Episode: 380 - Building Financial Discipline Without Feeling Miserable
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When most people hear the term "financial discipline," they often think of restriction, sacrifice, and missing out on life's pleasures. This mindset can make it challenging to adhere to a plan that helps you get out of debt. No one wants to feel as though they are confined by their financial limitations. However, the truth is that real financial discipline can offer more freedom, not less. Let's dive into how you can cultivate financial discipline without feeling deprived or miserable.
Understanding Financial Discipline
The misconception about financial discipline is that it involves sheer willpower—pushing yourself harder and being stricter. Yet, if you've ever tried this approach, you know how exhausting it can be. True discipline isn't about forcing yourself into compliance; it's about removing obstacles to making good decisions. It's about creating systems that make the right choices easier.
Why Financial Plans Feel Restrictive
Our approach to financial planning often mirrors dieting: we eliminate everything enjoyable, leading to a sense of deprivation. Most budgets fail because they are built on this notion of denial rather than reality. A typical mindset is the scorched-earth approach, where everything fun is eliminated to pay off debt. This all-or-nothing mentality eventually collapses, leaving you feeling defeated.
Redefining Discipline
To build real discipline, start with a shift in mindset. Discipline doesn't mean cutting out everything you enjoy. Instead, it involves purposeful decision-making about what matters most. This is where thoughtful budgeting comes in. Rather than slashing everything fun out of your life, allocate funds intentionally to what brings you joy while fulfilling financial goals like paying off debt or building savings.
Specific Goals versus Vague Goals
Having specific financial goals can greatly improve the effectiveness of your discipline. For instance, rather than aiming to "spend less money," set a goal like "I'll review my budget daily." By establishing clear rules, decision fatigue decreases, and you're more likely to follow through.
Embracing Structure, Not Restriction
The sensation of restriction arises when money is perceived as being taken away. Yet, when you assign your money with purpose toward what you truly value, discipline feels lighter. It's about focusing on what truly matters to you—deciding that some things are worth more than others.
Overcoming Emotional Spending
Emotional spending often disrupts financial discipline. Money spent because of impulse or emotion doesn't signify poor financial habits; rather, it's an easy way to obtain instant gratification. To combat this, incorporate planned fun money categories or practice the 24-hour rule—waiting a day before making impulsive purchases.
Automation as a Tool for Discipline
Automation can significantly enhance financial discipline by removing the burden of constant decision-making. Automating savings or setting up autopay for bills ensures progress, independent of your motivation levels. Think of it as automatic discipline.
The Myth of Perfection
Finally, remember that discipline isn't about perfection. It's about staying on course, even when things veer off track. Financial journeys, much like personal health, involve ups and downs. The goal is to bounce back quickly, understanding that mistakes are part of the process.
Conclusion
If previous attempts at discipline have fallen short, it's not a failure of character but rather of the system itself. Systems demanding too much lead to discouragement. Instead, focus on creating clear plans, allowing room for enjoyment, automating processes, and aiming for consistency over perfection.
True financial discipline should offer relief, fostering freedom and trust in your financial future. By embracing small, consistent habits, you’re setting the stage for significant, lasting impact on your financial health.
For more help building these systems and revamping your approach to money, programs like Roots can offer support and accountability. Whether you're ready to dive into structured systems or simply seek to break free from paycheck-to-paycheck living, resources are available to guide you steadfastly toward your financial goals.
Resources
The Totally Awesome Debt Freedom Planner https://www.debtfreedad.com/planner
Connect With Brad
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Transcript
Brad Nelson:
You know, when most people hear the word financial discipline, they don't think freedom. They think restriction. They think sacrifice. They think saying no to everything in life, that's fun. And that mindset alone is why so many people struggle to stick with a plan that helps them get out of debt. Because no one wants to live the rest of their life feeling trapped by their money. Now, today I want to show you and talk about how to build a real financial discipline without feeling restricted, deprived, or absolutely miserable. And more importantly, how discipline can actually create more freedom and not less.
