<$Monday, August 13, 2007$>
"Now I'm having a plan."
| This weekend I managed to tackle the small mountain of clutter that had accumulated beside my bed, and ended up tossing out an entire kitchen-size garbage bag's worth of crap (as well as identifying a stack of books that I need to either sell, swap or donate) on the way to unburying my nightstand and making it functional again. 'Twas awesome, and now I'm inspired to do more. Husband and I have been trying to get ourselves motivated to reduce our amount of useless junk for a while now...pretty much since we got married and moved in together to a space that was barely big enough to fit all of my stuff in the first place. Besides being overcrowded, when we move to a bigger place (which I'm sure will happen someday), we both really want to have less to have to deal with packing and moving. With Husband's disability, unless we can afford to hire movers--which seems doubtful--the bulk of the carrying will fall to me, so you can imagine that I'm especially eager to have fewer things to have to carry. With all of those motivating factors, you'd think we'd be living like Spartans by now (except without all the artful slow-motion. Or the togas); but with less than a month to go until our first wedding anniversary (which: whoa), we're just now beginning to make some headway. My two biggest obstacles, it seems, are time and emotional attachment. Husband, on the other hand, has the time, but after his first attempt at ruthless decluttering left me upset with some of his choices for things to throw out, which were oddly weighted toward my side of the bathroom ("You threw out my allergy eye drops?!" "You never use those!" "I use them almost everything morning!" "I never see you use them!" "Because you're still in bed!" "Well... oh yeah. Sorry."), he's wisely decided to leave "my" stuff up to me to deal with. I think with summer winding down and school starting this week, the time problem is about to solve itself. Husband's homework should keep us from going out as often on the weekends, and will also keep him distracted and occupied, leaving me time to myself to deal with said stuff. That leaves the emotional hurdle to overcome, and that's a big one. I know I kept more stuff this weekend than I should have, because I simply couldn't bring myself to get rid of it. So I'm developing a strategy: I'm making a list of my emotional priorities, from greatest to least, and I'm going to refer to that list as I sort through my stuff. If it doesn't relate to one of these priorities in some way, it goes. Of course, each priority will have a limited number of things I'm allowed to associate with it and keep, otherwise I'd be able to shoehorn just about everything in somewhere. I'm still figuring out this system, but basically, it goes something like this: Mementos from my wedding: important. Mementos from the height of my Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanaticism: not so much. Wedding mementos I get to keep: all (for one more year, at the end of which anything I haven't gotten around to either scrapbooking, displaying or otherwise preserving can go). Buffy mementos I get to keep: anything with an autograph, a couple of choice items that were handmade by friends, my comics, and my Spike action figure. Okay, and my Buffy figure, so Spike won't get lonely. But that's all. I know it still sounds like a lot, and like I'm not making progress, but believe me: that leaves a lot of Buffy-related junk that's gonna go. All right, so the system isn't really so much a system yet as it is a vague plan. But it's a step in the right direction. As I hammer out the details and work out the kinks, I'll keep you posted on my progress. On a related note, Get Rich Slowly has a good decluttering tip that I might have to work into my strategy: Purge Clutter with a De-Accumulation Bag Labels: organizing, systems |
<$Thursday, April 12, 2007$>
3 Things You MUST Do To Get On Top of Your Finances - and HOW to do them
| The big three hindrances inherent in Attention Deficit Disorder are impulsiveness, distractedness, and disorganization. This combination can be hard on the social life, and can wreak havoc on the job front; but nowhere does it tend to do quite as much damage as in the area of finances. Adults with ADD tend to be impulsive shoppers. They find it difficult to pay their bills on time and keep track of their money. There are scads of books and web sites full of financial advice aimed at this population, but the advice usually tends to fall short in one respect: it tells the reader WHAT to do without telling them HOW to do it. As someone with ADD myself, I entered into adulthood with no workable money management skills, despite my parents' best efforts to teach me how to balance a checkbook and drill into me the importance of saving money and making timely payments. I knew that all of these things needed to be done, but I just couldn't do them. Eventually I realized that my parents' methods just didn't work for me. It wasn't because I lacked the discipline to do the things I knew were necessary to stay financially afloat--it was because I simply wasn't wired to do them the way that I had been taught. What I needed was a system, one tailored to my own unique needs and ways of processing and tracking information. I needed to throw out all