IdleGlory | He had to be a genius or nothing, and since he couldn’t be creative he turned to bohemianism, eccentricity, social versatility, conquests. – Allen Ginsberg

via How to Break Your Bad Financial Habits.

1. Define your problem.
Before you can make any progress, financially or otherwise, you need to define your bad habit, and figure out how you would defeat it.

3. Replace your bad habits with good ones.
To break the bad habit, you need to find something that you can do to help satisfy that urge, while being better for you (and your wallet).

4. Don’t let yourself slip…:
The problem is, if you don’t take a hard line approach, if you let yourself slip back into your bad habit ‘just this once’ or ‘only in this situation’, it’ll be that much easier to slide back into doing it more and more often, and before you know, it’s a bad habit again.  Be firm with yourself (and allow anyone helping you accomplish your goal to be even firmer), stick with your goals, and if you do slip…

5. …And figure out what happened if you do slip up:
Things happen, and plans, however well intentioned and useful, get thrown awry.  Chances are, you WILL slip at some point in your attempt to defeat your bad financial habits.  When it does, though, rather than berating yourself for your failure (or worse, deciding that you just can’t do it and giving up), try to find out what went wrong.  When you see what went wrong, you’ll be able to adapt your plan to take similar circumstances into account, and avoid making the same mistake again.