A Budgetopian New Year: Annihilate your financial goals with me this year
Hello my friends and fellow Budgetopians, and Happy New Year!
It's been a while, a lot longer than I thought it would be, but it's been a strange couple of months for me. I don't mean that in a bad way, not at all - I'm incredibly fortunate in that Christmas and New Year for me means family, good cheer, and far too many sausage rolls. And, I really mean that. Far. Too. Many.
Other than the predictable overindulgence in food and board games, this time of year is also a period of reflection and planning for a lot of people. If you are blessed enough to be with family, fighting over who gets the last roasty and settling down for quiz shows or board games every night with seemingly endless leftover cheese, you might find yourself slipping into a bizarre, counterintuitive state of mind, a state of mind I seem to fall into every year around this time:
Am I feeling a bit... TOO comfortable?
Ungrateful scrooge, right? Well, maybe. In fact, probably, in my case. But also maybe not. It doesn't take a social anthropologist to state the claim that up until very recently, only the most privileged, wealthy, noble even, minority in society would enjoy the sort of Christmas that, according to a few different surveys by both the Office for National Statistics and the Bank of England, an 'average UK household' now enjoys every year, with the 'typical household' spending over £3000 in December on discretionary spending, 29% more than any other month. One could say a lot about that in itself, given the average GROSS take home in the UK is £2886 per month - spending more than we earn for additional festive joy, anyone?!
The point for now is, for a lot of us, or at least those of us fortunate enough to have the means to try and maximise how we behave with our finances, comfort is our absolute worst enemy when it comes to achieving goals.
With all the sausage rolls, it's no wonder that 79% of New Year's resolutions involve improving health. When we emerge from our Christmas cocoons, burping up brussels sprouts and bailey's and head back to work/school/university with a hazy, emotional hangover, we are resolved to CHANGE. I'm not sure how much New Year's resolutions have to do with starting new behaviours at the start of a new year, giving us a fresh slate to start carving out the perfect human we dream of becoming, compared to giving us a tangible way out of the excessive comfort of the past few weeks.
Keeping any goal going over holiday periods is challenging - the pull of the pyjamas, sausage rolls and mid morning glass of wine beats ferociously back at the 'I should probably go for a run' part of last years resolution to be more active. Perhaps more appropriately, the pull of the 'one more gift for the person I love' (including probably to myself) or the 'insert expensive Christmas/holiday habit here' knocks your financial plan out with vicious aggression, pushing your budget out of whack and your savings goals out the window. We accept these things as a given, until the comfort gets just a bit too heavy on our souls, and just when we're ready to snap, New Year comes along ready for our stoic resolutions, and so the cycle continues.
Fear not, brave Budgetopians. There IS a solution to breaking the cycle.
Discomfort!
My partner and I have developed a habit to provide some well needed discomfort over the Christmas period, which serves as a way to prevent the complete dissolution of any semblance of health and fitness: wake up on Christmas morning, rain or shine, lace up the shoes, and head out to run, early.
While it sounds insignificant, there's something about doing something hard and uncomfortable - which this is, horribly, every year - that makes all the rest of the excessive comfort seem, well, not so excessive. Maybe it all comes down to that good old stoic virtue of temperance: a healthy dose of discomfort to clash against the comfort and gluttony to make you feel a bit more balanced. Food for thought, hehe.
All well and tangible in regards to fitness, but how on earth does this translate to money?
The Allfather of personal finance, Pete Matthew of Meaningful Money, says of savings and investing:
It should hurt!
One of the biggest barriers I see friends come up against when it comes to not being able to save and invest towards their financial and life goals is an inability to accept that something worth doing might provide a moderate level of discomfort. Often when people come to reading about personal finance with the intention of developing wealth, they take the wrong message away from the material they find.
"Spend LESS than you EARN!"
"You just need to stop buying stuff!"
"You need to work harder to provide higher value skills to increase your salary!"
