Decision Making – Page 26 – mardihumphreys.com

Red Alert

Our daughter was born seven days before my 31st birthday. While pregnant with her, my OB/GYN referred to us as a geriatric pregnancy. Has a bit of a negative connotation, don’t ya think? I prefer to think of us as trendsetters because these days plenty of women are following in our footsteps. At the time, I hoped that within twenty-five years society would evolve to the point where it’s easier for parents of minor-aged children to work full-time. The deadline to fulfill that hope is January 2022. Looks like I’m going to be disappointed.

Acknowledge

The corporate sector has done little to address this issue, and as we discussed last week, bias against working mothers hasn’t changed much in 25 years. Since the pandemic spotlighted their plight, now is an opportune time to use that momentum and advocate for permanent changes with employers for both mothers and fathers. Child care is necessary for parents to work. Work is necessary to drive economic recovery from COVID-19. More than half of the parents who took this survey anticipate that the cost of child care will increase because of the pandemic. The child care crisis is now a red alert and it affects all of us.

Communicate

If you are a parent in the workforce, the pandemic probably taught you the necessity of work-life integration, especially if your children are very young and/or school-aged. For example, the need for your physical presence when your child is an infant is not the same as when that child becomes a teenager. Even if your work responsibilities don’t change during those years, where and when you do the work can. Gone are the days of sitting in an office for eight hours waiting for work to appear. Work happens 24/7/365; so does the rest of your life. Figure out where your boundaries are, then communicate and negotiate them with your manager. When your employer knows that you’ll write the quarterly report after your daughter goes to bed in exchange for attending her soccer game that afternoon, they should respect your work-life integration. If they don’t, then you can find an employer who will. Right now there are more jobs available than people to fill them. You need to be in an employment situation where you can have transparent, on-going conversations with your manager (e.g., performance reviews) where the goal is to define both what the company currently needs from you, and what you need from the company in order to meet its needs. The result should be an arrangement benefitting both you and the company. If you and your employer are both fair and flexible, not only will you successfully integrate the responsibilities of your life, but you, your employer, and your children will benefit also.

How does your business address the needs of working parents? Please share in the comments.

Defense Mechanism

It’s my mom’s birthday and I’m reflecting on some of the work she’s done so far: Registered Nurse, Director of Nursing, Sunday School Teacher, and now a Christian Counselor. These jobs share a common thread: compassion. Being the well many draw from saps her energy and she has to intentionally replenish it. Can you relate? If you are a parent, teacher, or in any type of care-giving role, what you assume is burnout due to the constant stress, change, and loss thanks to COVID-19 may be Compassion Fatigue (CF).

What is it?

Also known as secondary traumatic stress, CF is one of your body’s defense mechanisms. You become emotionally and physically exhausted when you’re repeatedly exposed to stressful events. This can leave you numb to others’ suffering. The condition is usually associated with health-care workers, but anyone who is consistently exposed to someone else’s hardship (e.g., first responders, clergy, public librarians) can experience it. CF can also be caused by a heavy workload, excessive demands, and long hours. For example, the mom working from home while supervising her children’s online school is a candidate for CF. You’re particularly susceptible if you watch a lot of news, have too many priorities competing for your energy, or work in a dangerous environment. Remember, since COVID-19 began, environments once considered innocuous are now seen as dangerous (e.g., grocery stores). Any time you have less energy, add more fatigue, then have to expend more energy, you are at risk. For example, you’re worried about your at-risk parents’ health while you are working longer hours, then a friend tests positive for COVID-19.

What Does it Look Like?

Symptoms of CF can be both physical and emotional. Watch for these behaviors in both yourself and those you interact with:

Physical:

Distracted, forgetful, withdrawn
Aches, pains, nauseous, insomnia
Work absenteeism, unproductive, relationship conflicts
Self-medicating/Substance abuse (food, alcohol, drugs, gambling, more work)

Emotional:

Helpless, sad, hopeless, isolated
Anxious, worried, overwhelmed, depressed
Irritable, restless, tense, self-doubt
Dissatisfied with self and/or job

What Can You do About it?

