Do you know that famous saying, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”? Well, I’m kinda realizing that the Ninja household is kinda guilty of having a few too many “good intentions.”
Exhibit A: Living off my income.
The plan when the stork drops a few babies off at our front door (that’s how it works right?) is for Girl Ninja to quit her job and be a full-time stay-at-home mom. Since we don’t want to be devastated by the loss of her income, which would be about a 30% household pay cut, we’ve decided we should pretend it just doesn’t exist. We live off my income, and bank hers. Great plan right?
Too bad we haven’t actually forced ourselves to really practice what we preach. If we wanted to make this experiment realistic we would have her paycheck auto-deposited into our savings account, since we never access that account. Instead, her paychecks go into our regular checking account and at sporadic points throughout the month I’ll transfer money over into our savings account. Most months, this amount exceeds Girl Ninja’s, but sometimes it doesn’t. It’s time to get our stuff together and get her check deposited directly into savings. What you can’t see doesn’t exist right?
Exhibit B: Contributing to my Roth IRA.
I swear I meant to contribute to my Roth at the beginning of the year. But here I am, over halfway through the year, and I haven’t contributed a dime. Retirement doesn’t save for itself. If I want to meet my long-term goals, I have to suck up the $5,000 expense/investment and pull some money out of our savings account. Every time I go to do it, I trick myself into thinking that it’s not the right time, that we could use the money for something else, blah, blah, blah.
Exhibit C: Not eating until I’m about to throw up.
I have a serious issue with food intake. Not sure if my parents starved me as a child, but many meals I eat way more than I probably should. I have this weird complex where I hate throwing food away. This means, even when I’m totally satisfied, I will eat another piece of pizza just so it doesn’t go in the garbage. Fortunately, I am relatively active and my metabolism apparently is too, so I still appear relatively fit. I gotta get over this weird psychological complex that says I must eat even if I’m not necessarily hungry. Why? So I don’t end up obese and with high blood pressure.
We bloggers typically only talk about the good things we are doing, so it’s refreshing to finally share some of the things I’ve been totally sucking at. What are some of your “good intentions” (financial or otherwise) that you’re not totally executing?
