A recap of two key thoughts in earlier posts about changing money habits:

1. Your brain has two systems operating together at all times: your rational brain and your instinctual brain. Don’t pit them against one another – your rational brain will nearly always lose. Or, in real life, you will buy the coveted item you can’t afford against your better judgement. Or you will avoid facing facts. Instead, learn to work with both parts to achieve long term change.

2. Playing to your strengths is likelier to lead to success than trying to fix your weaknesses. Think about it a moment. When you are doing something well, you feel good, right? And you usually want to do more of it? Whereas if something is difficult, and you often fail, you prefer to avoid it, right? So. Let’s put your strengths to work, shall we?
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The first step is to identify your strengths. Here is an exercise to help you to just that.

Choose 8-12 people who know you reasonably well from your various walks of life. Coworkers. Friends. Teammates. Family. Professional connections. Customers.

Send them an e-mail or a letter asking them to provide anonymous (-ish) feedback about your strengths to you. I did this once for a professional development assignment at work, so trust me, it’s do-able!

Here’s some sample text.
***
Dear ___________________,

As someone who knows me through **XYZ** I would really appreciate your feedback on a personal undertaking of mine. I want to ensure I am making the most of my strengths during 2011. I am interested in hearing your thoughts on what you see as my strengths. I am asking several people for feedback. Your support by way of feedback would be invaluable to me.

If you are willing, would you please list for me 3 key strengths you see in me? If you are comfortable, providing an example of that strength in action will help provide clarity.

1. _________________
example:

2. _________________
example:

3. _________________
example

***

Then, you can provide them a link to a survey on survey monkey, or ask them to e-mail you directly, or to send you a letter back in a self-addressed envelope. Your Call.

Once you receive all the feedback, create a composite of your strengths. This is what you have to work with!

On Wednesday, it will be time to discover how to bring those strengths into play re: managing your money effectively.

For those of you who are daunted by this exercise: You may miss out on some hidden capabilities, but a simpler, more private exercise is simply to reflect on the matter over several days. What have employers said about you? Friends? What are some activities you excel at?

This is a guest blog by a coworker with a lively online persona … but not from my lips or typing shall his/her identity be revealed. I did manage to coax out this guest post on the all-too-common habit of eating out too much for our budgets to handle. Northerners or readers in remote places will particularly relate, I suspect!

Having a single income, owning a home with constant repairs needed, and living in the North where the cost of living is at an all time high makes a person consider setting up an IV system instead of paying for real food. Add to this the temptation of working downtown where there are at least half a dozen establishments with friendly staff waiting to take $20 and hand you a quick answer to the question “what’s for lunch?” and I’ve found myself looking at an empty bank account wondering what happened more than once.

One solution to this is to stop eating. A BETTER solution to this is stop impulse eating. When I moved out of my parent’s place at age 17, some of the advise my mom gave me was “always lock your door”, “cook big meals that can be frozen”, and “learn to budget”. The last two I’ve really taken to heart recently. Every pay day, I sit down and think of what I want to eat for the next two weeks until my next pay cheque. On my last shopping trip, I got everything I needed for breakfasts and lunches for 2 weeks for about $45, and everything I need for suppers for $50, including snacks and desserts. That is every meal I will need for 2 weeks for under $100.

When shopping for food, people tend to do it all in one place, which is understandable, but tends to lead you to do all of your shopping at higher end grocery stores where the meat and produce is fresher and readily available. Unfortunately this also means that the frozen and boxed items are more expensive. Frozen foods, preserves and dry goods are made to the same factory specifications, which from a freshness standpoint makes it a moot point as to where you actually pick them up. A can of soup is a can of soup. My tendancy now is to pick up all of my dry/frozen goods at a grocery store down town, which is the cheapest in YK, and then pick up my fruits/veggies and meats at a store closer to my house.

Another way I save on my food bill is to make a big meal every weekend and freeze the majority of it in single serving containers. If I make a soup or stew on the weekend in my slow cooker (which is a marvelous invention might I add), that will do me for a week or so. Now, the same soup for lunch every single day tends to get quite dull, which is why I make something different every weekend and stockpile my frozen meals. Lasagana here, stew there, pulled pork every once in a while, and I’m happy.

