Exploring the reset button, questions, and operating systems

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

_{One tool to experiment with:}

The Reset Button:

When’s the last time you hit the reset button?

If you’re stuck on a money problem, perhaps you need to clear the system and start fresh. Resets help provide a new landscape to explore. They give permission to back up and start again — to question the very assumptions we were running with in the first place.

Do you need to save such a high percentage of your comp? Do you need to have no debt in order to be free? Do you need to have “nice” things? Do you need to retire at a certain age? Do you need that tropical retirement home? Sometimes the very things we are running toward create the curious problems we can’t solve. Our relentless pushing is like hopelessly pulling on two ends of rope to loosen the knot.

When we try to solve problems from our current standpoint, we look forward, to the future, for what we need to change or alter. Resets allow us to take a coveted step back in time. It’s like time travel for decision making.

Comparing resets to lifting weights, periodically you need a deload week, or a reset period. This is due when the benefits of progressive overload plateau and you’re stuck. This reset gives your body the recovery time you need to heal and resume the progression in proceeding weeks. So if these resets are so valuable, why do we avoid them? I think it’s a natural hard-charging human response to keep pushing forward. To keep putting reps with what we know, rather than backing up and seeing if another avenue might make sense. We feel like resets are events of default, regression in our long-term plans. In actuality, the resets should be designed into the plan.

What are common things to reset?

• mortgage payoff

• debt payoff before retirement

• pay for things in cash

Let’s inspect paying for everything in cash. Where was this behavior learned from? Often we latch on to early learned behaviors and take them as unshakable facts, guide stones for the rest of time.

These truths fix us in a certain mindset that can be obtuse and obstructive. A problem we must navigate when dissecting these base assumptions is the emotional attachment to them. Inherently, long held beliefs are difficult to divorce.

By using “why” as your shovel, you can keep digging to the root of your original assumptions.

• Why pay for everything in cash? —> “Using debt is bad.”

• Why is using debt bad if you have the cash to pay off the liability? —> “I just don’t like debt.”

Once you get to the place where you can’t answer the why question without a “just because,” you’ve arrived to the iterative arena.

What walls have you confined yourself in? Press the reset button, knock those walls down, and take a fresh look at the open landscape around you. What if you did something differently?

_{Two quotes on questions:}

The quality of your questions determines the richness of your answers.

_{Three questions on operating systems:}

1. Where have I picked up most of my daily operating systems — peers, parents, podcasts?

2. Tracing back to the roots, when is the first time I remember adopting these beliefs or operating systems?

3. What if the people I adopted this system from were wrong, or what if an upgraded system would work more efficiently?

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]