Mindfulness

Here’s a paradox: 

1- I know people who have more money than they will ever need but are totally insecure.
2- I know people who have almost nothing but are totally secure. 

The conclusion this forces me to draw is that if security exists at all, it is a feeling… not a number. 

The good news is that means we can have some control over it. 

The bad news is that means it’s up to us to learn how.

-Carl

P.S. As always, if you want to use this sketch, you can buy it here.

I want to share something with you that might feel a little bit heavy. You may also wonder what it has to do with money. 

The truth is, it doesn’t have anything to do with money. Not everything I share does. 

In fact, this has to do with something more valuable than money, and that’s how we treat each other. 

So let me tell you a story. 

I was in the airport when I found out one of my best friend’s mother had just died quite suddenly. She was at dinner with a friend, felt sick, and was gone within a few hours. 

I learned this through a message from my mom, who heard about it on the local news. 

I called my friend. 

Imagine this scene for a second: There I am, in Terminal 2 of the San Diego airport, calling someone whose mother had just died. 

He answered. He was crushed. We cried. 

His mom was one of the few people who always saw past my stupid behavior in high school. She always loved and accepted me, despite my being quite unlovable at the time. She gently influenced me to be better by not trying to influence me at all. 

She was amazing. 

My friend knew that better than anyone. He told me about her last moments in the hospital. He told me about begging the doctor to do more. 

Life. Is. Heavy. 

And then I boarded a plane. I thought about everyone else on the plane. I wondered if the airline employee scanning my boarding pass could see that I had been crying. Were my eyes red? Swollen? I wondered if there would be room for my bag in the overhead bin. If the person next to me would be nice. 

In that moment, I couldn’t help but think about how odd the situation felt. All around me were strangers. I knew no one. And as far as I knew, no one had any idea what I was dealing with. I thought about the flight attendant, the man sitting next to me, and the woman across the aisle. Did they have a sick child or a friend in the hospital? Were they on that plane in a race against time? What about the person who had been yelling at the gate agent or, for that matter, those who were yelling on Twitter while I checked it standing in line? 

As I turned away and stared at the Pacific Ocean through the little window from my seat on the plane, I was left with a bunch of grief and two big questions. 

What burdens are all the people on this plane carrying? And how would I treat them differently if I knew? 

In the moment, this was a very emotional experience. I wanted to treat everyone the way we all deserve to be treated. I wanted to give everybody room. I wanted to be more patient. 

What’s crazy is that just a week later, I was rushing through another airport and tapping my foot impatiently as the guy in front of me fumbled with his things in the security line. That feeling of goodwill faded away so quickly. 

I don’t want it to fade away. I want to hold on to it. 

How do we do that? How do we hold on to that feeling of goodwill? 

I don’t know the answer… but I do think asking the question is a good start. 

-Carl

P.S. As always, if you want to use this sketch, you can buy it here.

We only have so much time, energy, and attention. So how do we decide where to place our focus? 

To figure out the answer to that question, I like to ask myself two other questions: 

1- Does it matter?
2- Can I control it? 

Unless the answer is yes on both counts, you can stop thinking about it. Because if it doesn’t matter, then who cares; and if you can’t control it, then why worry about it? 

For me, the list of things I can stop thinking about includes: 

1- Whether my children get into college or not (because I can’t control it).
2- Whether I could have saved $5 on groceries by going to a different store (because it doesn’t matter).
3- Whether the stock market is in flux right now (because I can’t control it).
4- That guy who cut me off in traffic (because it doesn’t matter).

As I drive home from work not thinking about any of those things, I am suddenly freed up to think about things I can control and that do matter. For example: 

1- How I treat my children, regardless of whether college is a good fit for them or not.
2- How I can get my shopping to align with my values.
3- How I behave when stock market fluctuations happen.
4- Learning to count to 10, taking a deep breath, and letting go when other drivers act like jerks. 

Just imagine what might happen if you quit worrying about things you have no control over and quit obsessing over things that don’t matter. 

Where else might you be able to invest that extra time, energy, and attention? 

-Carl

P.S. As always, if you want to use this sketch, you can buy it here.