Announcer:
They are now on a mission to empower regular people to pay off their debt for good and enjoy happier, less stressful lives. Keep listening for inspirational interviews, tips, tricks, and practical advice to gain financial freedom.
Speaker 1:
My name is Brad Nelson. I'm the founder of Debt Free Dad. I paid off about $45,000 of debt. I've been debt-free now for more than 12 years. I've also been fortunate to help thousands of other people save and pay off tens of millions of dollars over the years with the work that we do here at debt free dad. Now, guys, after listening to this episode, if you're ready to take things to the next level, you're sick of living paycheck to paycheck, you want to reduce financial stress in your own life, you want to build a savings that is there for all of life's emergencies, and you finally want to pay off that annoying debt for good. But maybe you're like most people, including me at one time, you're not sure where to get started. Well, we've created some incredible free resources for you here at Defree Dad, and I'll be sharing some details on how you get some of those later on in today's episode. Before we get to today's episode, I just want to say I hope you're staying warm out there. I'm recording today on January 26th, and man, it is cold in the Midwest. And uh man, it's I I mean, we're used to the cold, but this is some cold, cold weather. So I hope you guys are staying warm out there and uh sticking to your financial plan here in late January and early February. But today I want to talk about discipline because this is a big part of getting out of debt. And discipline is a common topic that comes up and it's a thing that a lot of us will struggle with. A lot of us misunderstand what it is. And here's the biggest misunderstanding: most people think that discipline means just willpower. It's willpower, right? That you just need to try harder, right? You just need to be stricter with yourself, you need to say no more often. But the reality is, and if you know anything like I do, and you've tried some of this stuff before, willpower gets pretty exhausting. And when your financial plan relies solely just on that willpower, oh man, it breaks. And I failed at this too. And a lot of the reasons were is because I I just felt willpower. And it's not because we're weak, it's really because we're human, right? Real discipline is not about forcing yourself to behave, it's about trying to remove those challenges, trying to remove that friction from good decisions and adding friction to the bad decisions, right? It's about building, and we've talked about this over the last several episodes here in the new year. It's about building more, you know, systems that make the right choice, the easier choice, right? And once you understand that, uh everything gets easier, everything begins to change, not right away overnight, but over time things begin to change and discipline becomes kind of like your best friend. So let's talk about why money plans feel so restrictive in the first place. It's kind of like that new diet you go on, right? You got to lose some weight. And what do we do? We restrict everything that's bad, right? And that's exactly what we do with our money. Most budgets fail because they're built around deprivation, not reality, right? They assume, man, we're never gonna go out to eat again, right? We're never gonna spend emotionally or have a weak moment during the upcoming month. You're never gonna have a bad day, you're never gonna want to do anything fun again. No, we gotta pay off this debt. It's like this scorched earth mentality. You wipe out everything in your life, and life becomes to suck really, really quickly. Guys, that's not discipline. That's that's like fantasy, right? And when real life shows up, the whole financial plan collapses. Again, like I said, I've made this mistake in my own journey and getting out of debt. That's why it took me four or five years to do this. I did it on my own, and man, I failed so many times because of this very topic. So here's the first, I guess, mindset shift you need to make. Discipline does not mean cutting out everything you enjoy. I want to say it again. I want you to hear me. It does not mean cutting out everything you enjoy. And the reason I want you to hear that is because in the financial industry, where you have people helping you or wanting to try to help you get out of debt, there is a few of those personalities out there that say you have to just cut out everything. You can't do anything fun. And that's just not how this is gonna work. Discipline is really about deciding on purpose what matters most. And you guys, at the end of the day, that's what a budget is. A budget isn't about, you know, again, deprivation and cutting everything out. A budget is you saying, we're going to spend this money on purpose on what matters most to us. Because when you decide intentionally, spending stops feeling rebellious. You're not going to have that guilt of, oh, we shouldn't have spent that money. No, because you already decided to do that. And those goals also included you getting out of debt, maybe you're building your emergency fund, you're still getting things done in your financial life, and you're also still able to go out and enjoy life. And that means you're not breaking the