Carl Richards is a Certified Financial Planner™ and creator of the Sketch Guy column, appearing weekly in The New York Times since 2010. The following article is reproduced with permission from his weekly newsletter and his website can be found here.
Greetings, Carl here.
Today, I want to ask you… “Why?”
That is, I want you to ask yourself.
“Why do I invest a certain way?”
“Why do I spend what I spend?”
“Why do I save as much (or as little) as I do?”
The reason I want you to ask yourself these questions is because “Why?” is a question we tend to avoid.
That may be because “Why” is scary. It may be scary because we don’t know the answer. And honestly, we may not know the answer because we don’t want to know the answer. After all, the moment we start questioning our true motivations, we’re likely to discover that some of what we do doesn’t line up with what we say we believe.
For example, if I say that time with my children is the most important thing in my life, but I work long hours to manage a big car payment, then I’ll be forced to deal with that conflict.
Questioning your motivations will also lead you to discover things about your decisions simply because you’ve never thought about them before. Like the fact that it’s not just your kids who are subject to peer pressure.
This type of introspection isn’t easy. I suspect it’s one of the key reasons we do dumb things with money. We’re afraid to know why we do what we do, so we don’t take the time to question our behavior.
But here’s the thing: Asking ourselves why we make a certain money decision is integral to our financial success, even if it takes a bit of time and effort to reach an answer.
So go ahead… ask yourself, “Why?”!
Why not?
…
-Carl
P.S. As always, if you want to use this week’s sketch, you can buy it here.