We as Canadians tend to waste a lot of food. One reason being that we buy too much of it, and we buy it on an impulse. When I got home from the store, I used to have to clear out some space before I was able to put any of it away, and a lot of the new items I was putting in the fridge was the same stuff I had just tossed out because I didn’t use it the last time. Just because it sounds like a good idea in the grocery isle, doesn’t mean that you will use it. I’ve also taken to looking at my grocery cart a lot instead of what’s on the shelves, either planning meals in my head and making sure I only get what I need, or just trying to aviod the “oh shiny” reaction to a new flavour of chocolate coated something-or-other that may catch my eye. When it comes to treating myself, I could justify pretty much anything, so long as there was carmel filling involved somehow. Now, it’s 1-2 treats tops per pay period.

All in all, this has made for a much smaller food bill, and a much healthier diet. No more coming home from the store feeling like I accomplished something, then realizing that I spent $100 or so on treats, and only have enough real food for maybe 4 meals. Who knew that taking my mom’s advise would work out so well .

-Luggy Deadnick

Readers: I eat out for lunch maybe once/week, tops. That’s partly due to the fact that I can walk home – in -30C, mind you – every day for lunch. How often do you buy lunch, and what do you attribute it to?

I don’t know about where you live, but I’d say it was somewhere in the mid-2000′s when Halloween became an event rivalling Christmas in Vancouver. It became seriously epic! A little warmer than in December, Oct. 31st is the perfect time of year to walk through neighbourhoods not trick-or-treating (albeit tempting) but looking at the spookily bedecked houses. Folks go all out – sound effects, coffins pop open as you walked by and gravestones are scattered eerily across formerly friendly lawns. (Check out this haunted house in Thornhill, Ontario!) And costumes are no longer just for the kids. Halloween has become a time when everyone can express their creativity and ghoulishness…. as you walk down Broadway or Robson …

It doesn’t seem to be quite as big a deal up here in Yellowknife, perhaps because it’s hard to wear costumes over parkas, but still it has a strong presence (as Nanook the SuperHero demonstrates).

Canadians are going to spend $1.5Billion on Halloween this year, an average somewhere between $60 – $75 per each and every Canadian.

I’ll fess up. Things have been so hectic for me the past few weeks that I haven’t spent a dime on halloween this year. Not a dime. It also means I’ve bunkered down in my apartment so nobody comes trick-or-treating – how lame is that! How ’bout you? Do you get into Halloween? How much did you spend? And what made it worth it?

Since being once-and-for-all put off the Mass Meat Industry after seeing Food Inc summer ’09, I’ve made an effort to mend my meat-eating ways.

I’ve ordered 1/4 pig and 10 chickens from a free-range organic farm in Alberta. And I committed to learning to fish..
I haven’t made much progress on this. To date: I went fishing with some friends and a guide last summer and literally prayed I woudn’t catch a damn fish and thank God I didn’t although every other person did and at least the guide was very quick at bonking the flopping living things swiftly so they then became very dead but still it was hard to eat the meat even though it had been deliciously panfried over an open fire and everyone else was pretty much having a fish-eating orgy but I wasn’t.

And that’s as far as it went.

So for 2010, when the opportunity arose to learn how to fillet a fish (bring your own knife; dead fish provided) I thought I should take it to the next level.

I learned a few things.

1. It’s easier to eat a fish that looks like this:

This friends, is what is derisively term a Jackfish, but we prefer to call it Northern Pike. It abounds up here. They are tough-spirited fish, and check out that set of teeth.

2. The steps to filleting a fish are:
a. Cut just behind the gills
b. Cut along the spine, from neck to tail
c. I forget how to get the side of the fish completely off next (I looked away)
d. To skin it, place your knife flat between the skin and the flesh. Keep your knife relatively motionless, but tug the skin towards you. You can cut a hole in the skin to put your thumb through (extra tugging power).

3. The stomach is apparently a delicacy. (I think I threw up in my mouth a bit) (probably politically incorrect)

So here’s what money’s done to me: it’s so disconnected me from the primal life-and-death biology of FOOD that even something as basic as fishing and filleting (we’re not talking pretty goldfish here, much less gentle cattle or smart pigs) has me all disoriented. Pathetic!

In contrast, our instructor was completely at ease.

Do I have any readers who fish?

If so: I wanna know – how did you get past all the squeemish stuff?

Give me a fish and I’ll eat a meal. Teach me to fish and I’ll save a lot of money, eat more healthfully, and live more sustainably. If I can keep it down.

Canadians wanting to donate to help efforts in Haiti -

super easy via your cel phone.

Text 45678

Type: HAITI

$5 will be added to your cel phone bill, and all proceeds go through Salvation Army to relief efforts in Haiti.

I just did it and it was as easy as that.