Prioritizing Personal Care And A Tip To Spice Up Your Marriage

When we are focused on saving and investing, it is easy to view personal care as an unnecessary luxury. We may view things like gym, medical check up, food supplements, facial, massages, manicures and pedicures as wasteful and unnecessary. As much as we can do without it, personal care is important and contributes to our overall well being.

After sitting in the office all week, nothing does your circulation good than a jog or a session in the gym. Both however have a cost implication. Jogging is free, but you need good running shoes to ensure the running doesn’t cost you your knees. A gym’s cost is obvious.
A massage once in a while is good for your circulation and relaxes your muscles. We may differ on nail colour, but we all agree gnarled, cuticle-ridden nails are unsightly.

So if all these things are necessary, why is it so hard to make them a priority? Most times we start out with every intention to do so, but other important and even less important things crop up and we lose track, maybe because the rewards don’t accrue immediately. The reward of a jog may not be as immediate as a new pair of shoes, or a night out with friends for example.

I have of late made personal care a priority, and my method may be helpful to you.

1. Make personal care a separate budget line: for the longest time, I got my personal care money from a pool I have named “pocket money” in my budget. The problem with this approach was that Pocket Money had other exciting uses, and personal care would get bumped off the spending list.
Last month, I made it a main budget line to ensure that every month I spend on my body’s well being.

2.Plan for it: At the beginning of the month, I made a plan of the areas I intended to spend on, and I locked in the plan. For example, if I wanted to get 2 facials and a massage, I marked the dates and booked the appointments for the whole month.

3. Prepay like you do all your other bills: if you use the same consultants/specialists every month, I would advice to pay them a month in advance just like you pay all your other bills. That way, personal care won’t be bumped off the list when other things come up.

4. Make it free or as cheap as possible: be creative in making your personal care as cheap as possible. For example, you can learn how to do a home pedicure and manicure (I am learning this since my legs hurt too much to have it done in the salon). For the married people, take a massage course together, then every week take time to massage the kinks out of each other’s body. This may even be beneficial to your marriage 😉
Instead of gym, invest in weights, training bands and a couple of DVDs and do your workouts at home.

There you go. Take better care of yourself, you deserve it.