One of the most challenging personal finance issues we all face is an ever-expanding definition of “need.” 

Things we once thought of as clear luxuries somehow become necessities, often without any consideration of how the change in status happened. 

Cars that seemed just fine a few years ago now seem old-fashioned. Remember when the idea of giving a kid a cell phone—much less an iPhone and iPad to boot—seemed outlandish? 

Of course, I can’t help but ask the following questions: 

• What if financial happiness is not about getting more but about wanting less? 
• What if things start out as wants and become needs not because the thing itself has changed but because our feelings about it have changed? 
• What if you can never really get enough of something you don’t need? 

Look, we all know that the shiny new toy we just had to have often ends up in the pile of things we need to sell at a garage sale or donate to charity. 

This is yet another example of why personal finance can be so complex—because there’s no definitive list of the 100 things that every family must have. So these decisions end up being incredibly personal. 

But don’t despair… Over the years, I’ve gathered a couple of righteous tricks from personal experience and feedback from readers like you. To help draw a line in the sand between “want” and “need,” try the following: 

1- Don’t buy things immediately.
Sleep on the decision overnight. Pro tip: This works for e-shopping, too. Before I buy a book on Amazon, it has to sit in my cart for at least 72 hours. 

2- Implement a “Stuff” quarantine.
Nothing new comes into the house without sitting in the garage for three days. Then, if you still feel like you need it… it comes in. Otherwise, it can be returned to the store. 

3- Use the One In, One Out rule.
For every single thing you bring into the house, one thing has to go out of the house (and not into the garage… ​far, far away). You can do this with books, clothing, anything. 

The important thing is to engage in the process of trying to get clear on the difference between what you want and what you need. 

Put some space between yourself and the impulse to buy, and use that space to reflect.​

-Carl

P.S. As always, if you want to use this sketch, you can buy it here.

Humans make decisions first and then do their research. That’s backward.

For years, I didn’t even know I was doing this. Every time I had an idea for a new creative project, I’d run it past my friend Jason. I would gather evidence to prove how great it would be, and then I would call Jason to have him confirm it. Which he did, every time I called. After repeating that process countless times, and having many of those projects fail, one day, my wife asked me when I was going to stop calling Jason.

Of course, my wife was right. In fact, there’s even a name for this behavior. It’s called Confirmation Bias—the process of making a decision, then gathering evidence that supports what you’ve already decided, and summarily dismissing anything that disagrees with you. It’s a pretty dumb way to operate.

The tricky bit is how hard it is to break this behavior pattern. But I have found one thing that seems to help. I call it the Confirmation Bias Prevention Program. Here’s how it works:

1. Find someone who disagrees with a decision you’re about to make (an anti-Jason).
2. Ask them why they disagree with you.
3. Carefully listen to what they have to say.
4. Continue listening until you can honestly say, “I understand why you believe that.”

The Confirmation Bias Prevention Program isn’t an ironclad guarantee that you won’t fall into this trap. But what I’ve noticed is that it does seem to provide me the space to consider the possibility that I might be wrong, and every once in a while, that realization stops me from making a costly mistake.

-Carl

P.S. As always, if you want to use this sketch, you can buy it here.

Worry is a terrible strategy for solving problems.

But I have a confession to make: for a very long time, it was the only one I knew.

For example, each time I wrote a column for The New York Times, I was worried my editor would say, “Sorry, Carl, this just isn’t very good, I’m afraid that is the end of the Sketch Guy.” And then I would have to crawl under a rock, never to be heard from again.

I would bring my worries to my business partner (AKA wife). I would go on and on about, “What are we going to do if this happens?!” And when she seemed totally calm, I would say, “Aren’t you worried?!”

Because she’s generally unflappable, she would say, “I could be, if you want me to be, but I don’t see how it would help.”

It might feel like worrying helps. But as Shantideva put it:

“If you can solve your problem, then what is the need of worrying? If you can’t solve it, then what is the use of worrying?”

Worrying endlessly about something that may or may not happen in the future doesn’t help. But making a plan for what to do if that thing comes to pass does.

