Changing My Behavior

I'm in suburbia at the moment, like many of you who celebrate Christmas. I love it - I get to spend the week at my mother's house in Massachusetts, with her fantastic shower pressure and fully-loaded cable television. However, in return for these luxuries, she often asks me to run errands. Like yesterday, when I found myself at Walmart with a shopping list and $30 in my pocket.

To be clear, I hate Walmart. My boyfriend and I were front row center at this play not too long ago and I firmly believe in buying locally from independent retailers. But my mother had a fudge emergency and couldn't go another minute without having some gentle stove cleaning solution (sugar was hardening on her brand-spanking-new burners at an alarming rate) and so I went, barely able to suppress a panic attack.

I wandered around a tiny bit, hoping to find some of my favorite Christmas specials on DVD (a budgeted purchase I had thought about for a couple of weeks). I didn't have any luck, but during my search I happened about this gigantic bin of movies - 2 for $10. My first impulse was to dig through the boxes. Of course, it wasn't long before I found a couple of classics, Don't Tell Mom, The Babysitter's Dead and American Beauty. I carried them around with me as I shopped for my mother's items. This is a mere two weeks after I sold every DVD in my collection that wasn't a favorite for debt snowflakes to send to Discover card.

The movies made it all the way to the check-out isle. I even put them on the conveyor belt. But I pulled them off right before the cashier scanned them. I'm thinking this is progress.

I ran the NYC Marathon in 2006. During my training, my coach would always say: "Getting through this race is easy. Just put one foot in front of the other and repeat. For about 5 hours."

That advice is just as applicable to financial fitness as it is to getting through 26.2 miles. Just because you have the money to buy something, doesn't mean you should.

Here's to living below your means. It's a struggle now, but I'll get through it, one little step at a time.