In the fall of 2017, my doctor changed my life by demanding I quit lying to myself. And over the last year, I’ve learned to be honest when I look in the mirror, better understand my priorities and hopefully discovered a valuable lesson about our financial lives.
I went to see my doctor for heartburn medication, but it turns out he had different plans.
“You don’t have a heartburn problem,” he unleashed in a flurry of irony having just diagnosed the symptoms as those consistent with heartburn. “You have a tolerance problem.”
He said my body and I were too tolerant of bad health choices. For six months, my chest had hurt after I placed anything in my mouth. It had finally persuaded me to take action.
“If I give you heartburn medication, your tolerance problem will get worse, much worse, and you’ll continue to gain weight,” he said.
“Continue to gain weight? How dare…” I interjected while clutching my imaginary pearls.
He went on to tell me I ate terribly unhealthy foods and exercised about as frequently as I changed my furnace filter.
He was right.
Which brings me to these questions: Are you too tolerant of your suboptimal financial decisions? And how do you mask your unhealthy habits?
Let me focus on one financial decision that can trip up many Americans: emergency funds.
Personal-finance experts love to debate how much of a fund people need.
Emergency fund
“I think people need 12 months worth of expenses saved, with 30 percent held in cash in a fireproof safe,” some will assert. Others are comfortable recommending people accumulate and preserve anywhere between three to nine months worth of expenses to deal with whatever life wants to throw at them.
I’ll let other folks debate it, but I think three months worth of expenses in a savings account is adequate. Use this exact goal, or use it as a placeholder for something bigger, or smaller.
Savings statistics suggest you don’t have a proper emergency fund. Therefore, by at least one definition, you lack financial stability. As it stands now, you’re tolerating that, just as I was fine having heartburn every day for six months.
Resolutions
I think people read personal-finance columns hoping to glean a slick nugget that will inconspicuously change their trajectory. But I’m fresh out of slick nuggets. Besides, I’m not one for subtlety. If you’re going to change your life, change your life.
Here’s how change worked for me. In November 2017, as my best friends pulled out of my driveway on their way home to St. Louis, I strapped on jogging shoes (to call them running shoes would be a disservice to, well, anyone who actually runs) and began to put one foot in front of the other. One hundred meters in, along with a commitment to make drastically different food choices, I resolved to work out every single day for one year.
Plant your flag
You too can stake your claim, draw your line in the sand or plant your flag. Do something absurd, impossible: Don’t spend money for a week. Don’t spend money for a month. Get a second job. Sell your car. Move. Rock your system.
Small changes are overrated. Make absurd changes.
Every single person in this world is on a financial path plotted by the math of their choices. Again, based on nearly every available stability statistic, Americans don’t need subtle financial changes. We need absurdity.
What if not having three months of expenses set aside as an emergency fund wasn’t an option? You’d behave differently, wouldn’t you? You’d wake up a 4 a.m. on days when you have a cross-country flight because you wouldn’t have any other time to exercise, and you wouldn’t want to break your streak. You’d get on the treadmill for 30 minutes – like an idiot, a committed idiot – for three days in a row, even when you had the flu. And in the end, you’d regret nothing.
At 5:30 a.m. on Nov.6, 2018, in a Portland, Oregon, fitness center, I put the icing on the proverbial cake – one that I would recently think twice about eating – and completed my 365th workout in a row. I know what’s next for me – Day 366.
Do you know what’s next for you?