A diet is a regimen of eating and drinking sparingly so as to reduce one’s weight. A financial diet would be reducing your spending to achieve a particular goal such as saving, reducing debt or some other financial goal. I bet you thought I was just going to talk about dieting. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a patch for dieting and personal finance?
Vince Lombardi said “The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will”. Whether we are talking about dieting or financial goals, will power is the juice that helps us achieve success. Recently, I wrote about “A Different Investment Strategy” to illustrate multiple income streams. Next week I wrote an article called “The Google Diet” to illustrate what you can do about your finances.
How are you doing with your diet? It is one of the more popular New Year’s Resolutions. How are doing with your personal finance goals? Are you thinking short or long term? Are you making progress? Fortunately, I found some of the best articles of the week. This makes a good segue to today’s picks for Friday Night Links.
The following articles caught my attention:
Accountant by Day –Taxes and Innovation
Afford Anything – Go Ahead…Be Nosy
Barbara Friedberg Personal Finance – 50 Habits to Increase Wealth
Boomer & Echo – How to Manage Your Cash Flow
Buck Inspire – Can You Talk Freely About Stocks?
Rules
The selection of blogs is up to the committee of one established by krantcents as a representative of the Academy of Frugal Journalistic Writers. That committee can be influenced by meaningful comments, signing up for my RSS feeds, backlinks, links, trackbacks, Facebook Likes, Twitter, Re-tweets, Digg, StumbleUpon, delicio, Yahoo Buzz, Google Bookmarks and other social media. If you plan on creating a single purpose political action committee (PAC) to buy advertising on my blog to solely influence the committee, please go ahead! Please understand it will not influence the results.
I read more than five hundred (500) articles a week and I highlight just five (5) in my Friday Night Links. What are you doing about your personal finance goals? Thank you for reading Friday Night Links Diet Edition.
Photo by: Jodiepedia
Thanks for the link Krantcents!
You’re welcome, taxes was/is one of my avocations.
I’m doing wonderful on my diet — mainly because I had to gain weight this year 😉 Even so, I’m trying to gain as little pregnancy weight as possible, and my doc and I have been really happy.
My personal finance goals are both long- and short-term, and I’m happy to report that diet’s going well too!
Great links!
Thank you. When you are pregnant you natuarally want to eat more and everything, but you just need to eat the right things. Congratulations on keeping it in balance and your finances too.
I actually disagree regarding the importance of will power with respect to diets. I think that believing success is about will power results in people getting sucked into this eternal battle against themselves. People will themselves to avoid certain foods/adopt some exercise regime, and then rebel against it. I’ve found that I am most successful when I give up that fight but try to make small choices that are conducive to my goal. I used to be obsessed with food and fitness and I felt like I had to constantly be on top of that and it’s like I was grabbing on really tight to that control. Now I do things like walk to do errands, commute to work by bike, and go on a walk during my lunch breaks. Rather than sticking to some strict diet, now I eat whatever the heck I want. And somehow that works so much better than what I was doing before when I was at the gym every day and tracking every calorie. I’m trying to approach my finances similarly by avoiding setting up hard and fast rules, but rather doing what I can, when I can, in ways that work for me.
Interpretation of will power may be subjective. Much of what you describe is part of working on a particular goal to make it successful. I use small changes to alter my behavior. The impetus of making a change is based on the will power to succeed.
Lack of will, excellent point! Glad you enjoyed the article and thanks for including me. I’m honored.
You’re welcome. Although I am far from a trader, I value your point.
thanks for the mention- I would replace ” will” with “discipline” 🙂
I think you need both! Your mental state to overcome obstacles is mostly willpower.