Procrastination & Money – One Bite at a Time
I don’t know about you, but my eyes glaze over as I hear various financial terms.
Right now I am in the middle of settling up my parents’ estate and doing my own estate planning. I am buried in a sea of initials, numerals and jargon: TCLAT, RLT, ILIT, gift trusts, successor trustees, and durable POA. It’s enough to make me want to run screaming from the room, but I can’t. I want to do right by my heirs; I don’t want to blow it in some major way because I was too lazy or too overwhelmed to do some research and ask some of the pertinent questions. However, I am feeling overwhelmed, anxious, and filled with dread. I have a strong urge to drown my sorrows and fears in a Starbuck’s coffee frappuccino.
Maybe it’s the same for you with your financial planning: IRA, 401(k), 501©3, UC&R, ARM’s, capital gains, cost basis, defined benefit and defined contribution plans. Yikes! You know you need help, but it’s too much. Everything is inter-related and one question leads to another. It’s easier to push the literature into the desk drawer, to delete the information from your e-mail or shred your attempts at a web search.
However, that way leads to disaster with a capital D! What you don’t know can hurt you. So how do you fight the natural human tendency to want to avoid the uncomfortable and unfamiliar? One of my favorite approaches is the One Bite of the Elephant approach. You may have heard the story. Question: What is the best approach for eating an elephant? Answer: It’s one bite at a time.
Let’s apply the elephant theme to becoming reasonably informed about money matters and building an acceptable level of money management skill.
- One bite at a time: If you think too much about the size of the elephant, you will most likely procrastinate. If you can pick one subset of the financial project to work on, you will feel a sense of accomplishment. That feeling of success will help you get to the next bite.
- Set aside a given period of time: I like the idea of setting a timer. Once you get started, it’s likely you will be somewhat involved and able to do a bit more than you originally had intended. I used to motivate myself to do housework by playing my favorite music (one side of the record, the tape, the CD, whatever). I was then energized to do more and often would get the whole job done. This works fairly well for getting the tax-related papers organized.
- Put some tasty sauce on your elephant bite: It helps the elephant go down. For example, build in a reward for a given amount of work done. Starbucks works for me. What’s your favorite reward that you could use to increase your motivation? Remember: the reward comes after the work gets done!
- Ask for help. Maybe somebody else would be willing to help you reduce the elephant to size. You may need someone to come up with a filing system, a bill paying system, or a budget. You may need some extra encouragement to curtail your habit of spending too much or spending unconsciously. Is there a buddy you can work with? Or would it be a wise use of your money and time to take a financial planning class? Or could you pay a financial advisor to help set things up for you?
- Maybe you can change the way you look at the elephant. Instead of a huge, insurmountable project, maybe you can define it as a way to get control of your life. After all, if you can eat a whole elephant, what can’t you do?