So now, when I catch myself starting to worry—which is often—I try to sit down and make a plan. And then I take that plan, file it away, and stop thinking about it.

That’s it. I don’t need to worry about that scenario anymore because I have a plan.

Next time you find yourself in one of those cycles of worry, remember what Shantideva said. Action is a strategy, worry is not. So make a plan, put it away for safekeeping, and get back to work.

-Carl

P.S. As always, if you want to use this sketch, you can buy it here.

Living in Park City, Utah, I have often found myself feeling hopelessly inadequate. It seems like everyone is a top athlete of some sort. From mountain biking to running to climbing and skiing, you just know that everyone you see in the local grocery store is elite at something.

And then, there’s me. Competent, sure. Competitive, to a degree. But not a pro. And while everyone is super-encouraging, it’s hard not to get a bit overwhelmed by how much better everyone else is. And we all know what immediately follows a feeling of hopeless inadequacy: envy.

Of course, envy is not confined to the ski slopes. Now that we all spend countless hours on social media, it seeps into seemingly every aspect of our lives. And nowhere does envy raise its ugly head more than with money. 

When I think about envy, more than Park City, I think back to an op-ed I read in The New York Times way back in 2014 that opened with this line: “In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough.”

Stop and think for a minute about the envy behind this statement. Something good happened to this guy, but in his mind, it wasn’t good enough because he knew there were other people who received more. Who gets a $3.6 million bonus and gets angry about it? 

Well, probably the kind of person who compares themselves to anyone who seems to have more than they do. AKA, all of us.

It’s easy to get angry at the Wall Street bro and ignore how we are guilty of the same exact feelings of envy. But just look at how we engage on social media. We’re constantly focused on making it look like we have a better life than everyone else. But even as we take our own pictures and apply filters to our world, we’re flipping through other people’s photo streams and feeling envious about what we see. It’s a hard cycle to break.

The interesting thing about that op-ed is that it didn’t finish the way I expected it to. The ex-trader eventually realized that his envy and addiction to wealth were hurting him, and he left his job. The decision didn’t come easily. He feared walking away from the life he knew (and the seven-figure bonuses). But luckily, he found a way to break the cycle of envy and discovered what actually made him happy. And it turned out it had very little to do with what the guy next to him earned as a bonus.

In fact, it turned out that, for him, it had everything to do with learning how to believe that he had “enough.” On Wall Street, the idea of “enough” simply didn’t exist. It was like a fairy tale or a story for children. Again, this isn’t just the case on Wall Street. The experience of feeling like you never have “enough” describes social media to a T. You know this is true. As you endlessly doom scroll, how often do you see a picture and think:  “If I only had a little more money… If I only had a better body… If I only was better at [Insert Extreme Sport Here]…”? 

Let’s say all those things happened. Then what? 

There will always be something else we don’t have that someone else does, and our envy becomes a trigger for all the bad behavior we’re supposedly trying to avoid. 

After all, it’s really hard to focus on saving as much as we can and sticking with our financial plan if doing so gets in the way of having what we think we want right now.

-Carl

P.S. As always, if you want to use this sketch, you can buy it here.

We don’t know when to stop.

At least, I sure don’t.

Sometimes, on the way home from work, I’ll swing by the grocery store, buy a pint of ice cream, and eat it.

That’s right. The whole thing.

Yes, I know. That’s a LOT of ice cream.

I’ve noticed that a very interesting thing happens when I do this:

Bite 1: Best thing in the world, ever.
Bites 2-10: Really good.
Bites 11-15: Good.
Bites 16-20: Meh.
Bites 21+: OK, now I’m sick.

I learned this lesson the first time I ate a pint of ice cream in a single sitting.

And yet, for some reason, I still occasionally repeat the experiment.

Of course, this phenomenon doesn’t only occur with ice cream. This is a well-documented economic principle called Marginal Utility, and, you guessed it, it applies to money, too.

Beyond a certain point, having more money will not lead to more security, freedom, and happiness.

Because security, freedom, and happiness do not come from more money (at least, not beyond a certain point). They come from knowing when to stop.

-Carl

P.S. As always, if you want to use this sketch, you can buy it here.