crowbar

Action

Set a concrete, clear standard of behavior or constraint that is significantly different than current behavior, and adhere to it strictly for a period of time.

Discussion

The crowbar method is implementing a given change in your life very quickly and decisively. It is the opposite of an incremental or gentle approach.

Let’s say you currently spend $600/mo on food and you would like to spend ‘less.’

One approach is to start paying attention to sales stickers in the grocery store, read an article or two on frugal cooking, setting an intention to eat out less, etc. This is an incremental approach. Perhaps in several months of gradually increasing your skill at eating frugally you will be spending less money on food.

The other approach is to pick a very specific amount of money to spend on food – $200 a month, say – and to put that amount of food in an envelope. That is the amount of money you have to spend on food that month. If you run out of money before the end of the month, you don’t get to spend any more money on food.

This extreme constraint will motivate you to immediately change your habits in a drastic way – because you don’t want to have to eat scrounged donuts from a dumpster for the last week of the month. (Also, though, dumpster diving might be a great strategy depending on where you live.)

With only $200 to spend on food and a pre-existing $600/mo food consumption habit, you are going to immediately spend time researching, thinking, calculating, and otherwise forming a coherent plan to make the $200 last all month.

It might not be a super tasty month, because your frugal eating skills are low. But your behavior will change dramatically and quickly, and you will only spend $200. You will prove to yourself that you can eat for $200 and not starve, and you’ll also probably prove to yourself that it’s not actually that hard.

Having done it, you’ll also probably have ideas for how to improve the experience. Tastier meal ideas. You’ll know which ingredients from the store to stock up on and which to avoid.

In a few months you’ll be just as happy with what you eat as you were before, because you’ll have increased your skill, and you’ll have only been spending $200/mo on food the whole time.

You can apply the crowbar method to all sorts of lifestyle/behavior changes:

• To go carless for a month as an experiment, park your car, give your keys to a trusted friend, and tell them that they are only to give your keys back a) in a month or b) if you give them five hundred dollars.
• To drink less alcohol, drink no alcohol.
• To spend less on restaurants, stop going to restaurants.
• The ultimate crowbar method is the No Buy Year.