Exploring the radar, perfectionism, and practicing poverty

Welcome to the Intentional Dollar weeklynewsletter — 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 Radar

In the new-ish Top Gun, Tom Cruiseillustrates that you can fly undetected, undeterred, and directly through enemy lines. But there’s a catch. You must fly low enough to avoid registering on the radar. Failure is lethal. Trip the radar and enemy fighters and missiles will hunt you down.

When it comes to our personal finance defense systems, flying under the radar is not so good. Flying low here represents all the little expenses that come in undetected. The trouble is we let these small enemies in often.

I have an experiment for you.

Sort your Excel, Google, and mental money sheets by the smallest to largest dollar value of your expenses for the month. Count the number of expenses that are under $25 and divide by your total monthly expense count. What’s the number?

If your money radar works anything like mine, then that number is a high percentage. This makes intuitive sense, yes, because we aren’t tossing hundreds out daily. This should naturally lead to a higher bin of lower dollar expenses. But separating at $25 or lower lets us see a higher percentage of the fluffy expenses.

We tend to be loose with low dollar amounts, and that’s because the weight of these small “$5 here and $5 there” transactions is lost on us.

These small amounts are harmless in quiet isolation. It’s when they are taken together, tiny expense on tiny expense, that fresh sunlight shines on the smoking craters left by innocuous $5 missiles.

Little ticket transactions bypass our alert systems because our clunky radars are filtered and focused on large threats. We let those small sales slide, and subsequently die an unceremonious financial death. Death by a thousand little cuts.

A short threat detection test runs before we spend. Our minds take a rapid pass of the radar and assess the financial impact of the looming transaction. Small transaction? No problem. No intervention needed here, spend away. Repeat these loops 20-30x in a month and we are looking at real money.

These mental shortcuts save brain computing time at the expense of our future selves.

The easiest way to combat the cuts is to reprogram the radar. To inspect each expense as an integral part of the larger group. By seeing $5 for the $500 that it will be at month-end.

Bound together, the expenses would have never made it through your defenses. Your radar would have properly flagged and eliminated the hazard before any damage was done. So you have to learn to see the little undetectable blips by making them detectable — done through adjusting your focal point.

While you run this experiment and come up with your percentage, know that the inverse of this principle stands tall and true as well. Small things coming in can hurt us, and small things going out can help us.

This experiment will bring awareness to your undetectable spend. The awareness gives you a fighting chance for defense.

_{Two quotes on perfectionism:}

Waiting for the perfect financial plan, investment, time, or opportunity is standing still and hoping to move forward. It’s a burning match that incinerates your mortal seconds. Act and iterate.

_{Three questions on practicing poverty:}

1. What if I lived a month like a monk?

2. What’s holding me back from wanting to engage in this experiment? What might I gain from this?

3. Who can I recruit to try this with me?

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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