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Exploring the coffee cup, survival, and quantity

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

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_{One tool to experiment with:}

The Coffee Cup:

For all the coffee drinkers, have you ever had too much coffee? Not in the sense of becoming over-caffeinated, but purely on the enjoyment side?

When you reach for that second, third, or fourth cup, it doesn’t taste like the first one. It becomes a little less valuable to you. By then, the caffeine has flooded your brain and you’re ready for something else. 

In a way, our money is the same. We might get a lot of enjoyment on our first purchase, but when we keep hitting the buy button, it feels less enjoyable than it did early on. We become numb to the way we felt on the first purchase. 

This is a result of the law of diminishing marginal returns. That’s a dressed up way of saying this: each additional thing that we buy delivers a smaller and smaller increase in value. And if we keep the purchase ball rolling, we can breach into negative returns. 

In our coffee example, negative benefit might be headaches, or dehydration, or even an aversion to the joyous drink. 

Our brains assume we will pull equal, linear value from each added rep, but it’s not always true. So we trick ourselves into over-indulging, over-spending, all to end up in a frustrating state of confusion: why doesn’t increasing consumption bring increasing joy?

The question plagues us. If income is good, how can adding more be bad?

Let’s say you work a low stress job and make $60,000 per year. It’s routine, has a good amount of work, but nothing to take home. You have job security and you don’t come home stressed. The income lets you live a pretty good life.

But a promotion comes along. And with the promotion comes more work. More work brings less creative time than you had before. You might even manage people now. Your new role leaves you more stressed than you were before. There’s performance pressure. Last minute presentations that you must take home to tweak.

Yes, you have more money, but what did you give up to get it? 

There can be negative consequences with too much of a good thing. 

I used to go to Starbucks most days during the week. Venti dark roast, no cream. It was a rhythm. But I started to notice something odd. Something that changed the way I went about my day. What I noticed was a sense of familiarity, or expectation around the drink. It had become a part of my day — I had gotten used to it. And when this happened, I valued the trip to Starbucks less. I valued my venti dark roast less.

I remembered the feelings I would get when my trips to Starbucks were less frequent. The feelings were worth more on those infrequent visits than the fourth stop in the same week.

It was a treat that became a tired routine. One that took something I enjoyed into the negative return zone. 

It’s tricky to identify areas where you might be over-consuming and experiencing these diminishing returns. But it’s worth experimenting and cutting ties with some suspects you might have. 

This space, or distance, will help you right-size the relationship. To value it more when you resume your spend. 

_{Two quotes on survival:}

Understand your downside risk — you don’t need to do it big, you only need to survive long enough to reap the rewards.

_{Three questions on quantity:}

1. Where have I been trying to find the solution instead of a bunch of possibilities?

2. What if I focused on quantity and edited down to quality?

3. What if I tried to come up with 100 average ideas instead of pushing through the pressure of curating one or two good ideas?

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]