Do you owe a lot of money to creditors? Is your new year’s resolution “Get out of debt?” Fix your problem in two simple steps: Just cut your spending, and make more money! You’ll be out of the red in no time! This is really the only way. Maybe you should stop spending money on those stupid lottery tickets that you hope will save you. It’s amazing how $2 a week can really add up in your savings account! Meanwhile you’re never going to win that $100 million. You’re better off hoping for an injury lawsuit.
Sounds great doesn’t it? No? Sounds like I’m kind of being a dick, doesn’t it? And why is that?
I mean, that IS the best way to get out of debt, and it works for most people. But even if you could simply CHOOSE to make more money, you’d have to really work hard at trying to change the habits that put you into debt in the first place. Most people are inclined to spend any surplus, thinking “well, I can afford this now. I’ll just splurge a little.” Thus, for every break-even month, it’ll take that much longer to pay back money already spent.
The kind of flippant “It’s all so easy!” attitude I expressed is the same reason why it annoys me when people say, “If you want to lose weight, just eat less and exercise.” Yeah. Thanks, smart guy.
Maybe you were overweight once, and this plan worked for you. It doesn’t mean it’ll work so easily for me or the next guy, and isn’t justification for getting all pretentious about it.
Let’s say there’s this average guy (we’ll call him “Joe”) who has no medical condition that would cause him to not lose weight via a caloric deficit. He’s got maybe 30 lbs to lose; maybe not a LOT but it’s enough that his weight is starting to become a concern.
However, Joe is already working hard at two jobs (probably because he’s trying to pay off his car and credit cards), both of which are fairly sedentary. In this schedule, he finds it hard to make time in his day for exercise. By the time he gets home, eats dinner, and gets the kids to bed, he’s fucking tired as all hell and the last thing he wants to do is run over to the gym for 45 minutes of cardio. Due to the fact that he’s so busy, he doesn’t have time to make sure that he packs a healthy lunch of unprocessed foods, so he grabs fast food to eat most days. He might have a couple snacks over the course of the day whenever he gets hungry, and, well, yeah he might have a couple beers every weekend. But he’s even cut back on that because it gets expensive.
And since he is trying to cut his spending to reduce his debt, his family has cut back on the grocery bill. Excepting some fresh fruits and vegetables (which are a regular part of their meals), they are buying cheaper foods which tend to be more processed, and contain more empty calories.
If you were this average Joe, where would you start changing your lifestyle and still achieve all of these goals? Or are you gonna be the jackass to say “hey, sorry about your bad luck, Joe. You’ll just have to figure something else.”
Let’s go back to the debt scenario for a minute. Most of us at some point have, at some point, fallen a little behind. And once that happens, if the budget is already tight as a drum, it’s easy to fall into an endless cycle of overdrafts, missed payments, and bounced checks which put the person further under water. Say you have $20K in debt and you live paycheck to paycheck. Someone in your family gives you a gift of $5000 spread out over the course of a couple of months. It’s REALLY going to help you get ahead, right? (Assuming you don’t spend the surplus on an impulse buy.) Is that considered “cheating” or “weak?” Is it “not the right way to do it?”
Does it really matter as long as the habits are corrected AND you’ve figured out a way to help you get a head start toward your goal?
No? Then why are people so quick to judge dieters when they try weight loss pills, so-called ”fad diets,” or various other quick-start programs?
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TL;DR: Next person to tell me “Just eat right and exercise” will get snacky cakes shoved into every bodily orifice.
