Move Up Your Accountability Timeline

So much of success with finances is maintaining the long-term view. It’s about balancing the actions you take today with what you desire for the future. Indulging less in what you want or need now for the sake of what future you will want or need.

The challenge with that, though, is that those long-term rewards (or consequences) take a while to show up.

It’s hard to force yourself to live below your means when so many benefits are potentially in reach today, for the sake of a fuzzy ‘future you’ that might want or need something even more later.

Outsmarting our brain’s dopamine-driven reward system is not child’s play. It’s legitimately hard to say ‘no’ to comforts today for the sake of an uncertain tomorrow.

That’s why sometimes you have to work with, well, how you work and move the reward (or consequence) up quicker.

For example, if you can’t trust yourself with using a credit card, but wish you could take advantage of the benefits of cashback and fraud protection, try moving up the accountability. You can use the card to process transactions, but then you pay the card off in full at the end of each week, or even each day. This ties your cash-must-be-in-the-bank accountability directly to swiping a purchase.

In a similar vein, you can structure rewards for the right habits. Need to pick up something at Target? You get Oreos (or whatever rewarding thing you choose) when you get home if you walk out with only what you went in for. Build in that reward to help you become a master procurer instead of a shopper who constantly falls prey to the “Target effect.”

Money management requires that we align our daily behavior with our long-term goals and values.

And that means becoming masters of human behavior, something much trickier than planning an ideal budget or using a fancy spreadsheet.

Remember to use all the tools you can to make the behavior side of money easier.

Make your good habits as immediately rewarding as possible, so you don’t have to wait three decades for ‘future you’ to look back and be grateful for your good choices.

Make your bad habits more immediately punishing, so you can’t avoid the negative reality of those choices for quite so long.

Because only when you learn to align today’s actions with your desires for tomorrow, will momentum and time work on your side to reach those goals.