Happy New Year!
I did a cool thing today. I fulfilled a dream I’ve had for—oh, at least five years now. Maybe longer.
After a nice breakfast, the family and I drove out to the outlet mall and we made a beeline for the Le Cruset store.
A nice lady came up and asked if we needed any help.
And I said, “Yes, I want a 5 1/2 quart cherry red dutch oven, please.”
The icing on the cake is that they were having a store-wide 25% off sale! So, between the fact that it’s a seconds store (meaning, the items have slight imperfections) and the sale, I paid just a little more than half the price of a brand new, non-seconds one.
WIN!
But more than getting a great deal (which you all KNOW I love) this pot was about fulfilling a promise to myself.
Do you have “later-itis?”
“Later-itis” is an insidious disease that affects lots of people—especially women, especially those of us living with budgets, and especially moms, I think.
The main symptom is that whenever you think of something you want, you immediately say to yourself, “I’ll get/do/be that later, after I…”
For instance:
- I’ll invest in that good piece of cookware later, when we have more fun money to spend….
- I’ll buy good clothes for myself later, after I’ve lost the weight….
- I’ll spend more time with my kids later, when I’m not so stressed out at work….
- I’ll be able to do better meal planning later, when I’m not so busy….
But here’s the catch:
The truth is, later never comes.
When are you ever going to just have extra money lying around? When are you going to be less stressed at work? When are you not going to be busy?
And about that buying nice clothes for yourself one… Why are you postponing your life until later?
Let me say that again:
Why are you postponing your life until later? (TWEET THAT!)
Now, you might be saying to me, “But Lacy, I don’t have the money to do X, Y, or Z thing that I want to do! There’s no option!”
Well, I get that. I mean, if you don’t have the money to go out and invest in good cookware, or nice clothes, or a massage, or whatever it is you’ve been later-izing, then that’s a pretty good reason not to do it right now, today.
But riddle me this: What action have you taken to make it a reality?
Because you could go get an empty jar and put all the change from your purse and couch cushions into it. You could look at your budget and find five dollars a week you could put towards your goal. You could spend the next half hour brainstorming ways to earn the extra money you need.
Have you done those things? If not, you are later-izing your goal. You are later-izing your wants and needs in favor of something or someone else.
You are later-izing your life.
I don’t know about you, but I’m done waiting for later.
Part of my 2014 core desired feelings is to feel elegant, and so if there’s a purchase I need to make for that to happen, I’m going to make it a priority to figure out how to make that purchase happen.
But I also don’t want to sacrifice what I want for my future for what I want now. (In other words: no racking up credit card debt—because debt ain’t elegant!)
To start with, I’ve put a “shopping list” page in my home journal—one for January (that I started in December) and one for February so far. And if I think of something I want to buy, I’m going to put it on the NEXT months’ calendar, and I’m going to plan one Sunday a month as my shopping day.
If, by the time that shopping day rolls around, I still want the item and have figured out how to pay for it, I get to go buy it.
And feel oh, so elegant doing it. 🙂
So, tell me…
What are you later-izing in your life? What’s ONE step you could take to make it a reality? Leave me a comment below and let me know!
Congrats on the Dutch Oven Lacy!
This was on NPR yesterday…made me think of the waiting-for-later idea:
“You stretch your budget to make ends meet. People in the grip of scarcity are tightly focused on meeting their urgent needs, but that focus comes at a price. Important things on the periphery get ignored…That’s at the heart of the scarcity trap. You’re so focused on the urgent that the important gets waylaid. But because the important gets waylaid, you’re experiencing even more scarcity tomorrow.”
OOOO… So good! We need to do the IMPORTANT stuff over the URGENT (but unimportant) stuff. It’s like Stephen Covey’s time management matrix from “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” — just adjusted for our wants.
Great article and it hit home today. seems I do laterizing alot. I have been wawnting to DIY fix up or home or move out and get a new home. But instead I sit and do nothing about it at all. I am going to start with building the list and checking off one “House To Do” a month.
Way to go Taryn! And may I suggest that the first one you do be something you’ve been DYING to do?!?
Hi Lacy. I so agree with this post. As I have gotten older (and thankfully a bit more financially sound) I have stopped later-izing. I have found that when I treat myself to those things that I want it makes me feel happy and special. It also makes me feel abundant which in turn makes me be abundant. I think that back when I thought I didn’t have the money, I really did or could have and it would have gone a long way to helping my state of mind. Elegant is such a fabulous word and feeling and we all deserve it!!!
Great piece, Lacy! I've been actually pretty good at not laterizing lately but I could definitely recognize myself in what you were saying. And I have just decided that I'll stop working after picking up my kids from school and spend the afternoon playing together. No waiting till the weekend, today is the day! 🙂
Loved this Lacy. And congrats on the dutch oven. It’s beautiful. I walk around with a shopping list in my head…you know the perfect pair of black pants, the cashmere sweater, this way when I just happen to come across it, it’s a no brainer to purchase and it’s fun to see how I’m led to “find” these things because the truth is, I mainly forget they’re on the list until I see them. The other day I was in Macy’s while my daughter was looking for boots. Bored, I crossed the aisle to the petite section just because it was closest to the shoe department…and low and behold I bought two cashmere sweaters in red and bright blue for a fraction of the cost! Did I tell you that they had been on my later-ing list for years!