We’ve now been in the pandemic mode for two months. Things are slowly starting to open back up depending on where you are. Regardless of whether you can go back into the office or are still at home, now’s a good time to start thinking about good habits you’ve started during the pandemic – and how you can carry them over in the future. Here are some ideas:
- Continue making good use of what you have.
- Learn to know the difference between what you need and what you want.
- Be flexible in how your approach things.
1. Make good use of what you have
We’ve all been staying home a lot more and only going out for what we need during the last few months. This has drastically cut down on impulse shopping. In an attempt to get in and out of the grocery store as quickly as possible, we’ve all been doing more planning to make sure we don’t forget anything we need.
We’ve also been better about making good use of what we have – whether it’s making meals stretch or getting stuff out of the freezer we’d forgotten about and using it up.
2. Learning how to know the difference between what you need and what you want
Another thing we’ve learned is how to figure out what we NEED vs what we WANT. If you forgot to buy something at the grocery store, you have to think long and hard about whether it’s worth the risk of going back out again to get it. This helps you get into the practice of learning what you really need vs whether it’s only something you want – but you don’t really need it.
3. Be flexible in how you approach things
Some of us are working from home for the first time. We’re also learning how to teach our kids and keep in touch with loved ones via Facetime or video messaging. We’ve had to become flexible in how we approach things and learn to just roll with things. That’s also a lesson you can apply to how you handle money. Sometimes things will go exactly how you planned with money – and sometimes you’ll have to roll with it.
The Takeaway
When the world shuts down overnight, you have to learn how to take things day by day. Now that we’re a few months into the pandemic, we’ve gotten the hang of things. We’re starting to get into routines and learning some new good habits – that we can continue to use in the future.
What’s a good habit – relating to money or something else – that you’ve developed in the past few months?