Self-awareness: When you feel three or more of the above symptoms, define your triggers. When you just don’t care anymore, why is that? What is the root of the stress? What can you control? Will you accept help from others at home? Can you delegate tasks at work?

Boundaries: Prioritize your needs over what others need from you. Set, maintain, and enforce limits for: work-life integration, time spent scrolling through social media, care giving, realistic expectations.

Self-care: Do something everyday that boosts your energy: eat well, exercise, read, listen to music, drink water, journal, sleep, meditate, pray, talk to a friend, spend time in nature, laugh.

Compassion Fatigue should not be normalized, but talking about it openly should be because it’s not going away. Everyone has a new, longer-term complication and they want your support. For example, adjusting to emerging working conditions (e.g., remote, in-office, hybrid), concern for their young children going back to school, or comfort after the death of a loved one. Figuring out how to balance restoring, conserving, and giving away your energy is a key to effectively helping those you love and work with.

Are you experiencing Compassion Fatigue? What measures are you taking to recover from it? Please share in the comments.

Travel Team

It’s vacation season and if you have a spouse, you want to travel together. But there are things you want to do that they don’t, such as spend five hours at one art museum, spend three hours at a coffee shop, or spend an hour reading a book at a botanical garden. Luckily, you have friends who think these pastimes sound heavenly. In addition to traveling with your partner, take a trip with a friend. These adventures are ripe with lessons you can take back to work.

Getting to Know You

Constant togetherness reveals hidden talents as well as idiosyncrasies. For example, you discover that your friend has an uncanny ability to quickly spot your Uber while they notice that you can easily navigate large airports. On the other hand, maybe you are irritated by your friend’s obsession with the weather forecast and they are annoyed by your insistence to walk everywhere. We learn to be more considerate of each other because our time together is finite. The same is true at work. Projects have lifecycles. Acknowledge an interpersonal conflict when it starts. Be quick to define both your and your teammate’s boundary. Additionally, recognize that taking the time to unravel and resolve miscommunication is time well spent.

Plan B (or C or…)

When traveling, sometimes Plan A won’t work. Issues like flight delays, a car rental company losing your reservation, and a broken air conditioner in your hotel room provide multiple opportunities to not only find out how good a business is at customer service, but also work with your friend to figure out how to overcome the obstacle. Which one of you will: Take the lead in patiently communicating the unacceptable situation to customer service? Motivate the other to remain calm? Influence the service you receive by confirming that everyone is working toward the same goal? After recovering from the setback, you can take the lessons you learned (e.g., active listening, empathizing, aligning expectations) back to work and apply them to your team’s next project. When unpredictable obstacles occur, you can confidently take the lead to solve them because you’ve experienced the emotional intelligence required to get through a frustrating process.

Teamwork

The first time you travel with a friend to a destination that’s new to both of you, logic dictates that you set the parameters of the trip and start negotiating. Who is booking the transportation? Who is booking the hotel? Who is booking reservations at the restaurants, museums, sites, etc. that you want to visit? You divide up the task list according to talent. They are good at determining how much time you need between connecting flights. You can detect if a hotel is as good as its marketing says it is. You must trust each other to complete these tasks. During the trip, you both are gracious when unforeseen challenges happen. You patiently support one another when mistakes in judgement cause setbacks. You encourage each other to stretch outside of your comfort zones. You remain flexible so both of you can reach the individual objectives you have for the getaway. See what I did there? These activities are examples of collaborative teamwork. The same skills and mindset you use traveling with your friend apply to the project you’re tackling with your coworkers.

Do you plan to travel with friends this summer? Where are you going? Please share in the comments.

