Checking In More Often

I have a really bad habit of not checking my fantasy sports teams. Actually, some years are better than others, including the year that I won. But some years I can be really bad at it. 

The problem is that the longer I go without checking on my team, the bigger of a hassle it feels like it’s going to be to get back in there and fix things. You have to make sure that you trade out players that are underperforming, make sure that everyone actually has a game that week, and that no one is on bye.

For some reason, the longer I go without checking, the worse I feel about it and the more I dread making sure it’s updated. 

Although not everyone may have a hard time making sure that their fantasy team is in tip top shape, the shared experience is that we have an issue with putting things off and wanting to avoid things that we’re afraid of. 

Naturally, we do this same sort of thing in all different areas in our lives. Our finances can certainly be something scary that we don’t really want to pull the curtain back on. 

But it happens. 

We get a little busy or maybe we get tired of tracking our accounts or we know that we aren’t sticking to our budgets the way we should. So we become afraid to get back to it and take a look to see what needs to be done. 

Maybe this has happened to you. Weeks can turn into months and even years for people. 

You don’t log in to your accounts, you aren’t really sure where you are when it comes to your loans and credit cards. You keep paying month after month, but you never sit down with it all in front of you to really see what’s going on. 

Using a program like YNAB can sometimes make it harder because of the upkeep that it requires. If I get busy and don’t revisit our YNAB to make sure that it’s up to date, the Amazon and Target orders alone make facing and updating our finances seem like a huge chore. 

So even for someone who almost views their finances as a recreational tast, I simply won’t feel like doing it.

You likely know when you’re avoiding something, but that doesn’t make facing it any easier. 

It’s time to get back in there. 

When you avoid knowing what’s going on under the hood and you aren’t actively moving forward, you lose your power over the situation.

Start by setting the bar ridiculously low. I find that if I give myself a really low bar to clear, getting over it isn’t so hard. 

If it’s been forever since you’ve checked in on your money, just try logging in to see how things look again. If your budget is so incredibly outdated there’s no way you know what’s going on, just give yourself a clean start. Don’t attempt to spend forever updating and fixing it. 

Give yourself the gift of an easy clean start. 

It’s amazing what momentum can do for you both ways. With positive momentum, you’re so much more likely to keep checking and keep doing great work on your budget. 

But negative momentum can keep pulling you down. When you haven’t done that thing in a while and the time since you were working on it keeps getting longer and longer, the harder it feels to get back in there.

Push yourself out of it. Set the bar ridiculously low. You’ll find that once you’re in, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal.