Have you ever wanted/needed to lose weight? I don’t mean a couple of pounds here, more like 20 pounds or more. Don’t worry, this totally ties into personal finance, just follow along for a minute.

If you have needed/wanted to lose a good amount of weight, then you know that most people want Instant Gratification; they want to lose it fast and easy. Frantic searching for the newest lose-weight quick scheme out there isn’t always the best thing. Most of the times when people go on these fad diets or crazy schemes, they end up gaining the weight back and sometimes more.

Most people already know how to lose weight and what needs to be done. But really, who wants to work hard at something that could take a long-a$$ time? Not many apparently since the diet pills, new diet programs and weight-loss products sell like hotcakes.

For me, common sense says that to lose weight and get healthier we need to eat less bad-4-us foods, eat more good-4-us foods, drink enough water and exercise. Sure when I type it all into a sentence it seems pretty simple, but when most people attempt that, they can get impatient. Then they might give-up all together, go for a new fad/scheme, go to extremes or who knows what else. That’s the Instant Gratification Monster lurking around and screwing $hit up.

How this relates to personal finance:

It’s the same thing here, people want to get out of debt, have stellar credit and lots of money saved up without much effort. For me, yes again, to happify (it’s totally gotta be a word) our financial situation, we need to decrease our spending, increase our earnings, make better choices with our money and make saving a priority. Simple, but boring and time-consuming to most, but a nice sound strategy.

Everybody wants new tips and tricks to save money or make money quickly, but that’s not the real solution. Even if you make more money, if you totally suck with money it’s not going to make a difference. We need to know where our money comes from, what we NEED to spend it on, what we want to spend it on, where it really goes, how to stretch the money we do have and make better choices with our money that help us achieve our financial goals. Doing so gives us the ability to have control over money instead of the other way around.

I’m not saying that tips and tricks for saving money are worthless or anything. They can help us save a ton of money, but it won’t do us any good if we just spend more. If there is something that’s really important to you that you want to do/have/achieve, then it will probably be worth all the hard work in the end. Otherwise, why would you want it so badly? Here’s a couple of great quotes in case you need help to keep focus too.

The only way round is through. -Robert Frost

He that can have patience can have what he will. -Benjamin Franklin