Reservation Highly Recommended

Dad and Me Father’s Day 2021 Photo by MSH

During one of my networking groups last week, we discussed what we learned from the men in our lives in honor of Father’s Day. My dad unintentionally taught me the power of follow-up. In a conversation he habitually listens more than he talks, asks engaging questions, and, even if it’s weeks later, texts or calls for an update. You’d assume the follow-up would be the most powerful part of the process, but no. It’s the listening. If you’re just listening to reply, you’ll jump into the conversation at your first opportunity. But if you restrain yourself and listen to understand, (e.g., repeat what the speaker said back to them, ask investigative questions) you build trust. Acting with restraint is useful in many work situations.

Social Intelligence

Robert Greene advises “Never outshine the master.” You may be smarter than your manager when it comes to the assigned task, but if you push back too hard, you reveal that you lack social intelligence. For example, once upon a time I was in a brainstorming meeting with a group of five people: an executive, his assistant, and two of my teammates. The exec kept falling down rabbit holes and I kept pulling us back with the same phrase, “So, the goal is zero waste…” The third time I said it, the exec seemed embarrassed. By the fifth time I said it, both the exec and his assistant were annoyed and my teammates were uncomfortable. In demonstrating I knew what the goal was, I exposed that his ideas would not achieve it. Remember the cliche, don’t bite the hand that feeds you? When applied to work, don’t break the finger of the hand that signs your paycheck.

Emotional Intelligence

Let’s say our team missed a deadline because you spent more time on social media than working on our project. If I pointed this out, how would you react? Would you get defensive and lash out? Or would you take a few deep breaths and ask for a safe place outside your workspace to store your phone while you’re working on our project? The latter choice shows restraint. Reacting out of ego won’t serve you in the long run. Humility is strength, not weakness. You fell into temptation. Get up, make the necessary adjustment, and keep going.

Business Intelligence

Creative freedom is an oxymoron. Freedom leaves choices wide open. You’re more creative when given parameters like a direction, deadline, or dilemma to solve. In other words, a restraint. For example, I’m constantly looking for ways to promote brand awareness that won’t break my budget. The views on the company’s social media pages go way up when I post photos or videos of our dog. Thus, “Tails From the Home Office,” a photo/video series starring my adorable-but-less-than-helpful “assistant” was born. Restraint is also crucial when searching for B2B clients. No one wants to miss a lead, but lack of focus denies you a priority. BTW, Priority implies one. If you have multiple priorities, then you don’t have any. Define yours and filter decisions through it. If your sweet spot is fast-growing manufacturers with 50 or fewer employees, build relationships with them. Don’t let FOMO cause you to miss those you serve best.

How has showing restraint helped you get ahead at work? Please share in the comments.

Satisfied ≠ Engaged

When I hear the term employee engagement, in my head I see a scene like the photo above; engaged people satisfied with their work. I thought engagement was synonymous with satisfaction, but no. An engaged employee is probably also a satisfied one, but a satisfied employee is not necessarily engaged.

What’s the Difference?

Satisfied employees do their job, but don’t look for ways to contribute to the mission or vision of the company. They’re satisfied with short term incentives like a raise, and dissatisfied when the work gets stressful. Satisfaction is how happy employees are, which may include things like getting paid for doing as little work as possible. Satisfied employees avoid accountability, try to maintain the status quo, and resist change.

Engaged employees are enthusiastic about their positions, dedicated to the company, and work beyond their job descriptions. They believe in the company’s mission and actively promote it. They’re both mentally and emotionally dialed in to their work, teams, and organizations and expect a long-term relationship with all three. They embrace change; taking the initiative to seek out processes that can be improved and improving them.

Why is it Important?

Eighty-one percent of business leaders said engaged employees perform better than satisfied ones. They’re more productive, less absent, attract new talent, and stay with the company longer than satisfied employees. This results in growth and innovation in a thriving economy and the ability to bounce back after a recession. Engaged employees know their role in the company’s objectives. When an employee knows their purpose, they filter their work through it. The company can then harness and channel this energy to reach its goals.

How Do You Do It?

