Three months ago, I experienced a problem related to my monthly household budget. My monthly expenses exceeded my monthly income. Therefore, I had to develop a workable monthly budget despite the deficit. According to Newell and Simon’s Approach, the initial state, which is the condition at the beginning of the problem, was the fact that the monthly expenses exceeded my monthly income ( Funke, 2014; Goldstein, 2014 ). The goal state, which is the expected solution of the problem, is to develop a monthly budget that can address all expenses without any deficit. With the aid of the mean-end analysis, I was able to find the solution to the problem.
Before the commencement of the mean-end analysis, I developed rules that governed the operator, which is the process of budget creation. The primary rules were that the basic needs for the month must be met by the available fund, and that all monthly bills must be cleared. Since basic needs, including food, clothing, and shelter, are necessary for survival, they could not be compromised during the budget creation process. In addition, the clearance of all bill was essential in ensuring that I maintain quality standard of living throughout the entire month.
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The primary goal of the mean-end analysis is to reduce the difference between the initial state and the goal state (Goldstein, 2014). To attain the goal state, I created subgoals. My first subgoals was to categorize my monthly expenses. This would help in the process of prioritizing expenses from the most important to the least important. Therefore, to attain my first subgoal, the expenses were categorized into monthly expenses on the basic needs, monthly expenses on bills, and monthly expenses on leisure and recreational activities. To help minimize the difference between the total monthly income and the total monthly expenses, I had to reduce my monthly expenses as much as possible. Based on the rules guiding the operator for achieving a workable budget, the monthly expenses on basic needs and the payment of bills cannot be ignored. Therefore, to attain my second subgoal, I had to postpone any expenses related to leisure and recreational activities.
My third subgoal was to source for additional sources of fund to help reduce the income deficit. Even after the reduction of my monthly expenses to the maximum possible amount, the monthly expenses were still more than the available funds. Besides, since expenses related to basic needs and bills cannot be compromised, I had to source for additional funds to help me pay for them. There were two possible options for acquiring additional funds- taking money out of savings or borrowing a lone. While borrowing a loan will provide the required financial support, it would have left me with debt that could have been difficult to pay. On the other hand, taking money from my personal savings would reduce my savings. Since saving would not attract any interest during payment, I decided to use my savings as the additional source of fund for the budget.
The reduction of the expenses and the provision of an additional source of fund helped to clear the budget deficit and thus helping solve the problem. The problem space of the problem solving incorporated the initial state, the goal state, and the intermediate states. A summary of the problem-solving process include the identification of the problem, the development of rules to govern the operator, the development of subtopics, and the identification of potential solutions, and arriving at one specific solution. Avoiding a loan and instead digging into personal savings helped me avoid loans. I eventually managed to restore my savings in the subsequent year.
References
Funke, J. (2014). Problem solving: what are the important questions?. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 36, No. 36).
Goldstein, E. B. (2014). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research and everyday experience . Cengage Learning.