of the old, established rules and methods and create my own. Since then, I've formed three habits that are essential to living in financial harmony: paying my bills on time, knowing how much money I have at all times, and keeping track of where my money is going. What's more, I found ways to do them that work consistently for me. In a three-part series I'll share my methods here, in the hopes that you'll either find something useful in helping to stabilize your own finances, or gain inspiration in developing methods that work for you. Part One: Paying On Time There is no faster or surer way to damage your credit than by paying your bills late. This holds true for ANY bill, not just credit cards and bank loans. Grace periods might save you from paying late fees if you miss the due date by a few days, but the fact of your lateness will still show up on your credit report and lower your score; and regardless of grace periods, paying late will cause your interest rate to go up and cause you to bleed money--and that's not even counting late fees you incur if you miss your grace period. Few things are more essential to gaining control of your finances than learning to pay your bills on time, every time. Think of this as your first step toward financial independence, remembering that first steps are HUGE. They might not seem that way to those who are already running marathons, but to one just learning to walk, the first step is everything. If you miss it, you fall on your cute little baby tushy. But if you keep trying, eventually you'll make it. Make that first step, and know that eventually, you'll be off and running, too. My own failure to pay my bills on time wreaked all kinds of havoc on my life, from getting my phone shut off to, eventually, having to give up an apartment that I loved because late fees, high interest rates and high minimum monthly payments--all due to late payments -- meant that I could no longer afford the rent. Before I could conquer the problem and start paying on time, I had to examine the reasons I couldn't seem to pay anything on time. Forgetfulness was certainly part of it, but that wasn't the only reason. Procrastination was also a key. I procrastinated because the way I had been taught to tackle my bills--my mother's way of keeping them in a box, dragging them out once or twice a month, and spending what felt like forever going through paper statements, writing checks, stuffing and addressing envelopes, etc.--felt like pure torture, so I put it off. It was easy, because the bills were stashed in a box, and for me, it's out of sight, out of mind. That helped me to forget all about them, and with the tortuous process involved in paying them, I didn't feel particularly motivated to remember. I found online bill pay to be a Godsend. It took everything I hated out of the process of paying bills. However, that still left the other half of the problem: forgetfulness. Online reminder services are a good way to conquer this (and are easy to come by; a quick Google search on "reminders" turned up several such free services)... for some. For me, they worked at first, but eventually I got to where my eye skimmed right over them while reading the contents of my inbox, and then they were quickly forgotten. I needed something more tangible, but still quick and easy. It also occurred to me that I tend to derive a lot of satisfaction and motivation from keeping To Do lists with items that I can check off as I accomplish them. I thought it might be a good idea to apply this to paying my bills, and my Bills To Pay calendar was born. It's really very simple: in a calendar that's large enough to write in legibly (I started out using Outlook printouts; similar printable calendars are available at no cost from both Google and Yahoo), I mark all of my due dates, and I also list all of my bills for the month, along with due dates and payment amounts, in a checklist on the side. I keep this near my computer, where each payday I take it out, go down the list, and make online payments for every bill that's due that pay period. The entire process takes me five minutes, and then I can feel free to forget all about it until the next payday. Having bill payments tied to an event--in this case, payday--helps me remember that it's time to pay them without needing to rely on any external reminders. This method won't work for everybody, and there is plenty of room to tailor it to suit needs and personalities other than mine; but since I started doing my bills this way, I haven't been late once. A word of warning: automatic payments might seem like an even better way to ensure timely bill payments--after all, it's automatic. Set it up once, and you don't ever have to think about it again, other than to make sure that the money is available. And therein lies the rub. Until you have such a strong handle on your finances that you can be a hundred percent certain that you'll have the money there on time, I would advise against signing up for automatic payments. Overdraft fees can be even worse than late fees. Which brings me to my second habit, which will make up Part Two: Knowing How Much You Have. Do you have a system that helps you stay on track financially? If so, I'd love to hear about it, as well as your thoughts, in the comments. Labels: ADD, hacks, money management, systems |