Anna Tulchinskaya shares her personal tips and strategies for creating positive patterns

Hello, Community Ladders!

Although I would love to take this opportunity to talk about how super qualified I am to answer any and all of your design needs (wink, wink), I thought it might be nice to speak to you less as a designer and more as a fellow Community Ladders member who is trying her best to reach her financial goals.

In this issue of “The Ladder,” I really love the piece about your brain’s need to establish patterns. Establishing and breaking patterns has been one of the most challenging (and rewarding) aspects of my own journey in personal finance. Here are some of my lessons learned:

Tracking your own patterns is one of the best ways to get a wake-up call. For the longest time, I thought that as long as I wasn’t running out of money at the end of every month, I was doing just fine. Systematically tracking my spending helped me realize how wrong that assumption was. I realized that I had a few spending patterns that had simply gotten out of control, and this awareness sparked the motivation I needed to significantly improve my financial standing.

“If, then” patterns are extremely powerful. Establishing circumstantial “rules” can really help with evaluating decisions. In order to help myself limit spending to purchases I absolutely must make, I started thinking along the lines of, “IF I make this purchase, THEN I will add XX% of the purchase price to my regular student loan repayment.” Of course, I kept this rule in place only for non-essentials, but having a mechanism to make me think twice AND increase the apparent cost of each new purchase was a real kicker. Needless to say, this pattern helped me significantly cut down on extraneous spending!

Patterns are easier to stick to if they’re tied to a ritual. Do you have a ritual you keep to? Do you always grab a coffee at a certain Starbucks after work? Do all your Sundays begin with reading your favorite blogs over breakfast? Try making a good financial habit a part of a ritual that already exists. Maybe that Sunday blog fest can always end with an evaluation of your budget. Maybe every time you go to Starbucks you transfer $5 to your savings account. You’ll be much more likely to fall into a great financial habit (I hear it only takes 30 days to pick up a new one!).

Making results visual helps reward good patterns. I once heard of someone who collected enough small objects to represent every dollar of their debt; for every dollar repaid, they would throw away one of the objects. I appropriated this strategy by drawing erasable marks over a painting (yes, I did go to art school), and every time I did something that contributed to reaching the goal I had identified, I erased one of the marks. Having a visual reminder of how far I had to go until I reached my goal truly motivated me to get there faster.

I hope these tips help you establish a few good patterns yourself. In the meantime, please feel free to contact me if you need help brainstorming ways to incorporate these tips in your own life, to let me know how I’m doing with designing images for Community Ladders, or just to say hello. I can be reached by e-mail. You can also reach me through my blog, my498.wordpress.com.

Anna Tulchinskaya works at Bussolati Associates, a content strategy and design studio in Washington, DC.  As Community Ladders’ graphic designer, Anna completely overhauled our visual brand. All graphics in the newsletters, on blogs, and pretty much anything else we’ve produced in 2011, are Anna’s original work.