Exploring the choice tree, commitment, and reserves

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:}

The Choice Tree

You might not see it, but right now you’re at a fork in the road, and if you’ve made a series of money blunders, it’s not too late to travel a better path.

Each choice we make leads us down a path to a new point. And each point, or “node” gives some new choices. Life doesn’t present these decision points as clean nodes on a map, but usually as strange doors opened that couldn’t have existed on an alternative path; you can’t earn the basketball scholarship if you never play basketball.

The visual benefit of choice trees comes from the precise pictures they paint. They detail an understandable route to better nodes, better outcomes, better lives, all from our current standing.

If you make a series of negative choices, traveling down negative branches, you’ll see that you’re not too far away from a better spot. Without the visual, we are left to grapple with feelings or logical understandings of our position. And if the position feels bad, or seems bad, this muddies the water, disabling our objective, unemotional view.

The visual shows a path to recovery.

The bad trades, the bad purchases, the bad money beliefs can pull us down the wrong path. But that path doesn’t gate you from better nodes.

At these nodes, you can distill your vast choices down to two decision branches: do or don’t do, spend or don’t spend, invest or don’t invest, save or don’t save. Each unique branch spins off a node that grows two additional branches, and so on.

Think about the kind of doors that might open on each path, those second/third order consequences and opportunities that are unique to each branch.

Will X lead to a higher chance of good outcomes? Should Y be avoided at all cost? What might open up if I go down this path?

The choice tree lets us see an extrapolation of our small decisions. You can see the end of the path you’re headed down. Importantly, you can see all the exit signs to get off the wrong road and back on course.

Whenever you use navigation on your phone, you’re presented with multiple routes. Money and life are similar. Not all paths look the same, some might take longer to arrive. But you’ll get there.

Where do you stand on the tree now? Draw a diagram out for yourself — what small positive branch items will move you up?

_{Two quotes on commitment}

Promises, hopes, well-intentions are all good things. They’re idealistic. However, without dogged commitment standing firmly behind them, they’re hollow, empty artifices that project an aspirational self-image, rather than an actual self-image.

_{Three questions on reserves:}

Building cash reserves can seem overkill at times. You see a decent balance, you never touch the funds, so why add more? You’re stitching a financial safety net in case you fall.

1. How much cash do I have on reserve?

2. How many months of no income or half of my income would this cover?

3. If it’s less than enough, what might I do, what goals can I shift to get the reserves where they need to be?

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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