Routine gets a bad rap.
As an adjective, it gets paired with “oil change” and “colonoscopy” while its fun, sexy cousin spontaneous gets paired with “road trip” and “combustion”. The dating website eHarmony conducted a study in 2016 and found “spontaneous” in the top 10 list of words that got a dating profile noticed … for men and for women.
The movie Stranger than Fiction begins with a montage of IRS agent Harold Crick’s daily routine narrated by a female voice describing what he did, every weekday for 12 years … That’s right, to show routine, let’s use a guy with the most reviled job in America.
It’s time to take the word back.
I love routine. Almost as much as I love Net Worth. And they are totally related. I forgot how much I love routine until earlier this week when I got really sick. Do you know what Mom getting sick does to a family’s routine?
Right.
If you want to get a handle on your finances, you are going to have to embrace routine to a certain extent. You may think this will put a crimp in your spontaneous and fabulous lifestyle, but let me tell you what eHarmony found to be the worst five words to use in a man’s dating profile—quiet, spiritual, respectful, good listener, and caring.
God, we are stupid.
In the upcoming weeks, we’ll talk about the nuts-and-bolts of budgets, but right now, I want to talk about why routine is a budgeter’s best friend. I’m going to use a diet analogy. Imagine you have a calorie budget of 1800 calories a day. Which scenario below makes you more likely to stay at or under budget across a week?
1) Bulk cooking your meals and having the same breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day over a regular work week
or
2) Traveling with your family over the Thanksgiving holiday, staying in a (free) hotel, and spending a lot of time with people you see once a year … for a reason
For reference purposes, one glass of red wine has 120 calories.
I put my husband, at his request, on a diet a few years ago and, infuriatingly, he lost a fair amount of weight in a short amount of time. Since then, to maintain his loss, he’s pretty much eaten the same breakfast and lunch every day. Not for 12 years yet … but he’s getting there.
And because he eats the same breakfast and lunch every day, I know more or less what I’m going to spend on groceries each week and I can keep an eye out for deals for certain foods and opportunistically stock up. See the connection?
How much money you spend becomes more predictable when your life is more predictable, when it’s more … routine! When you drive the same amount every day, you know how much you spend on gas, even when you’ll spend it. If your thermostat is always set to the same temperature, your utility bills have fewer surprises.
One last note. Routine is as important, if not more important, to the other side of the budgeting coin—income. If you have irregular income due to irregular hours or irregular payment schedules, you basically need to be a budgeting and cash flow ninja.
Or just have more Net Worth 😍.