Communication: Employee engagement starts at the top. Senior leadership should authentically view employees as their most valuable asset and prove it by:

Casting a vision for the company, clearly and repetitively stating it, and lead accomplishing the company’s mission by example
Giving organization-wide updates on the health of the company including changes. Disclose what leadership is doing to improve the current conditions
Focusing constructive feedback on employees’ performance (not the person) and following up
Offering a process for anonymous company-wide feedback and implementing employees’ responses
Publicly recognizing engaged employees and giving them a system to publicly recognize each other

Cultivation: Business moves at the speed of trust. Senior leadership can build trust with employees by:

Defining what success looks like to the company and how to reach it with honesty and integrity
Providing clear expectations, holding people accountable, and focusing on delivering results
Making enriching employees’ lives a company value and acting like it (e.g., supporting employees’ career development with both money and time)
Developing cross-functional teams to complete projects. Pro-tip: When coworkers do projects together, they organically bond and create positive team memories because they achieve communal success

Contribution: Engaged employees want to feel like they’re instrumental to the success of something bigger than themselves. Senior leadership can tap into that desire by:

Matching roles to employees’ strengths
Giving employees tasks they find both interesting and challenging
Sharing ownership of the company’s mission
Reiterating how the work employees do contributes to the company’s success

A company with engaged employees experiences less turnover, higher sales, and more customer satisfaction. When an employee quits their job in America, it costs the employer about $5000 to replace them. It was hard enough to find good employees pre-COVID-19. It’s so challenging now that it’s simply a wise business decision to invest in keeping the ones you have.

Does your company have an employee engagement strategy? How does it work? Please share in the comments below.

FOMO on Steroids

With 391 million people fully vaccinated for COVID-19 worldwide (as of May 24, 2021), the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel is no longer attached to an oncoming train. People are emerging and testing their environment as herd immunity progresses. Americans lucky enough to remain employed have collectively saved about $1.7 trillion from the beginning of the pandemic through January 2021. The savings are mostly by default because they couldn’t spend it on travel, in-restaurant dining, and concert/sports/show tickets.

You not only saved up your money, but also your desire to spend it. The flood gates on both are about to open as COVID restrictions lift. Scarcity created FOMO and with freedom returning, you’re tempted to spend those savings on extravagances. For example, a year ago you didn’t realize how badly you wanted Crisp Morning Air scented hand sanitizer until it was sold out. Now, when you’re thumbing through Instagram and up pop photos of a friend posing in the middle of Times Square, you want to fly first class to New York and stay at The Ritz-Carlton. The phenomenon of spending money with abandon in an attempt to make up for lost opportunities during the lock down has a name: Revenge Spending.

All the money you would’ve spent in 2020 and couldn’t (thanks, COVID) is now burning a hole in your pocket. All the activities you wanted to do but couldn’t (thanks, COVID) now make you feel you have a lot of catching up to do. You want to take the trips you missed, replace the sofa you inherited from your parents’ downsizing six years ago, buy new work clothes to wear back to the office because your old work clothes no longer fit (thanks, COVID). You feel like you’ve been robbed of a year’s worth of experiences and are in a frenzy to make up for lost time. If you have a job, very little debt, and a stimulus check, you’re very tempted to spend. A little splurge is understandable, but letting “treat yo self” get out of control can quickly empty your bank account.

The point of Revenge Spending is to make yourself feel better mentally and emotionally; a little retail therapy for all the isolation you had to endure last year. But if you blow all the money 2020 saved you, you defeat the purpose of Revenge Spending by mortgaging your future. Haven’t you suffered enough? To keep yourself in check:

Control the Splurge – Set a limit (maybe a stimulus check or two) and try to spend it locally. Use a local travel agent, go to local restaurants, jewelry stores, concert venues, etc.

Use Your Points – If you have a credit card that accumulates points and you’ve racked them up buying gas, groceries, and take-out during the pandemic, use them where possible to pay for upgrades. For example, fly business class instead of economy, book a 5-star hotel instead of a 3-star, fine-dining instead of casual. Using the points gives you the experience you want while making your fun fund last longer.

Tap the Brakes – It’s easy to go online and immediately start booking and buying. When you’re about to purchase something you can’t live without, bookmark the site and revisit it in 48 hours. If the feeling is still as strong and you can afford it, go for it.

