Category: Habits

Good habits are the bedrock of changing your life. And converting bad habits to good habits is more doable than you may think. Check out the past three years of experiments in changing our money, food, and lifestyle habits.

A Year of Good Habits: Tomorrow’s Top Three

I’m going to spend each month of this year focused on building one new good habit to help our family achieve our goal of location independence, doubling our net worth, and moving abroad in three short years. This month, I’ll be focused on setting tomorrow’s top three goals.

Habits are the building blocks of our daily life, and I believe that focusing on replacing any bad or even “meh” financial and daily habits with good ones will put our goals into hyper-drive. Continue reading “A Year of Good Habits: Tomorrow’s Top Three”

A Year of Good Habits: Make Your Bed Every Day!

What does making your bed have to do with your financial health? Good question!

Habits are important. Good habits are small behaviors that seem so trivial, yet they can reap profound benefits in your life. Take this blog, for example. I couldn’t find any time during the day to write, so I told myself I would get up each day a little earlier and write for the first half hour or hour. That behavior, multiplied by many days, has created blog posts and content. Continue reading “A Year of Good Habits: Make Your Bed Every Day!”

A Year of Good Habits: Let’s Get Started

One of the books that has had the biggest impact on how I think is Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business. Using emerging findings from the field of neuroscience, Duhigg explains how habits, good and bad, are formed.

He explains a concept that has been revolutionary for me.  Brains are the body’s biggest energy sucker and use around 20% of the body’s available energy, so they need to work as efficiently as possible. Automatizing behavior is a way to cut down on energy use. Think about the first time you tried to tie your shoe. It took an incredible amount of focus and energy to make your hands form the loops and tie the shoes. Now, you do it without thinking about it. It’s become automated and you don’t have to use as much conscious brain-power to do it.

Continue reading “A Year of Good Habits: Let’s Get Started”

The Almost Miraculous Benefits of Making Space for Thinking

Sara Blakely of Spanx© fame once said in an interview that she spends about 45 minutes each morning driving around the streets of Buckhead, the upscale area in Atlanta where Spanx headquarters are located.

Even though she lives really close to her building, she builds in a “fake commute” so that she has time to think (without schedule or stricture), imagine, and allow her mind to wander. Steve Jobs was well known for his daily walks, where he would ponder problems and situations that he was wrestling with at Apple. Continue reading “The Almost Miraculous Benefits of Making Space for Thinking”

I Changed This One Habit to Save Over $11,000 This Year!

Could you really implement one, just one habit into your life to save massive amounts of money in a year? 

You can, and it’s not too hard. I did it, and I saved over $11,000 in one year, without really trying to.

What in the world is this magic trick and how can you implement it? 

Read on.

The Excel Spreadsheet

It’s almost December, and I’ve just about completed the second year of tracking my spending on my good ole’ Excel Spreadsheet.

Wait, what? That’s the big secret? Tracking?

Yep. Sorry if you were expecting something more flashy.

But it really is as simple as that.

I started the habit last January (2015), when I wanted more control of my spending trends than my budgeting software was giving me.

Our family has made (and gone over) budgets since 2008, so I’d been keeping a close eye on our spending for many years.

I kept hearing advice that tracking your spending was important to financial independence, so…

I decided to manually track everything in my Super-Duper-Over-the-Top-Six-Sheet Excel Networth Spreadsheet.

And it turns out that manually tracking your spending is enough to change your spending behavior in major ways. 

Continue reading “I Changed This One Habit to Save Over $11,000 This Year!”