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Exploring 365 dollars, endurance, and free time

Welcome to the Intentional Dollar weekly newsletter — great work taking this small step to move your money forward. I’m Logan, a Certified Financial Planner™, and I’m excited you’re here!

What’s inside?

• One tool to experiment with

• Two quotes from others

• Three questions to dig deeper

• Four lines of poetry for the point

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. These weekly posts represent my simple thoughts, a few quotes, and some questions — for educational purposes only.

_{One tool to experiment with:}

365 Dollars

You smoke cigarettes if you’re a smoker, you go fishing if you’re a fisher, and you save money if you’re a saver.

You act in accordance to thoughts you believe to be true. And with a little inversion, we can flip this to see the other side: we think ourselves into action that fulfills and satisfies our identities.

So in a way, we fulfill our own destiny.

Identity is our internal visual structure of ourselves. These visuals are nestled in with the evidence of what we’ve done. You do, think, and feel things that a person like you, one with your identity, would do, think, and feel.

Still unsure? Take a mental glance deep into the crevices of your past. Who were you? Maybe you were the same, but I’m betting against that. You’ve changed and likely for the better. Some of your past interests might hang around. But your earned experience in time’s strange void, filled with memories authenticated through dusty photographs and stories told from friends, has changed you.

You see with new eyes.

Experience colors the world. It gives me my perspective, and it gives you yours. Your values are shaped and molded from this experience.

Take two hypothetical friends that work the same job, for the same pay, at the same company. In all areas of life, save one, they are indistinguishable. They buy the same clothes, eat the same food; they spend the exact same dollars — except for one area. And that’s on cars. Frugal friend 1 buys the car that gets the job done, a “point A to point B” kind of person. But frugal friend 2 thinks differently. This friend spends quite a bit more on their car because they want a safe and reliable vehicle. 

Two years ago, frugal friend 2 was in a car accident, the sole defendant was a faulty feature from an old “gets the job done, point A to point B car.” This one experience changed friend 2 forever.

This scenario is complete fiction; it’s not real. But it shows that experience shapes what we do with our money. How we allocate money is telling of the values and the identities we hold. And over time, how we allocate money will create, alter, or reaffirm the values and identities we own — we are fluid.

Now, let’s reshape your money identity through the intentional creation of positive money experiences.

At the start, we noted that savers save. Just like a non-smoker won’t get the craving and the want for a cigarette, a non-saver won’t catch a want to save from a passing wind. You have to force it. It’s almost like we’re creating a positive addiction pathway.

The goal is to increase the quantity of saving repetitions we get. This stacks the odds of success in our favor. The common saver stashes their dollars on a once-a-month or twice-a-month frequency, boring. What I’m proposing today is a daily savings rate: $1 per day.

That’s $365 a year, and that’s 365 reps per year — reps that will let you earn the “saver” identity. And how could you not be a saver if you saved each passing day?

Labels are powerful. Use this tool to brand yourself with a good one, one that turns you to a magnet to better money thoughts.

_{Two quotes on endurance:}

Your investing career presents an opportunity for endurance. Endurance of the panic induced declines, and endurance of the process of unlocking astronomical growth through compound interest, one slow dollar at a time.

_{Three questions on free time:}

1. If time is currency, what am I spending on throughout the day?

2. What if I kept a log of my free time for a given day?

3. How might I retool some of this time to higher return tasks?

Which question stuck with you? Questions like these are spotlights for the mind. Reply to this email and let me know which one shined light on a previously dark cave.

_{Four lines of poetry for the point:}

Contact Me:

Content ideas, questions? Reply to this email or reach out to me at [email protected]

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. These weekly posts represent my simple thoughts, a few quotes, and some questions — for educational purposes only.

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