"Sacrifice today for a better tomorrow!"
The issue with messages like this is that they inherently suggest the taking away or stopping of things.
And the sad truth is, lots of people simply don't want to be told that they might have to suffer a bit for a massive net gain.
It's too difficult to save more
I can't stop buying X, Y and Z
I only have X left after I've paid for my 19 monthly subscriptions and my pointlessly powerful computer pocket
And the absolute worst:
If I stop getting takeaway once a week I'll be incredibly miserable
No, my friend, you won't. You'll learn how to cook, spend more time on your feet, provide nutritious food for yourself and your family and have infinitely more energy than you did slamming Domino's twice a week. You'll also, if your order is anything like mine, have about £150,000 more in the bank when you retire. That, to me, is worth a little discomfort, and will 100% help me achieve my financial goals.
And so, my advice to you my dear Budget Badass is to challenge yourself and embrace discomfort this year.
Here are some actionable steps that you can start NOW, WITH NOOOO EXCUSES to put yourself on a positive trajectory. Commit, and sit down again when 2026 comes round and thank yourself.
Without goals, you'll never know whether you're smashing it or sucking it. How awesome would it be to set yourself a realistic yet challenging goal, giving yourself an ENTIRE YEAR to achieve it, and sitting down in a years time to check out the sexy fruits of your labour.
Not sure what your goals are? Sit down with a cup of good coffee and think about what makes you truly happy. Then, work out how much £ you need to achieve that thing. The answers might surprise you, if you're really honest with yourself. Not many people can really be bothered with the maintenance and upkeep of a yacht.
- Take stock of your current situation
Have a serious look at your budget. Are things tight? Do you need to move things round? Did you get a promotion before Christmas, or lose your job, and need to adjust the numbers? Do it now, so you know exactly where you're at. Take control - it's your life and nobody will do it for you!
- Embrace the discomfort, cinch the belt, make it a challenge!
Are you spending way too much on novelty socks? Could you cut down on some subscriptions? The weekly takeaway? Can you shop at Aldi for a few months instead of Waitrose? How much are you managing to put away each month - for yourself, before you pay everyone else's bills? Cut the pennies, and the £'s will come. I promise. If you don't earn a lot, then challenge yourself to create more margin for saving for yourself. You might find there is more there than you thought (you probably will).
If avocado toast and proper coffee makes you happy, then buy it, truly, I mean it. I will be. But I'll also have my emergency fund sitting pride of place like the stoic defender it is, and will save in almost every other category of spending. I challenge you to do the same.
- Do hard things, and work hard
Strong blades require heat and a serious battering. Forgive me for the philosophy, but we're all friends. If you do hard things, in all facets of your life, your tolerance for doing things other people can't stomach will increase. Avoiding jumping on Amazon at every inconvenience or not buying a new outfit for every social occasion is difficult, that's why most people can't do it.
I know there are people who will laugh at the prospect of my Christmas morning icy slip and slide from the comfort of their duvet, mocking my hubris whilst at the same time hating me for preaching about how great I am. If I manage to fill up my ISA whilst earning below minimum wage, the same will probably be true. All of this is OK though, because tightening the belt to max my ISA and dragging myself out of bed in the morning with sausage rolls in my hair are a beautiful, harmonious symphony of difficult achievements that will only serve to increase my capacity for minor struggle, and therefore enable higher achieving, and ultimately happiness and 'enoughness', in the future.
The next time you catch yourself going 'Na, no way, too hard that mate', remind yourself of the feeling you got when you last deprived yourself of some comfort or another that ultimately resulted in a net win.
The feeling of getting back from a run, or a session in the gym, or a successful job interview, or saying no to going out for a meal and opting to cook instead, or climbing out of your student overdraft for the first time all result in a similar feeling: it's a feeling of success, a feeling of purpose, of worth and of meaning.
It's the feeling of being a badass Budgetopian.
Have a great year all!
x
