The blank could contain pretty much anything, but usually it’s something we know would be good for us. For example, we may know we should stop carrying a balance on our credit cards, stop spending so much money, or start living on a budget.

But something holds us back.

I have that problem with exercise. I know I should do it, and I know it’s good for me. I even want to do it, intellectually. It’s just that I haven’t been very good at following through consistently on a long-term basis.

Well, you know what? I’m tired of holding myself back.

So I sat down and figured out what the barriers were.

In other words, I indulged in a huge whine-fest, but instead of just whining and feeling bad, I actually listened to what I was whining about and then looked for solutions.

For example, I find exercising really, really boring. Why is it boring? Because it’s in a gym. I do not like exercising for the sake of exercising. Give me a treadmill and I’m ready to quit after 5 minutes. It’s torture. Give me a city to explore and I can (literally!) walk around for 10 hours and love it. (Although my feet may not agree.)

So I need to find something to do that holds my attention and gives me a workout in the process. OK, that’s one barrier down. Then I moved on to the next one.

You can do the same kind of things for money-related “shoulds”. (It’s funny how similar money, diet, and exercise can be.)

What if what I felt I “should” do was live on a budget? What are the barriers to that? For me it’s an emotional one. I don’t even like typing the words “live on a budget”. In fact, I don’t have a budget. A budget makes me feel all controlled and restricted. But a spending plan is right up my alley. I enjoy planning out what I want to do with my money, and then doing it and making stuff happen. How fun is that? (Of course, that’s a budget. Shhh.)

Now not everything is going to be as easy as renaming “budget” to “spending plan”, but sometimes that’s all it takes — a little mental adjustment.

Figure out what’s holding you back. You’ll probably have to go beyond the first thing that pops into your head. Whine for a while, and write them all down. Then take a look at what they have in common, and what some possible solutions might be. Keep going until “yes but” no longer pops into your head.

It’s only when something unexpected or drastic happens that the reality hits. We lose our jobs, and it takes longer than we’d ever imagined to find a new one. Or we’re hit with medical bills. Suddenly we can’t seem to make ends meet any longer, and we wish we didn’t have those bills.

If you want to stop living beyond your means, the obvious answer is to stop spending more than you make. But in order to do that effectively, you need to examine why you’ve been living beyond your means. Go beyond the superficial when doing so.

Suppose you got laid off. Don’t just say, “Well the economy’s bad and I got laid off and had to borrow to pay my bills.”

Dig deeper instead.

Why did you have to borrow to pay your bills? Were you missing an emergency fund? Was it inadequate? Had you bought a car, figuring you could afford it because you could make the payments? Were you assuming that you would always be able to make them? Did you ignore the possibility of multiple things going wrong at once, or a worse-case scenario?

Or suppose that you just woke up one day and realized that you’ve been living beyond your means. If you can’t think of a particular even that was the trigger, it might just be a matter of your not having paid attention to your income and expenses.

Either way, look for factors that were within your control, and see what you could have done differently. Then see what you can do to change things, both now and in the future. Once you focus on things that are within your control (as opposed to focusing on outside factors like the economy), you become empowered to make changes in those areas.

In order to stop spending more than you earn, you’ll have to take things like emergencies and irregular events into account. There isn’t a single person in the world that will get through life without experiencing at least one emergency. Most of us will experience more than one emergency, and many unplanned or irregular events. Since these things are going to happen, plan for them.

If you look at your bills and don’t have any wiggle room, start brainstorming ways to make extra money and areas to cut. Wiggle room won’t just appear — it has to be created.

Be patient and persistent. Take things one day at a time. Every day that you change your behavior brings you one day closer to making a permanent change.

Are you one of them?

I was.

Two things changed for me though. One was completely unexpected: I signed up for something called release point therapy, which was supposed to release stress and tension in the body and be vaguely similar to massage. The very first time I went turned out to be a life changing experience. It did release stress in my body, but it also affected me emotionally. Suddenly, I knew I could do those things I’d been wanting to do for so long. I sure am glad I went.

