Budgeting Part 2.1: Delayed Gratification

By now just about everyone has seen the (pretty adorable) video of the kids with the marshmallows. If you haven't, it's pretty funny to watch. The kids are told "here's a marshmallow. You can eat it now, or you can wait. If you wait, I'll bring you another marshmallow when I get back."

Then they have to wait.

The kids have all sorts of reactions. Some kids snag that marshmallow right away, some wait patiently, and some wait without the patience. Kids lick the marshmallow, play with it, hide it, or even turn away from it altogether. By the time the test administrator gets back with the marshmallow, these kids look like they've just been through the roughest five minutes of their lives. The looks on their faces as they eat their marshmallows are almost as varied as their waiting methods are, from sheer joy to a look of "was that worth it?"

When you're working toward your financial health and you're at a place of trimming the fat in your budget, delayed gratification starts becoming necessary. Delayed gratification is a foreign concept to many people because we live in the world of credit. Can't afford it? No problem, charge it! This mentality leads our waiting 'muscles' to atrophy from a lack of use and eventually we find ourselves in a seemingly bottomless pit of debt because of all the things we wanted and didn't wait for.

My mentors teach that if you want something, you have to earn it. They're multimillionaires and they swear by this idea. It doesn't matter that if they want to they could walk into any car dealership and buy anything off the lot, if they want a new car they set goals for themselves. They don't get that car until they've reached the goal and earned it. This way of living creates a revolving door of victory and reward that empowers them to go forward conquering bigger and bigger goals. It's why they're so successful.

Maybe you're at a place in your finances where you've had to cut your entertainment budget back, or maybe you've had to cut it out altogether, in the interest of paying off debts and keeping your bills paid. It's a hard decision. There's going to be times you wish you had money in the budget to go see that movie or to go out to dinner instead of cooking, and you'll have to practice putting off what you want now for the good you know it will do you in the long run.

We do the same thing with healthy weight loss when we opt out of the cupcake because we know that a handful of nuts will fuel our bodies more efficiently and we know that we want to fuel our bodies efficiently so we lose weight.

With instant gratification we find ourselves with tons of rewards but no victories, in a hole of debt (or the pit of poor health) that gets more difficult to climb out of with every choice to have now and think later. However, with delayed gratification we can use our rewards as motivations. If you're constantly pursuing new goals in order to earn something that you want, you will be constantly moving onward and upward in life. Not only is this good for you mentally, but it's good for your bank account too. People who achieve goals on a regular basis are more likely to excel at work or in business, which leads to greater success in other areas down the road.

In other words: waiting isn't easy, but even a kid can tell you that it's usually worth the wait.