Money Listens

We’re all working on our finances, heading toward our destination. (Hopefully, in the fast lane.) We’re disciplined, we’ve got our route planned. What happens when we hit a roadblock? We’ve all been stuck in a traffic jam, a construction zone, or an accident that really slows our progress. How do we keep going?

That’s when we pull #3 out of our luggage, resourcefulness. Resourcefulness is the ability to find quick and clever ways to solve problems and get past roadblocks. No matter how well we’ve planned, we can’t anticipate every problem. As Yogi Berra said, “Prediction is difficult, especially about the future.”

Don’t panic. Use your resources. Ask your spouse and friends for help. Check out a book or find an Internet site for suggestions. Tweak your plan. You might have to slow down, or even take a detour, but keep on going. Remember Murphy’s Law. Just when you get your emergency fund established, you have a major medical bill that wipes it out. Keep the big picture in mind. That’s the reason you had the fund in the first place. You were able to pay the bill without going further into debt. That’s a good thing!

Seth Godin wrote The Dip– a Little Book that Teaches you when to Quit and when to Stick. His premise is everything starts out fun and exciting, but then you hit a “dip” when things get hard and it’s no longer fun. Sometimes all you need is a new strategy to solve the problem and push past the dip. But sometimes you should quit if the dip isn’t worth the reward at the end. He’s not talking about the long-term strategy here, financial peace is a worthy goal. He’s talking about the tactics you’re using to get there. If something’s not working very well, quit doing it and do something else.

How’s this apply to us? Say you’ve been spending a lot of time on cutting your food spending. You’re making menus, comparison shopping, using coupons, preparing food from scratch. It’s taking an unbelieveable amount of time, and you’re saving about $50 a month. I’m not going to sneeze at $50. That’s a nice round number. But say you have a car you could sell for $18,000. What if you sold it, bought a $3,000 car and had $15,000 to work into your plan? Wouldn’t that rocket you through the dip with much less time and effort?

That’s why we have to keep changing our plans– not our goals, but how we’re going to get there. Don’t feel bad if you try something and it doesn’t work. Feel bad if you don’t quit doing that and replace it with something that does work.

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Saturday, April 12th, 2008 at 5:00 am and is filed under A to Z, Goals and Dreams. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.