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Money resolutions that actually make it past February
Most money resolutions get written by a version of you who just ate a lot of holiday ham and feels briefly invincible. That guy thinks he’s going to save $10,000 this year. That guy is going to cancel every subscription and cook every single meal at home. That guy does not exist by February 9th.
I know because I’ve been him. Last January I wrote “save $10K” on a sticky note and stuck it to my bathroom mirror, which in hindsight is a pretty aggressive thing to stare at while brushing your teeth. By mid-February the note had curled up at the corners and I’d quietly stopped looking at it. I think I saved around $1,400 for the whole year. That isn’t nothing, but it sure felt like failure, mostly because the original promise had been so loud.
So this year I’m trying something smaller. Embarrassingly small, actually.
The idea I keep coming back to is that a resolution should look more like a habit than a goal. Goals are numbers way out on the horizon. Habits are things you do on a Tuesday. “Save $10,000” is a number. “Move $25 into savings every payday” is a Tuesday thing. You can’t really fail at the second one in any dramatic way. Either you moved the $25 or you didn’t, and if you didn’t, you do it next payday and nobody has to know.
The one habit that’s genuinely stuck for me is a Sunday check-in, and it takes maybe five minutes. With my first coffee, I open the banking app and just look. I don’t budget. I don’t build a spreadsheet with color-coded categories. I just look at what came in and what went out, kind of the way you glance in the fridge before heading to the grocery store. It sounds too simple to matter, but it’s a little wild how many surprises show up. A free trial I forgot about turned into a $14.99 monthly charge. One week during a cold snap I apparently spent $90 on DoorDash, which I would’ve sworn was impossible.
Another small one that’s helped more than I expected is paying people back the same day. If a friend covers my lunch, or my sister grabs concert tickets for both of us, I send the money before I go to bed. I started doing this after spending most of last year on the other side of a slow-moving loan (I wrote about that whole saga a few days ago), and I realized I didn’t want to be anybody’s fog. It keeps my own head clearer too. There’s no mental sticky note of tiny debts floating around in there anymore.
The last one I’m trying is a waiting rule. Anything over about $50 that isn’t groceries or a bill goes in the cart and sits there for a day. Half the time I come back and it still sounds great, so I buy it, no guilt. The other half, I come back and genuinely can’t remember why I wanted a third water bottle. It’s sort of like letting an angry text sit in your drafts overnight. Morning you usually has better judgment.
The trick with all of these, I think, is making them almost insultingly easy. If a habit needs willpower every single time, it probably won’t make it to spring. If it’s small enough to feel a little silly, you’ll likely keep doing it, partly because quitting something that easy would feel even sillier.
It also seems to help to pick one, maybe two. Not a whole list. When you stack up nine resolutions in January, the first one that slips tends to take the rest down with it, like pulling the wrong block out of a Jenga tower. One small habit that survives is worth more than a beautiful plan that collapses on Presidents’ Day weekend.
And misses are fine. I skipped my Sunday check-in twice in December because I was traveling, and the world didn’t end. I just picked it back up the next week. I think a lot of people (me included, historically) treat one slip like proof the whole thing was a mistake, when really it’s just a slip. You missed a Tuesday. There’ll be another Tuesday.
If I’m being honest, none of this is going to make me rich. It’s not supposed to. It’s supposed to make me a little less surprised by my own bank account and a lot less likely to give up by the second week of February. That feels like a better trade than another sticky note.
My mirror is note-free this year. There’s a $25 transfer scheduled for Friday, and right now that feels like plenty.
The OweMate blog is written by the people who make OweMate, a simple way to keep track of money between friends and family.