The other thing that changed was more recent. I was wondering why I’d been afraid of success for so long. I’d thought about this before, of course, in an effort to stop being afraid, but nothing had ever made any sense. After all, what would happen if I became successful? I’d be able to do the things I wanted to do and enjoy life more. Nothing to be afraid of there, right?

But this time it hit me, and maybe it’ll hit you too.

I thought back to some of the things I’d worked really hard on as a kid, and how I felt afterward. I was happy with what I’d done. I felt good. I was successful. Once a teacher even put something I’d drawn (and worked on for days) up on the wall.

Another kid came along and tore it up, leaving it hanging in shreds.

I cried when I saw it. All my hard work on something I’d really enjoyed and was proud of, and a complete stranger tore it to pieces? Why would they DO that?

That IS the kind of thing that happens sometimes to people who are successful. Think of movie stars, and all the gossip columns and detractors. Think of great comedians, with a heckler shouting from the audience.

The thing is, people are human, and their natural reaction to other people’s success is often to feel not-so-great inside. THEY want to be successful too. Maybe they want attention. Maybe they feel inadequate, or jealous, or whatever, in addition to or instead of being happy for you.

So their response to your success may be less than enthusiastic, at best. Sometimes the response is downright unpleasant. They try to tear you (or your work) down.

Maybe a fear of success is really a fear of being disliked or of dealing with unpleasantness. The thing is, even when we’re not successful, there will be people out there who dislike us or who are unpleasant. We may as well go ahead and succeed.

My own main IRA is with Zecco.com. My IRA there is a self-directed, which means that I choose when to buy and sell investments and what specifically to invest in. I’ve selected a huge variety of things, including ETFs and mutual funds, but am mostly investing in individual stocks now. I love using Zecco (especially now that they’ve improved their interface) but it took me a while to find a brokerage company that I liked and to get comfortable enough with investing to use a self-directed account.

There are many other companies that offer IRAs where you get to make your own choices about stocks and mutual funds. A few that I’ve tried are USAA, Sharebuilder, and Scottrade. Some companies allow you to invest in real estate as well.

If you’re a very hands-on person who loves doing research and are either experienced with investing or willing to become that way, a self-directed IRA might be right for you. You have to be comfortable making buy, sell, and hold decisions, and you must not be prone to panicking or getting greedy (since nothing protects you from yourself.) Self-directed IRAs are not for everyone. It suits my style perfectly though now.

If you’re comfortable with evaluating your tolerance for risk and understand the importance of asset allocation, but aren’t interested in individual stocks or managing investments from day to day, choosing a mix of funds from across the various types of asset classes might be more your style. You could choose good funds that align with your objectives and level or risk tolerance.

Using this method, you leave the choice of the individual stocks, bonds, etc. contained within the funds you’ve selected to the fund managers, and you just worry about the selection process and monitoring the overall progress instead. I do have a small IRA with Janus that is a single mutual fund, and I hold a few other mutual funds within my Zecco IRA as well. I selected all of those back when I didn’t feel as comfortable with evaluating individual investments. I suspect this is the most common way of handling IRAs. Many folks go through companies like Vanguard or Fidelity when using this method, but again there are many companies out there that you could use.

If your eyes glaze over when someone says things like beta, cost basis, or asset allocation, you may be more comfortable using a target date or life-cycle retirement fund, or with having a professional manage your retirement investments.

Target-date or life-cycle funds aren’t things that I have personal experience with, so I can’t say much about them. But the basic premise is that you pick the fund meant for the date you want to retire, and the fund manager(s) do all the work over the years. In theory the asset allocation is automatically adjusted as you get closer to retirement. It sounds like a sort of “set it and forget it” method of planning for retirement, but I don’t know how well it works. A quick Google search reveals a lot of criticism of these types of funds.

This leaves professionally managed IRAs. My husband uses this method, because he is not into investing, and I’m too chicken to mess with his retirement money. While I feel comfortable managing my own, I’d feel terrible if I made a suggestion and he followed but it turned out to be bad.

There are many different kinds of professionals who can take care of your IRA. Some are fee only (like the one my husband uses), and others get paid on commission (which means that they are probably interested in making sales.) If you go with a professional, I’d suggest picking someone with a fiduciary duty toward your money. That means that they must legally put your best interests first. Professionals with a fiduciary duty have to offer you investment choices that they believe would best meet your stated needs and goals, not just any investment that happens to align with your goals (but that may pay the best commission as opposed to being the best choice for you.)

