Last year I wrote about two personal experiments. One was about 30 days of the Whole30 food diet. The other was about 30 days of Mind30 mental diet. Both experiments yielded terrific lessons and results. While not a strict everyday regimen, I have incorporated both into my ongoing routine.
This year, both my wife and I together started a new personal experiment for 30 days which we have dubbed Finance30. That is, a financial diet for 30 days.
A Modern Taboo
Money is a taboo topic. In one of the studies that we published at work last year, 64% of the respondents said that they would rather talk about their own death, than about their money.
However, this taboo seems to be a modern one. I recall that my grandmother would think nothing of asking what one's salary was - nearly as her first question!
One might also note that in the Jane Austen novels, mothers constantly evaluated their prospective sons-in-laws income. After all, it is a universally acknowledged that the single Mr. Darcy was possessed of the good fortune of an annual income of 10,000.
Thus, I don't mind cracking the money taboo just a little bit, to talk about the actions my wife and I took together as part of our Finance30 experiment.
A Life Event
There generally needs to be a major life event for a drastic change in life course. For example, it could be a health scare that make one give up smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol.
For us, it was sending off our son to college. Well the drop-ff was emotional, but that act did not cause us to go into a Finance30 experiment.
It was the first college bill! Oh Boy - Life event all right!
We spent the Christmas Holidays creating a budget for the year. Both of us have MBA degrees. You do not want to even know how detailed the new Kolluri Household spreadsheet looks!
We also asked ourselves, how would we know whether we are adhering to the budget, except when we reached the end of a said time period and looked back. And well, that might be too late.
Thus we embarked upon our Finance30 experiment. It was a jointly agreed upon 30 days of (near) zero discretionary spending!
Top 10 Finance30 Actions
We successfully finished 30 days of our Financial Diet, and were surprised at the results. Not only were we in line for our newly set budget - but we found an absurd amount of waste!
Here are the 10 actions we took.
1. Subscriptions: What is that for?
We had old subscriptions for magazines and services that we had forgotten about. Some that our son had subscribed to and he himself had grown over. We discovered nearly half a dozen of these, strewn across various platforms.
2. Service Options: Do we need this?
On some of our services, there were options that just came with the enrollment, or one that we had added and had forgotten about. These were features like international dialing on our phone plans, or expensive channels on cable TV that one had to pay extra.
3. Memberships: The full load?
Over the years memberships to various clubs multiply as well. A simple call to each of these places yielded lower cost options - play less frequently, individual vs family memberships etc.
4. Force of habit: Why am I here?
By going on a financial diet, one suddenly realizes all the places one goes to without consciously realizing it. A visit to a Starbucks here, a visit to a CVS Pharmacy there and so on. When one is one a Finance30 regimen, one find oneself in these places or stopping at these places and ask, why am i here?
5. Persistent charges: All year, really?
Some charges ought to be seasonal, and if one takes the eye of the ball they persist. For example, we have a critter service that traps critters around the house. Well, in the winter we are snowed it and those traps don't work. But the charges persist!
6. Cheaper alternatives: What does the difference get you?
In the area of prescription drugs, one has become accustomed to finding the generic drug alteratives given the price difference. It turns out that every purchase has an alternative - and by just paying a little attention, small currency accumulates to a large difference in the shopping bill.
7. Click Bait: Wait, what just happened?
The number of brown boxes that show up at our doorstep is a wonder. And the frictionless ease with which that happens is breathtaking. The finance diet we undertook but an end for 30 days to clickbait purchasing. No boxes arrived for a full month (except our dog Fred's food).
8. Over ordering - honey, the second freezer is full
At grocery stores and at restaurants, we joke that there is a Surya-tax. We go to order one thing, and we end up ordering other things on a whim. By just paying attention to what we are ordering, we became conscious of this habit of ordering or purchasing stuff we don't need or use. I am particularly guilty of picking up spices off the spice racks in grocery stores and they just piled up in the house!
9. Deferred gratification - is that a reward?
When I combine the Whole30 habit with the Finance30 habit, the notion of deferred gratification becomes natural. In order to indulge in something, one has to earn it. Thus consumption suddenly gets in check.
10. Finish what you have - about that second freezer
My wife and I thought we would get creative with what we consumed by cooking our meals with whatever was in the fridge. I will say at the end of the 30 days the freezer is not completely empty - but we are at it!!
Summary
All this is not to say in the 30 days of this finance diet experiment, we did not see a movie or go out to dinner with friends. We did. But these 10 actions above identified many accumulated habits and behaviors that we jointly identified and cleaned out.
It is hard to sustain this level of focus beyond the 30 days (just as it was with Whole30), but it has made us aware of what has been going to unnecessary waste that we were able to wring out of our expenditures.
Now for the integrated Whole30, Mind30 and Finance30 approach to life!
