Last week I talked about how being home for less than a week and restrictions that made a familiar place feel slightly off-kilter. This week I’m focusing on the future and re-establishing routines. I’ve enjoyed the past week, but I was a bit unsettled and had to take a break from my habit tracking. Sometimes, we just need a break and some R&R! As we enter week 35 2020, I hope to get organised and do some planning for the future.
The Trouble with Habits
While I’m decent at devising and sticking to habits, I don’t always know when to take a break. As the past week showed me, however, you sometimes have to take a step back to regain balance. Although I know that the world won’t end if I take a few days, it can feel hard to let habits slide. This shows that something has become an ingrained habit and you’ll get back to it naturally.
While using a habit tracker, you need a way to switch it ‘off,’ so your rest days don’t show as failures. In a Bullet Journal, the easiest way to do this is to mark break days in a different way to a completed habit. For example, I put a line through breaks, but cross off completions. This way, I don’t have a blank in my tracker, which can look like I’ve ‘failed.’ Instead, I have an acknowledgement that I took some time for myself!
Saving Sensibly- My habit of saving too much!
Habits are only as helpful as you allow them to be. Like everything else, we need to allow ourselves some flexibility in dealing with them. One of my biggest challenges around habit flexibility was financial. Fortunately, this revolved around saving rather than spending but was problematic because it was rigid. As a saver, I have always put money aside for a rainy day. My problem was that I never put any aside for myself! I never knew what I could afford to spend on myself so I either erred on the side of caution or bought something, then felt guilty.
I then read a book that changed how I viewed my income. If you’re an Aussie, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of the Barefoot Investor. He’s a hugely influential figure in the world of personal finance for his self-reliant, bank-beating books. While they cover everything from debt to mortgages, the biggest draw for me was the buckets. I won’t go into detail here, but in essence, as your income comes in, it is split into different ‘buckets.’
The key bucket for me is called ‘Splurge.’ This is a separate debit account that receives approximately 10% of your income and it’s yours to spend freely. Want a fancy coffee every day? Use splurge! That’s the genius of this system. Once your bucket is empty that’s it. No more stationery shopping sprees or cinema trips. I’m still not a huge spender, and while I rarely spend all of my Splurge money in a month, I love the certainty it generates. I know exactly how much I can spend on myself guilt-free, without worrying it’s cutting into my living costs.
For me, this development of my saving habit shows that we can make habits too inflexible or difficult. Our challenge is to work them realistically into our lives.
Onto the Bullet Journal: Week 35 2020
Phew, I got rather carried away there! I must warn you, personal finance is one of my passions, so don’t be too surprised if you see a few more posts about it pop up!
As you can see here, I’ve gone for a completely different layout for this week! As you know, this is unusual for me, but this week I just wanted something different.
Part of that desire is because August covers six weeks rather than the usual five, which always means a bit of a change-up. But as mentioned, I also wanted a fresh start this week, so this was a great way to start one.
I had a look some of my saved inspiration on Pinterest and realised I’d never done a spread like this. Apart from the mountains, this spread took about two minutes to draw up, so I think this is one I’m going to add to my rota!
Not a lot more to talk about on this spread, apart from I can’t believe it’s September next week! I’m looking forward to getting my monthly spreads drawn up and shared with you all! If you’re still wondering what theme to use, have a read of my top suggestions post for inspiration! That’s it for me though, and I hope week 35 2020 is a great one for you!
Great post Helen! I like what you did with your spending habit by giving yourself some built in spending money. I think the important thing with good habits is not to make them TOO restrictive that you can’t enjoy life.
I would say the same thing goes for healthy eating. A lot of times people try to go too strict and then they either feel like they’re missing out on the good things in life, or they quit.
The purpose of habits is not to be perfect 100% the time for example by saving 100% of the money that doesn’t go to bills, or by NEVER eating sweets or pizza etc. I think more it’s important to just be good most of the time, but still give yourself a little wiggle room to enjoy life. After all no one’s perfect, and if they were, how boring would that be?!
Exactly Clarissa; habits are great but they have to be realistic and give us enough time to enjoy our lives! The healthy eating point is such a good one; you can be sensible and healthy and still have dessert occasionally! And exactly; being perfect would be no fun at all 😉 thanks for commenting!