Never Retire - New Year's Money Resolutions

"Evidence" from dry January and packed gyms and exercise classes

With Omicron surging in the United States and around the world, my girlfriend and I have decided to lay relatively low during January.

It has been and continues to be a lot of fun. There’s no better person to lay low—or high—with than my girlfriend.

We’re doing this, in part, to be pandemic safe in the present moment. But also because we have a two-week trip to Italy planned for the first part of February. It seems to make sense to stay close to home and avoid being indoors with lots of people for long periods of time. Plus, we save a few bucks ahead of our trip by not eating out as much as usual.

The main thing we do—separately and together—is hot yoga.

Prior to January 1, the classes were usually sparsely attended. Including the instructor, usually there’d be fewer than ten people, sometimes closer to five.

However, like clockwork, in the new year, more than half of the classes have about double the late-2021 numbers. We’re still taking our chances by attending (the studio and LA County, for that matter, requires masks and vaccination). However, we intend to freeze our memberships in a week or so to lay even lower.

No surprise that the classes have grown in size.

People commit to getting healthy in new years.

There’s also the dry January fad, where people choose not to drink for the entire first month of a new year. In my experience, most don’t last much more than halfway through the month. Quite a few drank super hard in December, which renders dry January the equivalent of catching up on sleep. It takes a long time to reverse the negative effects of an unhealthy lifestyle.

There’s a similar dynamic at play with money-related new year’s resolutions.

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t make them. As with most things in personal finance, it’s personal.

To make a resolution stick, it probably has to be something more than a resolution.

Just as we take traditional retirement and bring it up to date with the more fluid and flexible concept of Never Retire, it might make sense to discard the word resolution and think in terms of lifestyle change.

You can make a resolution to pay off your credit card debt in the first half of 2022, however if it stops there—with that one, isolated action—you’re selling yourself short.

Time and timely events often dictate life changes.

It’s a new year and new you. Or, you’re getting married or having a kid, so you decide to get certain ducks in a row.

For many of us, the stay-at-home portion of the pandemic (almost two years ago now!) prompted wholesale lifestyle changes, particularly with money.

I took what I was already doing and recommitted to it, making it less a series of personal finance tasks and more a lifestyle where work and money help facilitate the life I wanna live now and for the duration.

This approach went beyond money.

During spring and into summer of 2020 (it was 2020, right?), I lost that last bit of weight. In December 2020, I went on a coffee walk with a girl I had a crush on. As our relationship progressed through 2021, I learned and worked on a few things. It has become clear—using my girlfriend’s words from the other day—that I like the way the second half of our life together looks.

Bottom line—it probably can’t be a one-off resolution, if you haven’t already adopted and close to perfected a comprehensive lifestyle around, but not limited to how you manage your money.

You might start with something like credit card debt, but it has to branch out from there. It has to cover the many bases associated with spending—be it credit or cash spending—even if some of these bases seem super far flung.

In our next newsletter installment—which will go to paid subscribers—I will outline one way to do this.

How to craft a comprehensive personal financial plan starting from something such as getting credit card debt under control.

We’re going to get deep in the weeds detailed and nerdy with it.

After that, we’ll do part three of our four-part series on working in retirement—

• Health and well-being research on working in relative old age—what the data say.

You can access the first two parts of that series HERE and HERE.

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As always, I appreciate the support and feedback.

Rocco