Unlike MMM and many of you, I don't have the inherent wherewithal to change habits without blinking. Due to this, I have a hard time fostering good habits. So one trick that I turn to often is to make a large upfront investment, which forces motivates me into doing something long enough to break even, and by then have hopefully developed it into an automatic habit that continues.
For example, I'm a terrible eater. I grew up in a household where frozen pizza, grilled cheese sandwiches, ramen noodles, and the Dollar Menu were staples. Since I've been on my own (approx. 3-4 years), I've tried numerous times to eat better. I bought fresh, healthier foods. I cut out (most) of the fast food. I replaced the Ramen noodles with rice and beans. But, I always went back to my unhealthy ways with the precooked, easily heated, terrible-for-you mush. Cooking fresh was exhausting with the cooking itself (I'd never cooked before, so there were many ruined dishes), the endless cleanup, and the fact that I'm also a picky eater (a fact I attribute to my earlier eating habits).
So I made two calculated decisions. First, I purchased a Vitamix blender. A roughly $400 expense investment*. Since purchasing this blender, my previously non-existent breakfast has become a smoothie concoction, resulting in the removal of my mid-day snack attack that would have me purchasing a bag of chips from work. My lunch generally involves some type of peanut butter sandwich, as I love making my own fresh peanut butter. I can also puree up virtually any fruit and vegetable, and incorporate it into dishes I already like, and mask the flavor (my diet was virtually devoid of these, despite me constantly attempting to incorporate them previously). Due to this, I've been fuller than ever eating meals half the size I usually do. This $400 blender resulted in me saving an average $125/month over the past 3 months, almost paying for itself already. Plus, I've become much healthier as a result. Second, I just last week purchased a FoodSaver vacuum sealer at a cost of $150. With this, I've spent the past three days bulk cooking and freezing chicken, beef, potatoes, and black beans. I now have roughly 50 individually sealed meals in my freezer, at a cost of ~$1.00/meal. If these meals had been made on an individual basis (i.e. the food had been bought in smaller purchases at a higher cost per unit), the price would have been ~$3.00/meal. As well, if I had just purchased Ziploc freezer bags, I wouldn't have been motivated enough to spend the effort necessary to make the meals. But since I invested $150 into it, I went through with it, saving a total of $100 in the meals made over a weekend. Better yet, I know I wouldn't have made each meal from scratch over and over again. I would have instead purchased precooked or prepackaged meals, or gotten fast food or ordered out. That brings my average meal bill closer to $6-$10, so in one sense I recouped my cost of the vacuum sealer in one go.
The next investment I'm pondering is a nice bike. For the past two semesters, I've rented a bike from my university ($20/semester rental fee, for what was a brand new $500 bike when I first rented it two semesters ago). The problem is I rarely used it. It was cumbersome to get to and from campus (I don't own a bike rack for my vehicle), so it stayed locked up at the campus building I worked at. I'd ride it to class every now and then, but usually forgot the key for the lock, the helmet, etc. The problem is that I have very little financial leverage involved to *bump* me into changing my routine. So I plan on taking another route: buying a damned bike. Investing $500+ into a bike (and however much a hatchback bike rack costs)will force me to ride it long enough to make back my money (in this case, in the form of foregone gas driving everywhere). It takes me approximately a gallon of gas to get to commute to and from work/school . On this alone, it'll take 167 work days to make my money back (at a conservative $3/gallon - it's been at $2.89 for a few weeks so I'm being optimistic). Adding in the mileage driven for errands and taking away mileage due to not riding every day, I figure that I will break even on my initial cost in 6 months. I'll tenaciously stick it out that long just on principle, but hopefully by that time I'll actually enjoy it for itself and continue unabated.
Do any of you guys use similar tricks to get yourself (or your other half) to develop good habits?
*Note: For perspective on exactly how much leverage this was, $400 currently represents a week's take-home pay for me. So I spent 25% of my monthly income on a blender. Accounting for income fluctuations throughout the year, it's probably closer to 12-15% of my monthly income.
