We’re not bean counters
People often say they don’t know where to start with money. Financial advisors from coaches and counselors to Certified Financial Planners® to multi-million dollar investment managers know that the best place to start is expense tracking, but most of them also don’t have a go-to solution that they recommend because they don’t think you’re going to use it.
In other words, they want you to do something that doesn’t work.
Financial advisors are not stupid, and they’re not wrong, and they do want to help you. But there’s something they’re missing. Most budgets fail because they try to make you a different person: a quant. Even if you’re not the one crunching the numbers, the expectation is that you will operate the numerical machinery with dedication and sincere interest. Your success depends on this.
And we buy into this. Our natural human optimism can imagine what we believe to be a better version of ourselves, and we want to be that person. We believe that with a little help and enough self-discipline, we can become whoever we need to be, even if that person is a bean counter.
These delusions about personal finance go against every single lesson we know from behavioral psychology:
We’re more encouraged by meeting small goals than fantasizing about large ones.
We’re more likely to engage in activities that are actually fun.
We’re more successful in pursuits that we embark on with other people.
If you’ve tried a budget, whether it was an app or a spreadsheet template, it probably asked you about your biggest goals, tried to hold your hand through the entire process because it was so unfun, and left you feeling slightly more organized but no less lonely.
At Brightfin, we’re building social finance so we can do this differently. We’re going to make it small, we’re going to make it fun, and we’re going to do it together.
Photo by Victoria Druc on Unsplash