Money market funds and other passive spending barriers
Money market funds keep your money earning interest, and can be funded with direct deposit, making it easier to save money and harder to spend it – without extra effort from you.
In this 2001 file photo, young fan Dusty Bizub (with big brother Jonathan) reaches over a fence at Fort Lauderdale stadium in hopes of getting his baseball signed. Tangible barriers like park fences serve an obvious role, but intangible barriers – like putting 10 percent of your salary in money market funds, where it earns interest but is hard to spend – can create passive barriers to keep you in good habits or away from bad ones.
Andy Nelson / The Christian Science Monitor / File
In my most recent book, The Simple Dollar, I spent some time talking about passive barriers. A passive barrier is a small barrier that you set up that will make a particular bad habit more difficult to continue or, sometimes, make a particular good habit easier to repeat. Putting your cigarettes in a hard-to-reach place (or throwing them away) if you’re trying to quit or putting the television remote on the other side of the house from where the television is if you’re trying to cut down your television viewing are both passive barriers – they make continuation of a bad habit more difficult.
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The Simple Dollar is a blog for those of us who need both cents and sense: people fighting debt and bad spending habits while building a financially secure future and still affording a latte or two. Our busy lives are crazy enough without having to compare five hundred mutual funds – we just want simple ways to manage our finances and save a little money.
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Of course, there are many opportunities to utilize passive barriers in your own financial life. I certainly use them in my own life in order to subtly push myself into good financial habits.
Here are nine passive barriers you can utilize in your own life to encourage better financial results:
Hide your credit cards
Freeze them in ice (actually, I should make a post about doing just that…). Put them in an envelope in the attic. Delete the numbers from your online accounts. Cut them up, even. The entire point is to make it more difficult for you to gain access to your credit cards to use them for impulsive spending. If you don’t have the card with you, it’s pretty hard to buy something you don’t need on credit, isn’t it?
Set up automatic savings transfers
It’s easy to tell ourselves that we’re going to start saving, but the actual process of doing that can be challenging. You have to regularly make that transfer into your savings account and it’s easy to just forget about it, whether consciously or not. Instead, set up an automatic savings transfer that pulls a little bit out of your checking account each week and moves it into your savings. Boom – you’re saving money without the effort.
Set up automatic investing plans
You can do the same thing with most investing accounts. Set it up so that a certain amount is withdrawn from your checking account monthly and transferred to your investment account. Essentially, you’re doing dollar cost averaging without even thinking about it and building up your investment in whatever you choose to invest in without the opportunity to overthink.
Change your driving routes
When I commuted to work, I used to drive by a bookstore each day, both ways. I also drove by a coffee shop that had some killer bagels. Unsurprisingly, these two things would cause a lot of impulse buying on my part. The best solution I found was to simply start utilizing a different driving route to work, one that was basically the same length but took me through a residential neighborhood and near a football stadium instead of the commercial district. The impulsive temptation to stop more or less went away – a passive barrier.
Put your savings in a remote bank
Many people find success saving, but when that savings has built up to a good number, they give into temptation and spend it on a big splurge instead of holding onto it for emergencies. Often, this is made easy by having the money in a local bank, where you can easily access it via a quick stop at the bank. If you put your savings in a more remote bank, it becomes harder to just withdraw it on a whim and, often, you have to think about that withdrawal, talking yourself out of it.
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