rules, right? You're following the rules you put in place when you put that budget together. And this is where rules matter. I guess I would say more specific goals. Rules kind of use those same rather than vague goals. Like a lot of people's financial goals are vague. Rules or specific goals are very specific, they're clear. Like a vague goal would be like, I want to spend less money. That's very, very vague, right? But a more specific goal, or say a rule you create for yourself, I check the budget before spending over a certain amount of money, or I check my budget and review it daily, like we recommend, just so you know where you're at and where you're going throughout the month. Another rule might be is I want to stop using credit cards, or I want to stop using debt altogether, right? But a more specific goal would be like, hey, let's just commit to the next month of not using any debt. Because saying I'm gonna cut out credit cards when you've used them all the time and saying I'm never gonna use one again, that might be just too harsh for you right now. You might want to focus just on can we get through the next month and then can we get through the next month, right? The rules or more specific goal, it removes that decision fatigue, so to speak, right? The fewer decisions that you have to make uh leads to less stress overall in your life, right? But it also leads to better follow through, right? You're actually gonna do it because you don't have so much fatigue in making all these decisions because you've already made them, right? Now let's talk a little bit about the restriction side. Restriction feels heavy because money feels like it's being taken away from us or the fun things are being taken away from us. And guess I gotta admit, I felt that way too. I mean, when I got out of debt, I cut out my cable back then, and I'm aging myself a little bit, but back then we didn't have the streaming services that are so popular now and and somewhat inexpensive if you're just keeping it minimal. But we didn't have the Netflix and the Hulu and all that stuff. We we had cable, right? That's all we had, and I cut that out, that was $150 roughly a month, I want to say, maybe $175. And then, as you guys know, I also got rid of a car, and it was a brand new car when we bought it. Really nice car. I couldn't afford it though. I ended up buying myself an old 1996 Toyota Corolla that had a good amount of little rust on it, but it was a reliable car. But when I gotta admit, guys, when I first started and I got rid of those things, it felt heavy, right? Because I was taking things away from my life. But here's what I didn't understand: discipline feels a lot lighter when you start to realize that you are deciding your money is being assigned towards something you care about. That's a big part of getting out of debt, is that you got to decide in your own life, not me for you, but you for yourself about what you care about, what's important in your financial life. And that makes such a huge difference because once you start to realize, hey, I got rid of these things, but they weren't as important as this thing that I want. That makes a huge difference in not only your overall mindset, but your overall attitude moving towards a debt-free life. It's just huge, right? You're not saying to yourself anymore that I can't spend, right? I can't have anything fun. You're saying instead, I already told my money where I want it to go. And this is why we talked about having those clear goals, that clarity, that creates a lot of stress-free living. It creates almost a calming effect in your financial life. For most of us, our financial lives are absolute chaos most of the time, right? Because when your money has jobs, like we talk about having in your budget, give each dollar a job. You stop second-guessing yourself because you've already decided the jobs every single dollar that's coming in is going to have. You stop negotiating with yourself. You stop feeling guilty when you actually spend money on fun things. You already told yourself you could do that. You wanted to go out to eat, you wanted to go out to a concert, you want to go do all those fun things that you want to do. All you gotta do is put in your budget. That guilt, like when you don't do that and you're just winging it, that guilt makes people quit. Now, here's another point I want to make. Discipline fails when it's all or nothing as well. People think that discipline means you have to be perfect. It's like I talked about earlier when we started this episode. It's like that diet, right? People go on their New Year's diets or they get on a new health kick and they're eating healthy, and they think if they just had one bad day or one bad meal or they messed up and gave into a treat that they shouldn't have had, they think they've blown it, right? And the same thing comes with getting out of debt. I think there is a lot of parallels between getting out of debt and a health journey of wanting to lose weight and become more healthy. There's so many similarities there in those journeys. And when we have that all or nothing mindset, that mindset kills a lot of your progress when you do have those moments. So I want you to think about discipline. Discipline isn't about being perfect, it's really about the direction that you want to go