Walk Away – When you see social media posts of your friends Revenge Spending, put down your device.

Keep Going – Maintain the good savings habits you were forced to adopt in 2020, like retaining an emergency fund.

Party Like It’s 2019 – What did you plan to spend your discretionary income on in 2019? If you stick to that budget, the odds you’ll keep your 2020 savings increase.

Have you done any Revenge Spending yet? What is the first thing you bought? Please share in the comments.

Brand Awareness

Last week we talked about bringing your whole self to work which concentrated on the impression you give. This week let’s talk about your reputation and if the brand you’re projecting is being received the way you intend.

Why do you need to know?

In the 1980’s, Lee Atwater coined the phrase, “Perception is reality.” You may think you are kind, compassionate, and thoughtful, but if your peers, bosses, and clients see you as cruel, harsh, and insensitive; that’s a problem. For example:

You thought that you were being assertive, but your team mate accuses you of being difficult
You thought that you were celebrating accomplishments, but your boss suggests you stop bragging
You thought that you were being diligent, but your client complains your follow up is aggressive.

You can’t control every opinion of you, but shouldn’t you intentionally manage what you can? Every day you’re creating an impression and it affects what projects you get assigned, who you do them with, and even future job opportunities. Your performance is judged not only by what you do, but also how you do it. Your skill at influencing how others perceive you is a key to controlling your career trajectory. This is not manipulation; it’s both personal and leadership development.

How do you find out?

Self-awareness – Much of our behavior is unconscious and habitual. Consider taking an assessment like The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, DiSC Profile, or Clifton StrengthsFinder. Look for patterns in the data. E.g., Do you behave more dominantly when you’re stressed? Pro Tip: Don’t dwell on the results you disagree with. These tests are snapshots of where you were mentally and emotionally when you took them.

Feedback – Choose peers, managers, and direct reports you trust to give you objective evaluations. Ask them about a specific situation where their reaction was not what you expected. Graciously receive their feedback. Resist arguing and/or accusing them of misunderstanding. There will be at least a bit of subjectivity in their opinions, so evaluate them carefully. Excavate the truth from their feedback, then determine how you will communicate differently during your next interaction.

Reconnaissance – Observe leaders you admire. How do they behave? How do they influence? How do they present themselves in meetings, 1:1s and on social media? Define the traits they have that you want people to associate with you, then model them. E.g., is the leader known for facilitating productive problem solving? Before your next project meeting, think of three open-ended questions that will prompt discussion of how the team can push the project to the next step.

What if you want to change it?

Start Small – Begin with the easiest impression to change and make altering it a S.M.A.R.T. goal. Activate the perception-changing conversation by digging up common ground. For example, is your team full of dog lovers? If you like the same things, it’s a small step to reason that you want the same things (e.g., accomplishing the project you’re working on together).

Advertise – Let team mates know you’re in the process of changing your behavior, and that you’ll periodically ask for their feedback. Leading with vulnerability triggers support. Resist exaggerating. You can’t sustain deception. When it’s discovered, it’s really hard to earn trust back.

Repeat – You’ve trained people to anticipate you’ll react a certain way. It takes time, both for them and you, to unlearn the pattern and replace it with your new one. Participating in team projects is a good way to demonstrate your change. When successful completion depends on working together, your coworkers are motivated to perceive you positively.

It’s all interpretation. If coworkers, managers, and customers see you in a negative light, soon they don’t want to work with you and you don’t want to work with them. You have the power to make your light shine positively.

What do you do to control your narrative? Please share in the comments.

Who Are You?

During the first team meeting after Jane got promoted from individual contributor to manager, she admitted she was nervous about the new role and asked her team for help. Her honesty and vulnerability were counter productive. Instead of regarding her as authentic, Jane’s direct reports perceived her as weak and unable to do her job. They didn’t trust her decisions, making it impossible to lead them. Her leadership style should have evolved as she gained experience, but instead Jane lost the courage necessary to promote her ideas.

