between the communities you support.
   By diversifying your giving, you increase the likelihood that you’ll make personal connections in different communities, which themselves can be the source of powerful giving—as well as powerful opportunities for yourself.
   
4. Give in a way that stretches you.
   Giving can often be a powerful way to improve yourself and discover where your own personal limits are. Offer to write a document describing something in detail that will require you to do research. Give your time and energy to a building project that will physically push you and teach you construction skills.
   
5. Enjoy it.
   Giving of yourself in a way that makes others thrive feels
   good.
   

Earlier we discussed how we use routines to help keep our lives in some semblance of order. Without these routines—or at least the perception of them—our lives would be too filled with randomness for us to comprehend. It would be impossible to plan ahead and set goals.

Yet, at the same time, this very routine-oriented nature of ours works against us when we’re attempting to establish real change in our lives. We have great, powerful intentions when it comes to making the changes in our life that we need to make, but when the rubber meets the road, many of us falter.

Resolutions fail not because they’re not something we truly want, but because they require us to break through a lot of routines in our life—and those routines are very powerful things to break, indeed.

This chapter focuses on some of the most powerful tactics you can use to break through these routines and bring about the personal, professional, and financial changes that we want in our lives.

It’s easy to commit to a change verbally. We can easily tell ourselves that we’re going to lose weight or tell our partner that we’re really committed to trimming our spending.

Our actions, though, often fly directly in the face of our words and our best intentions. We fill our plate at dinner and devour the whole thing without thinking about it. We go out with our friends and drop $40 almost reflexively. It’s no wonder that such promises often leave us feeling far worse than we did before those words came out of our mouth.

All of the words and the great intentions in the world add up to very little if they’re not coupled with the actions to back them up.

Instead of focusing on words, focus on actions. Instead of pledging to lose weight, forget the pledge and concentrate on eating smaller portions at meal time. Instead of promising to alter our spending habits, focus your energy on avoiding situations where you’re tempted to spend.

Setting a goal can be a powerful thing, indeed, but a goal, in the end, is just a framework for a set of actions you have to take. Instead of making grand promises to yourself and to others about the goal itself, use your energy to simply ensure that you make the next step on the long road to your goal.

Words don’t matter. Your next action is all that matters.

Ramit Sethi, author of,
I Will Teach You To Be Rich
, argues that one incredibly effective way to force yourself to establish a new routine in your life is to introduce a
passive barrier
that ensures better behavior. In his words: “Passive barriers are subtle factors that prevent you from changing your behavior. Unlike ‘active’ barriers, passive barriers describe the
lack
of something, making them more challenging to identify. But once you do, you can immediately take action to change your behavior.”
¹

Here are five examples of passive barriers that can be used to achieve greater financial success:

1. Leave your credit cards outside of your wallet.
   Instead of carrying credit with you wherever you go, just leave your cards on your desk at home. Then, whenever you feel the urge to pull out the plastic to make a purchase, you’ll find that the credit card isn’t with you. It’s at home, safe and sound, where you can’t rack up a balance on it. Some people go further and actually freeze their credit card in a block of ice (this is actually quite easy—fill a pan half full of water, freeze the pan, put your credit cards on top, add more water to fill the pan, then freeze it again), creating an even stronger passive barrier against unplanned credit card use.
   
2. Set up an automatic savings plan.
   Saving money regularly seems like a good idea until you meet the reality of actually having to conduct a bank transaction every time you want to do it. Instead, set up an automatic transaction that transfers money from your checking account to your savings account each time. Your savings account, held in a distinct place from your checking account, is itself a passive barrier to easy access for your money. This same philosophy works for any automated savings, whether in your retirement account at work or in an investment account.
   
3. Unplug the Internet cable.
   One of my friends loves to spend her evenings checking eBay auctions. She seems to constantly have dozens of bids going on things that are “bargains,” but she’ll sheepishly admit that most of the stuff she buys isn’t really a bargain. It’s just a pattern for her. One effective way to curb such a spending addiction is to add a passive barrier to the mix. Just unplug the Internet cable from the computer. This way, if she sits down to check her eBay auctions, there’s suddenly a passive barrier—she has to climb under the desk, figure out which wire goes where, and hook it back up.
   
