I have two stories that have nothing to do with each other, but show how ease is one of the keys to our behavior.
When I was in high school, the principal would call several students on the intercom every week, and the way he did it drove me crazy.
In the middle of class, you could suddenly hear his big voice saying something like, “Next students, go to room D-103.” Then he named a dozen students from the school, and hung up.
Each time, confused students would get up and, having misunderstood the room number at the beginning of the message, would end up going to the office to ask where they should go.
This annoyed the director. The next time he said, “It’s important!” The students I am about to name, go to room C-308. And he named pupils. Again, many did not know where to go.
The more the year progressed, the more we felt the director’s anger rising. ” Listen carefully ! I will not repeat! “, And so on.
What drove me crazy was that all of this could have been avoided if the principal had simply named the students first, and the room second.
Hearing their name on the intercom, the students concerned would naturally have been attentive to the result of the message. But starting with naming the room, the principal expected hundreds of students busy doing other things to remember the number of a place that didn’t concern them and where they would never go, which is illogical. .
My second story takes place at the start of the First World War, when the coffers of the federal government were empty.
To raise funds, Ottawa introduced Victory Bonds, in which the public and businesses could invest for a period of 5, 10, 20 or more years, with interest.
It was successful, but not enough to finance the sending of hundreds of thousands of Canadians to the battlefields. After difficult debate, the government passed the Income War Tax Act in 1917, the country’s first income tax, which was to end with the war.
The government had just tasted an “easy” way to finance itself. You know the rest: the war ended the following year, but the income tax remained.
The moral of both stories is that if you want organizations or people to do something, it has to be easy.
Unsurprisingly, saving and investing work the same way.
Very often, we intend to save… only to realize at the end of the month that we have no more money to do so. Result: we end up with a savings rate of 2.9% in Canada today.
Don’t say I told you this, but it’s hard to get rich when you give 97% of your paycheck to others.
I could give you the best arguments for savings. But if saving is not easy to implement, I will have wasted my time (and yours).
To exploit inertia, saving and investing must be default choices.
Before paying others (restaurant owners, shop owners, cell phone companies, car dealerships, etc.), let’s pay ourselves. After all, we are more important than them. Why would we go last?
The best way to do this is to put it all on autopilot.
Want to fully contribute to your TFSA this year? It’s $17.80 per day. To contribute to a child’s RESP in order to receive the maximum grants from Quebec and Ottawa, it’s $6.85 per child per day.
If you have a brokerage account, you can schedule pre-authorized contributions to your various accounts (RRSP, TFSA, RESP, TFSA, etc.) every 1st of the month, or every payday, or even every day of the week if you want it. Then, a few times a year, you just have to buy investments with the money that has accumulated.
Investment services like Wealthsimple place the money automatically as soon as it arrives in the investment account. Same with money invested through a mutual fund representative.
The power of inertia is so powerful that we can also use it to better manage our investments.
“You’re going to get a statement every month,” he told investors. Don’t open it. Never open it. Don’t even take a look. »
Mr. Bogle suggested that people only open their statement on the first day of their retirement.
“And make sure you have a cardiologist on hand,” he added. Because you might drop dead! »
Getting rich should be easy. The more we remove the human from the equation, the more we increase our chances of getting there.
In addition to aiming for ease, all human endeavor, when you think about it, seeks to shrink the territory occupied by pain. We live in a house to protect ourselves from the discomfort of rain and wind. We take our car to escape the effort of walking. We buy online to avoid the inconvenience of shopping. Even paying by credit card reduces the pain of shopping. That’s why it’s so confusing to see a group of athletes not running away from pain territory, but staying there for 21 days. This is what came to mind while watching the new documentary series Tour de France: in the heart of the peloton, recently available on Netflix. Falls, tears, dust, screams of rage and joy: the camera takes us through the 2022 race from the perspective of the riders and their team. A captivating series that touches the limits of the human.
