Good and Bad Barriers
We probably think about barriers in life in terms of them keeping us away from success. I think we can use them to keep us from harm.
If you ask me there are good and bad barriers in life and in finance. Let's explore.
A few weeks ago while there was a huge personal finance conference (The Fin Con) taking place in Washington, DC, the Smidlap Family was enjoying the The inaugural Smidlap Con 2019. Really that's just a fancy name for our annual cabin rental on a lake in the wilderness of NY State, but what the hell does that have to do with barriers!?
Despite the fact that we were in pristine wooded wilderness with clean air all around and hardly any people we didn't get out and hike nearly as much as I would have liked. The difference between our cabin and our home is that when I go and take a walk from home there is very little or zero barrier to the activity. I just leash up our trusty dog Banjo! and go down our front steps and start walking or running. After going for 5 minutes on sidewalks we can run most of the rest on grassy knolls and then some trails if we're ambitious enough to get that far. The barrier I used as an excuse at Smidlap Con is the location of our cabin in relation to paths where we can walk for awhile uninterrupted. Here's how it's all laid out: the cabin is about 1/3 mile down a dirt road from the main rural highway, which is not all that busy but isn't somewhere you would really choose to walk or run. If you turn the other way out the driveway the dirt road is a dead end surrounded by private property. So, in essence, you sort of have to go somewhere else to get any more than about a 10 minute dog walk.
This is a map of the cabin area.
The best alternative is to get into our automobile and drive a short ways to a nice wide trail that goes for 5 miles to Great Santonini Camp. This particular trail is nice and wide and allows mountain bikes and is large and maintained enough for a horse drawn carriage. It goes through some interesting woods and past some historical buildings that have been partially restored. It's real dog friendly in that I can pretty much drop the leash and only have to pick it up if we're passing other hikers/cyclists or a horse carriage. It always seemed to me that the parking area for this trail was 4-5 miles away from our cabin and I just wasn't used to needing to get in the car to take a walk/run at home and that created this mental barrier to doing something good for myself. It wasn't until the last couple of days I really took full advantage of this great trail and went running and walking where I should have been going every day that we didn't hike on a real trail. In my mind it was a pain in the ass to pack up a little day pack with dog water and drive to do it but here is the reality of the distance:
2.0 miles and 5 minutes driving according to Google Maps!
The reality of taking 5 minutes extra in order to do something extremely enjoyable really sunk in the last two days of our stay. Once we got there this is the environment:
What fool wouldn't want to run or walk on this, unless you hate hills, woods, and nature?
What other barriers, real or imagined, keep us from doing what's best for us?
i consider the pursuit of perfection to be a barrier to doing something that can make us better. Did you ever hesitate to invest when you were starting out for fear of doing it wrong or making a mistake? Most stock market investments, even bad ones, don't go to zero right away and even if one does that doesn't mean your diversified porfolio will all go to zero. You don't have to hit a home run every time, remember. Be more like Malevolent Missy and trust the process. You also have to remember that this whole investing thing is not like putting your money on a horse race, where if you miss 100% of your wager is gone to the house. So what if you buy something and it declines by 10 or 20%? You're not the first one to experience that so you learn something and move forward. The direction is always forward. Don't let fear kick your ass. Remember this one from Shakespeare in As You Like it?
Our doubts are traitors that make us lose the good we oft might win for fearing to attempt.
That's pretty strong rhetoric, eh? One other thing to keep in mind is that you don't have to fail publicly if your're going to fail. Nobody is really keeping tabs unless you put it out there. Nobody would have known I crapped out on my Freddy’s 5K Fail if I didn't write it up for accountability. Even though that race was a fail and my training times were off from what I thought, you know what was real? The progress in getting better and faster and the weight loss were all progress. I got better and improvement is pretty good no matter the activity.
Have you ever heard of "activation energy?" My buddy Adam who writes a good FIRE (financial independence/retire early) blog over at Brewing FIRE.com is a better chemist than me and will explain it better but my version of activation energy is like this: It's the energy required for atoms or molecules to overcome their present state to go to a lower energy state as a larger molecule. Sometimes in chemistry that means adding some kind of catalyst to overcome the activation energy barrier. I've noticed the downside of low activation energy with regard to diet at times. Sometimes it's just too tempting to take the path of least resistance with the lowest barrier to clear. If you're hungry isn't it easier to just grab a takeout sandwich or gobble up some junky junk food just to take in some calories in order to overcome the hunger? The barrier of cooking something decent made of real food is just too high, sometimes to the detriment of your wallet and your overall health if you're taking the easy way all the time.
Those hot nuts were healthier than they look.
Are there any "good barriers?"
I can think of two barriers we can use to our advantage right off the top of my head. The first one is to use that path of least resistance to junk food and turn that around. Did you know I can't resist certain crap foods that aren't really food because of their delicious nature? I visit my mother in law's house and she perpetually has a whole variety of different snack crackers like Triscuits and Wheat Thin along with a litany of chips that fill up a whole damned cabinet! She even stocks up on my favorite cream cheese dips and spreadable cheese that I can't resist. She can do that because, unlike me, she can just have a little handful of these in the afternoon before dinner and stop mowing them down. When I visit I'll stay up late and eat a whole box of those crackers with dip so I know that we ought to not have those in our house. Mrs. Smidlap does 95% of the grocery gathering so years ago I recognized this fact about myself and requested she not regularly buy that stuff that is futile for me to resist! That's the necessary barrier in my diet is that if I want that stuff late at night I would have to get in the car (I detest that already) and go to the store which ain't gonna happen.
The other big barrier we can use for good is a money barrier. When we were really building up our savings and investments in years past I would take the overflow once our Emergency Fund and Travel buckets were full and add any extra money to a brokerage account. The Roths IRA's were already funded and the barrier I created at that time was that it's a pain in the ass to get money back out of that brokerage. There would be tax consequences of selling shares and then there would be a waiting period for the cash to be available and then a waiting period to transfer that dough back to a bank account in order to spend it. In reality it's not that hard to take those steps but it's easier not to take them so a person is less likely to sell their long-term investments to fund day to day living. See how that works? We all want the easier path and to minimize the pains in our collective asses, don't we?
What about you Smidlappers? Do you have any tricks you have to play on yourselves that work very well? You have any barriers you have created that are positive or negative? Do you enjoy snack foods as much as I do? Have a muffurito instead.
Sometimes it's just easier to lie in the sun by the lake than get in the car and enjoy a productive nature walk.