So here’s a confession, right around the same time I started brokeGIRLrich, I also started a blog called chubbyGIRLthin (yes, not the most PC name, though I was also talking about me, so I think I can call myself whatever I want – it was also 2013, different times).

I think of this blog from time to time because there are a lot of similarities between a personal finance journey and a fitness journey, yet I actually weigh about 10 pounds more than I did 7 years ago, as opposed to actually being the weight I wanted to be then (and actually I guess is still around my goal weight now), but my finances are on point.

• I seemed to start both journeys from a place of near total ignorance.
• I had a bunch of debt to pay off and about 20 pounds I wanted to lose.
• I had zero habits in place to succeed at either goal.
• I had a pile of weird challenges and hurdles in front of me to succeed at either goal.

Here are a few of my thoughts on why I succeeded at one and not the other, but I think the biggest is:

I got the biggest emotional payoffs from the money wins as opposed to the physical wins.

My bank account creeping up $10 a week was more motivating to me than losing half a pound.

Also, a lot of personal finance was setting up systems and leaving them alone to do their thing. I am very lazy sometimes. I also work crazy jobs with crazy hours most of the time – so this was a really useful thing.

On the flip side, there’s nothing passive about healthy choices. You can start to integrate some things into your life so that they are automatic, but I would argue that stopping by HR and increasing your 401k contribution 1% or 2% takes a lot less overall work than training yourself to buy apples instead of cookies at the grocery store.

In those first steps, there was a lot of experimenting. I wrote about the personal finance experiments a few weeks ago, but the same was true with fitness. I had to research and try recipes. I had to go through a few weeks of fails trying to balance a healthy number of calories with foods that gave me enough energy to not be the Hulk of hanger. I don’t actually think I ever really found that balance.

And exercise. Man. Endorphins are a joke. More power to those of you who can find some joy in exercise, there is just none for me anywhere outside a pool, which is a super limiting factor.

Here’s an interesting thing I’ve found personal finance-wise that perhaps applies health-wise too but I never made it that far down the journey.

If something messes with one of my personal finance goals now, and I have to do something unpleasant for a while to continue achieving it – I can. I am invested in this journey. I have financial discipline muscles for days. I will pivot and make it work until I can figure out ways to optimize the new path I had to forge or until my old path is ok again and I can return to it.

It makes me suspect that if I could’ve gotten into a fitness groove with something tolerable, that I could’ve learned to force myself to pivot for a little while to something different if I had to in order to continue achieving those same gains.

But it takes quite a while to reach that level. I would say financially it took several years, and a lot of experiments, because the outcome of several of those experiments were – it works, but I don’t like this. I can tap that knowledge when I have to.

In the beginning, plenty of experiments were also – I don’t like this and it doesn’t work – which is real frustrating.

Also, the further into the personal finance journey I go, the more wiggle room I have to course correct before anything goes wildly wrong.

For instance, instead of budgeting, which I did at first, I now track my expenses. At the end of the month, I tally up what I spent (which I didn’t worry about all month – though that is in part because of the discipline muscles I built up earlier and being fairly well aware of where things are going, even if it’s not to the penny).

If I was super off in my estimates, the next month I cut back a little and then check again at the end of the month. So far, this has always put things back in balance.

This wasn’t an option at first. I had to be super rigorous for a while because I literally didn’t know where my money was going. I didn’t know how to pick retirement accounts or brokerage accounts. I didn’t know what an HSA was or what its annual limits were.

I had to plod through those things bit by bit.

And honestly, as a lower income earner, learning where my money was going and automating some savings made the biggest difference.

I did a bunch of frugality experiments, which are super empowering, by the way. Don’t let anyone ever get you down about needing to earn more because that can feel impossible at times.

But researching and trying ways to save money, you could honestly start today, and it gave me some control.

After a while, the feeling of being in control of my money also gave me the confidence and hope that trying some other experiments might increase my income too.

Things that seemed laughably impossible at the beginning of the journey became pretty reasonable – not even all that far into the journey.

I don’t think I ever reached these points with fitness. It never feels like there are payoffs. It always feels like a struggle. And so I just give up and decide to accept how I am (which, is like fine, good self-esteem is important, but it would be healthier for me to weight a few pounds less).

Anyway, the point of all this rambling is just to remind us all that some journeys are easy to start and some start, stall, start again, take three steps backwards, and then fester for years in neutral before getting anywhere.

It was also an attempt to motivate myself to take a bike ride. We’ll see if that happens today.

What is one tip that helped you start on either a finance or fitness journey that you felt was really helpful?