in. And that direction isn't always going to be a linear path. It's not gonna be perfectly straight. You're gonna have ups and downs throughout that journey. It's about being able to get back on track faster when things do go wrong. And that's the cool part is about this, guys, is that when you do have a moment, we all do, I still do to this day, you're not off track forever anymore. You realize, oh, I messed up, I'll do better next time. I'm gonna try. How can I do that better? And you get right back to what you were doing before. Now, another big killer to discipline is emotional spending. And this is like a whole, I mean, we could do a lot of different episodes on emotional spending, right? In fact, we have shared statistics on this podcast from Shopify that they say upwards of anywhere, and this is a very big range, but 40 to 80 percent of all purchases are made out of impulse or emotion. The reality is you don't spend money emotionally because you're bad with money, you spend emotionally because money is and buying things is a really fast way to get relief from whatever it is that you're feeling. And if you haven't noticed lately, guys, it's really easy to buy things nowadays. You can write on your phone and buy things instantly. And if you're familiar with Amazon, which I know a lot of us are, that stuff can be at your doorstep within hours, depending on how close you are to the warehouse. It's amazing how quickly you can just spend money nowadays, right? Discipline, it doesn't mean pretending emotions don't exist. It means knowing that they exist, it means planning for them. And that might look like in your budget, you have a small fun money category. Maybe you're someone who's spontaneous. Maybe the thought of a budget and having a plan for your entire month freaks you out because you're somewhat of a spontaneous person, which there's nothing wrong with that. So maybe in your budget, you have a line item for spontaneous fun money. And you just set a certain amount each month. And if something comes up and you want to go out and do whatever it is that is, you use the money out of that. So you don't feel that deprivation. It could be like a weekly spending limit that you don't have to justify. So let's call it like spending money or pocket money, right? And you just give yourself a certain amount of money. You don't have to track that money, so to speak. You want to stop at a gas station, get a soda, or get a coffee, or go out for launch and you know, you can use that money. Again, it's more of that fun, that spontaneous kind of category. Another one is just taking a pause before on-planned purchases. I've talked about this plenty of times on the podcast, but we call it the 24-hour rule. If you're tempted to buy something, and you're you get yourself in that emotional mode of I just have to have this. The advertising is so good. Like you see it online or you're in the store, or you hear a friend talking about it, you're like, oh, I've got to have that. Pause. Just wait 24 hours. Don't tell yourself no. Instead, just wait 24 hours. And I can tell you guys, if you practice this, and it's hard at first, but when you practice this over and over again, it's amazing how much stuff you don't buy. Because after that 24 hours has gone by, nine times out of 10, you're not even thinking about that purchase anymore because you've removed the emotion by giving a pause, right? But those emotions are acknowledged when you realize that they're happening. Those emotions begin to lose power. And this is why when we talk about things we've talked about over these last several podcasts in the new year, we talk about automation. Automation, like having an automatic savings, right? That builds discipline faster because it takes the motivation away. It's being automatically done for you. You don't have to decide. You've decided, but then you set the automation up and the savings just moves over to where you want it. And for instance, like when you put your bills on auto pay, if you have a good budget, I like auto pay. Makes things easier. It's one less thing I have to worry about in my busy life. You don't have to forget, right? It's already done. Automation is all about automatic discipline, so to speak. So when your debt payments are scheduled, progress happens whether you felt motivated or not. Right. So again, discipline, it improves when you have less to decide every day because you've already decided it by having a financial plan, having a budget for every month. Now, the other thing I want to say is if your financial plan makes you feel punished, again, you're not gonna stick with it. You will fail over and over again and you won't make much progress. Discipline that lasts, it feels more supportive, it feels not as restrictive, it feels like structure, not like you're suffocating yourself. And that structure is what eventually creates the freedom you so badly want in your life when it comes to your finances. And this is the reality. This is the truth that most people miss. Discipline isn't about just controlling your money, it's really about reducing stress, it's about knowing what's coming up, right? Discipline is looking forward in the future. A lot of us use debt because we just don't have a good habit of looking towards upcoming expenses that are coming down the pipeline