🤞🏻 One small promise...

I’ve had a rash of wrong charges in the last week.

• A double charge for one night in a hotel in Ireland

• An extra charge for the car I rented while I was there

• A mysterious $18.99 charge from “Canva” on a credit card I hadn’t even started using yet

• An incorrect extra addition of $280 per week to my mortgage payment

  And, as the cherry on top…

• Instead of the invoiced annual charge of $485 for a service I subscribed to, my credit card was instantly maxed out with an outrageously wrong charge of $5,550.

Frustrating, right? And a lot of work because I had to individually challenge each of these charges, either with the vendor or with the bank. I’ve been spending a lot of time on the phone to banks this past week.

But there’s something amazing about this. I picked up every one of these charges right away because I’m on top of my finances. If you’d told me even three years ago I could do it, I would have laughed. When it came to my finances, I had my head buried so deep in the sand that I could have given ostriches lessons in subterranean navigation.

Here’s the evidence. It’s a photo I took a few years back of a credit card statement. Covered in dust bunnies. Unopened. For SIX months.

And yes, I did accept their invite to go paperless. And started working on getting control of my finances. It didn’t happen overnight. I had (and still have) a lot of financial trauma to deal with. But I stopped letting it stand in my way.

And so, this week, when I had a bunch of wrong charges popping up, I was ready for those punches and came back swinging.

It all started with flossing

I can say the same thing about keeping my fridge in order. I don’t think you want to see a “before” picture of my fridge, but just a few months back, I despaired that I’d ever be able to have a fridge that wasn’t a repository of wasted, rotting food. If you'd asked me if I could keep my fridge in order and not have a panic attack about it, I'd have put the chances at pretty hopeless. But now, I’m doing just that.

It all started with a promise to floss my teeth every morning. A promise I made to my dental hygienist. He was the latest in a long line of dental hygienists who've implored me to floss daily.

I'd just read Atomic Habits by James Clear. And that's where I learnt about habit stacking.

Ok, I told myself. When I take my Fitbit off to shower in the morning, I'll put it on top of the floss, and when I put it on, I'll see the floss and floss my teeth.

And now, two years later, I've got a morning routine that starts with a mini strength workout before my first cup of tea, includes checking my financials somewhere in the middle with a few other things, and ends (TA-RAAAAHH!) with me spending a couple of minutes checking my fridge for something that needs to be removed.

Now, I don’t put off cleaning my fridge because I can't stand the thought of finding something that's gone off. And I don’t ignore my financials anymore. They’re just things I deal with as part of my morning routine.

And speaking of that…

For the past few months, one of my clients has been going through a court battle with an ex who keeps hurling one ridiculous accusation after another at her. She’s living what, one year ago, was her worst nightmare. In the past, if she tried to set boundaries with her ex, he’d threaten to take her to court and she’d back down.

But now that it’s actually happening, she’s like a different person. She just rolls her eyes at his constant allegations. Why? Because she’s got the receipts. When he recently made yet another untrue accusation against her, she produced the evidence of his lies for her lawyer in about 52 nanoseconds.

So, what’s changed from then to now?

It’s simple. She got into the habit of documenting every written interaction between her and her ex, in a system she adapted to her needs, using categories she created. Now, when her lawyer asks her for something, she doesn’t have to waste time and energy looking for the evidence her lawyer needs to defend her. It’s all there at her fingertips. As she told her lawyer:

Want to know how I can help you?

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After I listened to Atomic Habits on Audible, I bought 5 paperback copies of the book. One for me, and one each for my children. I loved the book’s practical, doable approach to habit formation. I’ve struggled all my life with creating and maintaining sustainable habits and after reading this book, I finally had a blueprint for making this a reality and you already know the rest…

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