Three steps to making personal finance sustainable

Seth Godin had a post last week called “Cognitive Load is Real.” Worth a read (his posts are short, it’ll take you 45 seconds).

In it, he writes, “Without habits, every decision requires attention. And attention is exhausting.”

A lot of people choose not to learn personal finance because it’s feel complicated and exhausting. It’s both anxiety-producing and avoidance-producing.

Here’s three steps to making personal finance sustainable:

  1. Learn the principles. Like with what we do in FF1 and FF2.

  2. Automate everything. Automate your savings and investing (profit first). Automate your bills (rent/mortgage, memberships, car etc). If you make your financial decisions fewer in number, the cognitive load will decrease.

  3. Do periodic checkups. Once every three months, see how everything is going and adjust.

I’m a strong believer that you have to keep learning (step 1). But the doing? Automate it.

Keep it simple, smarty.

read and listen in

You can read the SOFF newsletter Money and Money on Substack. Additionally, you can listen to the SOFF podcast, which features past students explaining their favorite lesson and what it’s meant to them years after the course. There you’ll get a good taste of what you’ll learn in FF1 and the fellow students you’ll meet in the course.