Overall, it’s a matter of what will work best for you and what you are comfortable with. And there’s nothing that says you can’t change over time, if your needs or interests change. I’ve used every method (except for target and life-cycle funds) over the years and finally settled where I am now. Now matter which method makes you most comfortable, the important thing is to get started — and then monitor your investments and at least make sure that they aren’t doing worse than the market.

What has your experience been like in this area? Are you just getting started? Have you changed over the years, or did you find something that suited you right off the bat?

It also helps to review them regularly, so here’s how I’ve done on my goals so far this year:

• Finish funding my 2009 Roth IRA – Almost there! I could have polished this one off this month, but went ahead and made a contribution to my 2010 IRA instead because it was just easier to do it that way.

• Fully fund my 2010 IRA – Barely started on this one.

• Pay a minimum of $35 extra per month toward mortgage, and send additional as well – Making good progress here.

• Increase my income by at least 100% – Still working on this one.

• Reduce minimum regular expenses to $1800 or less – Not really happening.

• Practice moderation – This is probably the hardest one here. I need to set up some sort of measure so that I can see if I’m accomplishing it or not.

• Try something different every month this year – I’m doing OK on this one, although I still need to try something new for this month.

• Build up to exercising 2-3 times a week for at least 30 minutes each time – Hm. Working on this.

This cash doesn’t have to literally be money you can hold in your hand. It’s usually money that you have available in a bank account for daily expenses, future needs (both planned and unplanned), and desires.

Right about now you might be thinking, “Sure, it’d be nice to pay cash for everything. But let’s get real. Sometimes you have to borrow money to get ahead.”

Well, you can make sure that you have enough cash for the things you want and need without borrowing money. Sometimes what you have to be is patient and committed. I don’t buy things any longer unless I have the money available already. It took a while to get to this stage, but I did get here.

There are three keys to doing so: spending less than you earn, planning ahead for expenses, and keeping a sharp eye on your cash flow.

You see, it’s really having a positive cash FLOW that’s king. On an individual level, cash flow is essentially the movement of money in and out of your bank account. When you have more coming in than going out, you have a positive cash flow.

When you have a positive cash flow (and some good insurance), you don’t find yourself falling deeper and deeper into debt. Instead, you find more and more opportunities opening up for you. Getting to that positive cash flow takes planning and the ability to say things like “no”, “not right now”, and “how can I do this for less without sacrificing quality?”.

Before you can get to positive cash flow, you’ll need to see what you’re spending your money on, when you typically need to have it available to spend, and how much income you have coming in when. Remember to take things like taxes and other irregular expenses into account as well.

At first it will be hard to juggle things, because expenses rarely line up conveniently with income. To combat this, you can do things like changing the due dates for your expenses (where possible) and building up a cushion of cash that acts like an operating account.

Sometimes people have feast or famine type income, which was pretty common for me until a few years ago. In that situation, it’s important to remember that the famine is coming while you’re enjoying some of the feast. Setting aside more than enough for the future is critical when you’re flush so that you can slowly dole it out when you’re not.

Of course, increasing your income while maintaining or lowering your expenses makes it even easier to reach a positive cash flow. You can do this through side jobs, selling things you no longer need, asking for a raise, switching jobs, starting a new business, etc.

The beginning stages are usually the hardest part, but once you get through them things get easier and easier because you have more and more money available as time goes on. Then you can step up and take advantage of opportunities that folks who are cash strapped can’t. Cash (and cash flow) really is king.

I like that saying, because it reminds me that while I can’t change the past, now is exactly the right time for me to get started on (or continue working on) the things I want to do.

Financially, this means that I can start out each day by asking myself what I can do to move forward.

Saving money and investing is important to me, so I can move a little money toward those items — or at the very least I can ask myself whether what I’m about to buy is worth it before spending money.

It also means that I don’t need to keep actively kicking myself about that $1000 that I spent unwisely years ago, or about the time I withdrew money from my 401k.

Instead, I can focus on now. Now is exactly the right time — and the best time.