Maintain The Enthusiasm
You’ve been doing so well. You’ve stuck to your monthly budgets, have started to see some savings goals being achieved, and all of a sudden you start to slip. You buy a couple of things, or have a month where you don’t save much at all. Like achieving any long-term strategy, plateaus happen. Here are some tips on how to maintain the enthusiasm.
Recognise It
The most common enthusiasm plateau talked about would, of course, be exercise. It’s exactly the same conundrum- you’ve started to lose kilos, you feel great, everyone is commenting on how healthy you look and, right at the moment you should find it easiest to maintain enthusiasm, you turn off your alarm and stay in bed. It gets worse, you keep feeling guilty and yet don’t manage to rekindle your enthusiasm. It’s the same with the mental state of saving. The last thing to do is panic. It’s just the next stage in achieving your goals. You’ve overcome the initial obstacles, made the initial jump, but now you have to find a way to incorporate it into your life so it feels as natural as breathing.
Have A Breather
If you’ve been working hard, maybe it’s time to treat yourself. Limit the period- say a week where you don’t spend any money. Tell yourself that for this week, you’ll relax a little (not the point where you spend all your money obviously). You’ll go out to dinner, or if you see something you like, you’ll buy it. This approach can go one of two ways- you might feel immensely refreshed and ready to kick off again or, as I think is more likely, you’ll find yourself unwilling to spend the money. Now that you’re not denying yourself anything, you’ll find you don’t want it perhaps as much as you thought you did,
Shake It Up
Routine is a wonderful thing, but boredom is the possible consequence. Saving is not meant to be a path of total denial, you should be able to live a fulfilling life while saving. So if you’ve found yourself immensely bored, why not shake up your savings routine? If you’ve saved all your money by eliminating dinners out, why not get rid of a subscription and have the occasional dinner out instead? Or sit down and have another look at your budget and see if you can move around your income and expenditures. A key factor in achieving goals is being able to update them and keep them fresh, they’re easier to achieve if they change as you do.
Take Stock
A large part of losing motivation is forgetting where you’ve come from. It’s a natural human response- we live essentially in the now, and forget very quickly what is was like when we had not money, or weren’t fit, or hated our job- whatever you change with your goals. So take stock of how far you have come- how much closer you are to your goals, how much more financially secure you feel, how much more in control of your life you now are. The most important thing is to not blame yourself or feel guilty, negative emotions aren’t going to do anything to motivate yourself. You’ve gotten this far, and you’ve just got to persist part this sticking point.
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