4. Find a different route home from work.
   When I worked in an office environment, my traditional route home from work took me directly by a bookstore and an electronics store. These two places were painful on my pocketbook as it was incredibly easy for me to just stop in for a quick peek. I put a passive barrier in place against these stores by coming up with a better route home from work. This new route was actually a bit shorter and kept me from going near those temptations, erecting a passive barrier against wanton book buying.
   
5. Play the “why” game.
   This is a general solution for uncovering passive barriers in your life. When you notice something in your life that you’d like to change, ask yourself why you do this. Then ask yourself why you do that. Keep asking yourself “why” until you hit upon something that can easily be changed with a passive barrier.
   Here’s an example. Let’s say you want to find more time to read, but you always seem to be exhausted before bedtime:
   Why are you exhausted?
   Because you go to sleep too late.
   Why do you go to sleep too late?
   Because I watch the late local news on television.
   Why do you watch the late local news?
   Because it’s after whatever show I’m watching that evening.
   Why do you watch “whatever show” each evening?
   Because I’m in the family room and it’s so easy to switch on the television.
   Your solution is self-evident—make it harder to watch television by doing something like getting rid of the remote (or storing it in the opposite end of the house), and you’ll bump against a passive barrier, freeing you to spend your time on other activities. You can still actively choose to turn on the television, but it now requires much more action than before, which is often more than enough to direct you down a different path.
   

Clutter is actually a specific kind of passive barrier, one that often keeps us from accomplishing important things in our lives. Clutter is the result of having more material items that we can deal with in our lives.

Clutter, by its very nature, represents financial and personal loss. By having more things than we have time to deal with, we’ve invested our money into material
items that don’t add up to the value we invested in them. At the same time, clutter often functions as a barrier against doing the things we want to do—finding a particular item to solve a need we have (sometimes even resulting in unnecessary and redundant purchases), inviting people over to visit and building your social circles and communities, finding time to adequately enjoy each item we already have, and so on.

Erin Doland, author of,
Unclutter Your Life in One Week
, recommends using the “three piles” system to declutter an area: “The first thing you do is that you pick an area you want to declutter. Don’t try to do too much at once; focus on what’s causing you the most stress. (Let’s say it’s your closet, but it could be your files, or your kitchen, or anything else.) Schedule ample time to dedicate to the task and go through every item in your cluttered space. Place each item into one of three piles: the ‘love and use’ pile, the ‘recycle’ pile, and the ‘ambivalence’ pile.”
²

The real trick of using the “three piles” method is to recognize that the vast majority of the stuff you put into the “ambivalence” pile (the things you’re unsure about) should actually be in the “recycle” pile (things you don’t need to have).

A simple decluttering can accomplish several things at once. The “recycle” pile can become a source of financial revenue (think eBay and the “
snowflaking
” strategy discussed earlier). The items you do choose to keep can now be found much easier, eliminating passive
barriers to enjoying some of your property and keeping you from spending money unnecessarily on entertainment. Plus, it freshens up your home and makes it much more accessible to guests.

One of the biggest challenges in establishing a new habit is repeating it often enough that it begins to seem like the norm in our lives. If we do something every day for an extended period of time, it eventually becomes a normal part of our day and we naturally
want
to include it in our routine.

Software developer Jerry Isaac shared a brilliant tactic (that he attributes to the comedian Jerry Seinfeld) for maintaining the focus on establishing a new habit on
LifeHacker.com
. “[G]et a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker. […] [F]or each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. After a few days, you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”
³

This tactic actually creates a simple psychological barrier
against
your tendency to revert to your old habits. The idea of breaking a “chain” of successes can seem incredibly negative and something to avoid, but by
continuing that chain, you’re pushing yourself into the establishment of a new personal habit.

For most of us, happiness—and, conversely, unhappiness—is a habit, part of the routine that we follow in life. Quite often, the routine has been in place for so long that anything else seems impossible. Yet, just as often, unhappiness with aspects of one’s life can fuel poor financial moves, as we attempt to “cure” the sense of unhappiness by spending recklessly. Marketers prey on this sense of unhappiness, often convincing us that the peace we want can be found in this product—but that promise of happiness is a mirage.

Happiness is a choice. We can choose to see the glass half full and be aware of all the opportunities and joys life has for us. Conversely, we can choose to see the glass half empty and dwell on all of the things missing in our life. A happier life, a more contented life, makes it much easier to control our spending and keep our finances in a healthy place.