730 Days to a New You

Habits are a hard thing to break. The saying that "you can’t teach an old dog new tricks" is only partly true. What would be a more accurate statement is "you can’t teach an old dog new tricks quickly", because the older you are, the more time it takes. It is true that the younger you are the easier it is to learn something. But middle age and even seniors are good students and when they put their minds and hearts into a new subject they often come out shining stars.
What does this have to do with saving money you say? Everything. The biggest roadblocks to our financial well being is our own habits. These habits have been learned, and anything that has been learned can be un-learned again. But it will take some time and effort to un-learn them. Nothing worth having comes easy.
Another way to look at it is how long will suffering last? When you have to give up something, like chocolate, cigarettes or chips, it takes a while for the cravings to go away. It the same thing with chronic spending. When I gave up cigarettes many, many years ago, it took a full two years (730 days) for the cravings to go away. I thought my experience was unique at the time and didn’t give it much more thought. Then years later when I lost someone very close to me, and I found the pain almost unbearable I went looking for answers. What I found in a publication from a clever Dr. of Psychology was that it takes about two years to get over a loss (that is, change your behavior towards that thing). In some cases you never really get over a loss entirely, but the severity of the reaction to the loss gets bearable within 2 years. So again the 730 day rule came into play.
Then when I examined how long it took to learn a new behavior I found the same thing to be true in many cases – 730 days later the new way becomes ingrained. Often it can become solidified much sooner than 730 days. For instance if you are a chronic clothes shopper and you really want to give up the habit of excessive clothes shopping then you can use a number of techniques to get out of the habit before the 730 day period. Some of these techniques are: never carrying credit cards, debit cards or much cash or always shopping with an impatient tightwad, or forcing yourself to sit and write out an essay of why you should buy the item before you do, or forcing a one week waiting period on any purchase, etc. But these techniques will remain only that – techniques. The real you may still be vulnerable enough to lapse back into the old habit.
However rest assured that once you have forced a new habit on yourself for 730 days, the new habit will become the new you! That’s why it is so important to persevere and not give up too easily. When you give up a bad habit push yourself hard for 730 days. It’s like running from an attacker. Run for just a few days and when you turn around you will see he is still on your heels. Run for 365 days and he will be on a distant hill. Run for 730 days and he will be so far away that you will never see him again…unless you go looking for him!

Scrooge