A buddy and I have been running an experiment where we act as "Spending Coaches" for people who want to spend less and save more.
Here are 3 lessons we learned and wanted to share:
1. To be frugal, you must master your response to common social situations.
- What happens if an old friend comes to town and wants to "see the sights" with you?
- How will you deal with friends' requests to go out? Try a new restaurant? Go bar hopping?
- How do you handle holidays? Many people expect something on Valentine's Day, Christmas, and their birthday.
2. The first step in improving your finances is setting a specific goal.
- The people we've worked with who set specific, tangible goals, inevitably do better than those who just wanted to "be more frugal"
- Having a specific goal makes it more real and allows you to plan specific actions in order to reach that goal
3. Being accountable to someone else increases your awareness of your spending.
- Our spenders (experiment participants) text us every day about their spending. When we surveyed them about their experience, they reported being more aware of smaller, every day purchases like buying coffee or paying for transportation.
- Plastic (credit/debit cards) makes purchasing FAR too easy, but because our spenders have to report their purchases to us, they've told us that they often find themselves second-guessing a purchase BEFORE they've paid for it.
OVERALL: It's clear that there's much to be learned about how to help people spend less and save more. We're still onboarding new people to the experiment and will share more lessons learned. If you're interested in this, you can learn more at http://ift.tt/2lXyG53.
February 16, 2017 at 01:14PM
