By Lena Vasquez, Community Features & Culture Editor

You ever notice how the house only gets cleaned fast when company’s coming in an hour?

You’ve had three free days. The mess sat there. Then suddenly the clock is ticking and somehow the floors are swept, the counters are wiped, and it even looks decent. Same hands. Same mess. Completely different result.

That’s Parkinson’s Law in action. Back in the 1950s a British naval historian named C. Northcote Parkinson published an article in The Economist positing that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Give a task a week and it’ll take a week. Give it ninety minutes and you’ll somehow get it done in ninety minutes.

Most of us live this every day and never name it.

Now flip it to money. Same exact law.

When you treat a budget like an absolute you get creative. You hit Walmart, the thrift store, and the dollar store. You use what you already have. You make stuff yourself. You happily accept hand me downs. You stretch. And somehow it works. You still eat. You still look presentable. You still show up.

However, when the number is soft and big, the spending just expands to meet it. Suddenly the nicer version of everything feels necessary. The upgrade. The extra. And somehow, even with more money, it still never feels like enough.

As it turns out, the limit is too high. You can do more with less. You just need to treat it like a necessity. Because the fact is it is. Most Americans spend too much money. Most Americans don’t have enough saved for an emergency or for retirement. 

This is not rocket science. It’s simply proof that when you accept working faster and stretch money farther as an imperative, you can do it. It’s always been about your mindset. 

As Jack Sparrow said in Pirates of the Caribbean:

“The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem.”

You don’t need more time. You don’t need more money. You need a more mindset that doesn’t accept excuses.