What Bringing Your Whole Self to Work Means

Being both courageous and comfortable enough with coworkers to reveal both personal interests and flaws, thus creating space for them to reciprocate
Normalizing what employees experience outside the workplace affects them in the workplace
Includes both the impression we give of ourselves (consciously or unconsciously) and the impression we have of coworkers
Some elements we consider: authenticity (“This is me, warts and all”), humility (“I don’t know everything”), and vulnerability (“I need your help”)

Bringing your whole self to work is a relatively new concept. It presupposes that employees want to find purpose and higher meaning through their jobs. During the industrial revolution, no one looked for engagement with their work. They worked to buy food, clothing and shelter. They looked for purpose and higher meaning at church, in nature, or through art. Even today, some employees will never see their jobs as a source of fulfillment. If employees spend their energy trying to fit in to the culture, then they don’t have a lot left to be innovative, engaged, and productive.

Why You Don’t

Maybe, like Jane, you brought your whole self to work in the past and got judged or were less than your coworkers expected
The culture of your workplace is not conducive to sharing, keeping conversations at surface level
You fear revealing certain parts of your personality will make you appear unprofessional (e.g., you remain silent in a meeting after your feelings were hurt)
You are ashamed of something in your background
You feel pressured to always be right because your work culture does not support learning from failure

Why You Should

The more willing you are to be authentically vulnerable, the more positive an impact you have on both your work and your team. Bringing your whole self to work:

Breaks down silos
Accelerates trust
Creates a culture where honesty is valued
Removes the stress of hiding flaws
Allows genuine connection (critical to successful networking)
Enhances productivity and performance
Boosts creative problem solving
Helps managers resolve conflict in a constructive way

Someone who recognizes when to risk being vulnerable also recognizes a smart business risk when they see it.

How You Can

Start the authenticity ball rolling by:

Both recognizing and appreciating coworkers. There is a difference. Recognizing is feedback on performance. E.g.,“You gave an excellent presentation today.” Appreciating is expressing gratitude for valuable human qualities (e.g., humility, kindness, humor) regardless of whether the deliverable succeeded or failed. E.g., “It’s obvious you care deeply about serving our customers.” Recognizing and appreciating them helps coworkers feel seen. This leads to deepening trust and improving job performance
Having a growth mindset. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn, and we learn more when we do it together
Leading through both modeling and celebrating behaviors like: speaking up, taking smart risks, and owning mistakes. This enables your workforce to feel psychologically safe which leads to creativity which leads to productivity which leads to revenue

How comfortable are you bringing your whole self to work? Please share in the comments.

Balance vs Integration

Photo by EKATERINA BOLOVTSOVA from Pexels

I mentioned last week my mom is retired. If you’re envisioning a little old lady sitting in a rocking chair and knitting, you haven’t met my mom. If she’s sitting in a rocking chair, It’s more likely she’s on her laptop in her home office, videoconferencing with a mentee in Turkey rather than knitting. Instead of trying to balance work and life, Mom has integrated them. She’s incorporated elements she loves (The Bible, studying) into her daily routine (counseling, mentoring).

If you have a job that can’t be done remotely, (e.g. factory, hospital) you have a better shot at work life balance because you leave your work at the place you perform it. But those jobs tend to have hours that don’t coincide with the school day. Balance then becomes: Are you going to your eight-year-old’s piano recital on Saturday or are you working your normal shift as a hair stylist? If you have more of a sales role (talent acquisition, productivity consultant) or knowledge worker (software developer, career coach) you have more freedom to integrate all of your responsibilities. For example, instead of working eight hours straight, work-life integration could look like this: you do deep work at 5:00AM while everyone is asleep. You break at 7:00AM for breakfast with the family. You work while the kids are in school. You answer emails after everyone goes to bed. Integration blurs the lines between home and work. Life becomes more fluid and less categorized. For example, developing a marketing proposal for a client and developing a vacation proposal for the family are both duties you may have, and you get paid to do one of them.