and then having a plan to go about being prepared for those things. Discipline is a it's about trust, it's about building trust in yourself. Trust that you're not going to sabotage your financial plan nearly as much moving forward. And it's going to build trust in yourself that you can do this, that your plan can work and that you can get out of debt. And this is why small, consistent habits beat big, dramatic changes. If you guys haven't read the book by Darren Hardy called The Compound Effect, I highly recommend you check it out. It's my favorite book of all time because it's all about small, consistent changes and creating small new habits every day. And eventually, over time, those big or those small habits create big results. You guys have heard a lot of our roots members who have been on this podcast over the years and what they've been able to do. We've got upcoming interviews with some new people that have made some tremendous progress over the last couple of years that are going to be on your coming up in the upcoming months. And it all started with just making small changes. And we've been talking about those again in these episodes here in the new year. Small changes are things like doing daily check-ins, having, again, clear goals and clear rules for your finances, uh, creating some simple systems that removes that motivation factor and it creates more automation, right? Just simple things that you can do. And again, remember, none of this is gonna feel exciting. But over time, as you begin to see that savings grow, as you begin to see those credit card balances go down, as you begin to feel less financial stress, that's all gonna create a lot more confidence in your life. And confidence makes the discipline easier every single week because the more confident you get, the more disciplined you're gonna be, and the more willing you're gonna be to do the work because you're seeing all the amazing progress that you've made. Right now, if you've tried to be disciplined before and failed, I want you to hear me. You didn't fail because you weren't disciplined enough. You failed because the system expected too much of you. You may have put some really unrealistic expectations on your budget. Remember, we we went to that deprivation, scorched earth mentality. A better system beats a stronger you every single time. So here's how you can start building some of this discipline without feeling restricted after you've listened to this. Number one, create a clear spending plan. Like again, have a budget. Create some just clear spending rules instead of you know having vague goals. Number two, allow room in that budget for enjoyment so you don't rebel against your own plan, right? Number three, automate what you can, like we've talked about, to remove some of that decision fatigue. So you're not having to constantly be thinking about your finances all the time and what you need to do, just automate it, right? And number four, like I said, focus on consistency, not perfection. That's it. It's not extreme, it's certainly not very complicated, right? It's just realistic. And remember, discipline isn't something that should trap you. It's really something that, again, is going to create that freedom. It protects your finances as time goes on. It protects that future that you want, it protects your overall financial stress, your peace. And when discipline is built the right way, it's not going to feel like restriction. It's going to feel relief, right? Now, if you want help to start building these systems step by step and you want support and accountability, obviously, this is what we do with our members. Members inside Roots. We only open up Roots several times a year. It is a closed membership. But if you're someone who's interested in joining that program and joining the thousands of members that we've worked with over the years, uh you can head over to debtfreedead.com, click on the free resources page. And if you scroll down, you'll see the roots information there. You can join and jump on the wait list. All right. And we will email you within a few weeks of when we're going to open next so you can prepare and get all the information that you need to join that accountability group. Now, if you're not quite ready for that, but you want to start getting some more information, some simple tools that'll help you. Again, maybe you want to break free from maybe paycheck to paycheck. Heck, it's probably why you listen to this podcast. We've got you covered. Simplify My Money is sent each and every Sunday to your email. Uh Simplify My Money is really your step-by-step roadmap to better financial control. Uh, you're also gonna get some easy to follow strategies to manage your money more effectively, like you've discover and learn on this podcast. We're gonna help you make stress-free money decisions that are gonna help you simplify your financial life with proven tips that actually work for normal, everyday people, people just like you, people just like me. And you're gonna gain the tools and confidence to tackle your financial goals head on. You can sign up for Simplify My Money by clicking the link at the top of the show notes. Thanks for joining us on today's show, and we will see you guys on the next episode.
Announcer:
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