This year, both my wife and I together started a new personal experiment for 30 days which we have dubbed Finance30. That is, a financial diet for 30 days.
A Modern Taboo
However, this taboo seems to be a modern one. I recall that my grandmother would think nothing of asking what one's salary was - nearly as her first question!
A Life Event
There generally needs to be a major life event for a drastic change in life course. For example, it could be a health scare that make one give up smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol.
For us, it was sending off our son to college. Well the drop-ff was emotional, but that act did not cause us to go into a Finance30 experiment.
It was the first college bill! Oh Boy - Life event all right!
We spent the Christmas Holidays creating a budget for the year. Both of us have MBA degrees. You do not want to even know how detailed the new Kolluri Household spreadsheet looks!
We also asked ourselves, how would we know whether we are adhering to the budget, except when we reached the end of a said time period and looked back. And well, that might be too late.
Thus we embarked upon our Finance30 experiment. It was a jointly agreed upon 30 days of (near) zero discretionary spending!
Top 10 Finance30 Actions
Here are the 10 actions we took.
1. Subscriptions: What is that for?
We had old subscriptions for magazines and services that we had forgotten about. Some that our son had subscribed to and he himself had grown over. We discovered nearly half a dozen of these, strewn across various platforms.
2. Service Options: Do we need this?
On some of our services, there were options that just came with the enrollment, or one that we had added and had forgotten about. These were features like international dialing on our phone plans, or expensive channels on cable TV that one had to pay extra.
3. Memberships: The full load?
Over the years memberships to various clubs multiply as well. A simple call to each of these places yielded lower cost options - play less frequently, individual vs family memberships etc.
4. Force of habit: Why am I here?
By going on a financial diet, one suddenly realizes all the places one goes to without consciously realizing it. A visit to a Starbucks here, a visit to a CVS Pharmacy there and so on. When one is one a Finance30 regimen, one find oneself in these places or stopping at these places and ask, why am i here?
5. Persistent charges: All year, really?
Some charges ought to be seasonal, and if one takes the eye of the ball they persist. For example, we have a critter service that traps critters around the house. Well, in the winter we are snowed it and those traps don't work. But the charges persist!
6. Cheaper alternatives: What does the difference get you?
In the area of prescription drugs, one has become accustomed to finding the generic drug alteratives given the price difference. It turns out that every purchase has an alternative - and by just paying a little attention, small currency accumulates to a large difference in the shopping bill.
7. Click Bait: Wait, what just happened?
The number of brown boxes that show up at our doorstep is a wonder. And the frictionless ease with which that happens is breathtaking. The finance diet we undertook but an end for 30 days to clickbait purchasing. No boxes arrived for a full month (except our dog Fred's food).
8. Over ordering - honey, the second freezer is full
At grocery stores and at restaurants, we joke that there is a Surya-tax. We go to order one thing, and we end up ordering other things on a whim. By just paying attention to what we are ordering, we became conscious of this habit of ordering or purchasing stuff we don't need or use. I am particularly guilty of picking up spices off the spice racks in grocery stores and they just piled up in the house!
9. Deferred gratification - is that a reward?
When I combine the Whole30 habit with the Finance30 habit, the notion of deferred gratification becomes natural. In order to indulge in something, one has to earn it. Thus consumption suddenly gets in check.
10. Finish what you have - about that second freezer
My wife and I thought we would get creative with what we consumed by cooking our meals with whatever was in the fridge. I will say at the end of the 30 days the freezer is not completely empty - but we are at it!!
Summary
All this is not to say in the 30 days of this finance diet experiment, we did not see a movie or go out to dinner with friends. We did. But these 10 actions above identified many accumulated habits and behaviors that we jointly identified and cleaned out.
It is hard to sustain this level of focus beyond the 30 days (just as it was with Whole30), but it has made us aware of what has been going to unnecessary waste that we were able to wring out of our expenditures.
Now for the integrated Whole30, Mind30 and Finance30 approach to life!
3 comments:
I am guilty of these bad habits too, as charged!
You really should consider writing a book that contains all three of these: Food, mind, money. You would be helping lots of people.
Good stuff. And particularly relevant for me. My big ‘life event’ was the need to move as my rent went up @ 50% over the last few years – causing me to move. I think I’ve found the place, and so will be moving next month.
Along with that move I’m also looking at my spending habits. For instance, one of my financial sins has been continuing to subscribe to Comcast though I don’t find much to watch these days. So I’m buying a Roku smart TV and switching to broadband only when I move. And I’ll only subscribe to maybe three streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube or Prime).
Also, I’ve found I’m reading less and less of the WSJ, which has a very costly price. I’ll eliminate that too.
The secret here is moderation. Which translated in this case to a well-balanced diet, both physically and economically.
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