When I think of balance, I visualize the Scales of Justice and constantly trying to keep both sides even. But you don’t have work on one side of the scale and everything else on the other. Life is more like a large Marion’s Super Cheese Pizza whose squares are unevenly cut. Some are huge and some are tiny. Your squares include work, family, friends, health, personal development, spirituality, volunteering, leisure, etc. Some days, those bigger squares are going to be children (e.g., you have to attend parent-teacher conferences). Some days those big squares are going to be work (e.g., attending the all-company videoconference). After you eat a couple of big squares, you fill up on smaller ones: checking email while awaiting your turn at the parent-teacher conferences, light weight lifting while attending the all-company videoconference. (I recommend both video and microphone muted for this one.) Only you can decide which squares and how many to eat everyday. Make decisions based on your values, goals, and priorities. When you feel overwhelmed, write down where your T.E.A.M. is going (i.e., how many squares you’re eating). If you discover you’re spending your T.E.A.M. out of sync with your values, goals, and priorities, consider reassigning the squares. Maybe today the biggest square is the slide deck that’s due at noon and the smaller square is the social media post you told your church you’d do for them this week. You can even share your pizza, giving a square (like the social media post) to someone else.

Switching your mindset to integration can help you achieve the balance you want. How have you changed your routine to bring more harmony to your life? Please share in the comments.

How You Doin’?

My dad’s birthday is this week (HBD Pop!). Both he and Mom are retired. When I think about preparing for retirement, I study how they did it. Speaking of saving money, how are your savings goals for 2021 coming? Given the state of the economy, we should revisit our money habits. You have a budget, debt payoff plan, good credit score, and savings goals, right? RIGHT?

Budget

If you don’t have a budget, create one. It’s free to manually track your money using a spreadsheet, or there are plenty of budgeting apps available. Whether simple or complex, choose a system you’ll stick with. If you don’t evaluate your budget monthly, at least glance at it once a quarter, especially while the economy is still reeling from COVID-19. Are you driving a lot less thanks to the pandemic? If so, you may be able to save 5-10% on your vehicle insurance if you’re willing to allow the insurance company to track your driving activity using telematics. Do you have a mortgage? If you can lower your rate by at least 0.5 percentage points, consider refinancing it; especially if it would eliminate mortgage insurance premiums.

Debt

Debt-to-income ratio is one of the things lenders look at when you apply for credit or a loan. Here’s a worksheet you can use to figure yours out. If it’s too high, don’t borrow any more money right now, revise your budget, and consider consolidating multiple debts. After calculating how much debt you have, prioritize what to pay off first. Do you have more credit card debt than you’re comfortable with? The average interest rate on a new credit card is 17.87%. If you make minimum monthly payments, you could spend years just paying off the interest. Do you have multiple credit cards? Consider paying off the one with the highest interest rate first. Or, you could pay off the one with the lowest outstanding balance first, then add the amount you used to pay that lender to the monthly payment of the credit card with the higher interest rate.

Credit

If you didn’t check your credit report at the end of 2020, do it now and make sure it’s accurate. Most lenders use the FICO (Fair Isaac Corporation) credit score, which is based on your payment history on loans and credit cards, total debt and amounts owed, length of credit history, new credit accounts, and credit mix. Three companies publish credit reports: Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. Experian offers a free tool called Boost. It recognizes timely payments to utilities providers and streaming services (e.g. Netflix) to increase your credit score.

Savings

Saving money is not supposed to be painful, it’s supposed to make you feel accomplished and free. Consider paying yourself first every month by direct depositing a percentage of your paycheck to a designated savings account. Budget spending around your savings instead of spending all your money every month and then putting what’s left into savings. You can also schedule automatic recurring transfers into your savings account so you can painlessly build your emergency fund. If you didn’t think an emergency fund was important pre-pandemic, I hope COVID-19 has changed your mind. Does your employer have a matching retirement plan? Are you contributing as much as they are in order to receive the most benefit? Best practice is saving 12-15% (including employer match) of your paycheck for retirement.

How are your 2021 financial goals coming along? Please share in the comments.