You will start a log that records your money decisions so patterns become visible.
Ask Darren what his money mistakes are and he'll give you a vague answer: "I spend too much on weekends, I guess." Ask him to list his last ten money decisions and he'll struggle to name five. Patterns are hard to see from memory, because memory keeps the vivid decisions and quietly drops the routine ones, and the routine ones are usually where the money goes. This exercise builds the record that the rest of the course works from.
Use a spreadsheet, a notes app or a paper notebook. A spreadsheet is easiest to sort later, but the best format is the one you'll still open in week six. Create these columns:
Date, the decision, and the amount in S$ What you expected to happen How you felt at the time, in a word or two What actually happened Suspected pattern, which can stay blank
The two columns people skip are expectation and feeling, and those two do the most work. The expectation lets you compare your forecast with the result later. The feeling column is where patterns first show themselves, because the same mood tends to come before the same kind of mistake.
If you took Critical thinking and better decisions, this will look like the decision journal in lesson 8.2, What goes in a decision journal. The difference is scope and timing. That journal records important decisions before the outcome is known. This log records money decisions of every size, and it starts by filling in the past few months from your records.
Open your bank app, card statements and broker account for the last three months. You are looking for decisions, which means moments where you could have done something else. A grocery run usually doesn't count. A S$240 dinner you agreed to when you'd planned to stay in does.
Aim for a mix of sizes. Include at least two small ones under S$50, at least one over S$1,000 if you have one, and anything involving borrowing, investing, insurance or a subscription. Ten is enough to start. More than fifteen at once tends to turn into a chore.
Be careful with the expectation and feeling columns for past decisions. Hindsight rewrites them. If a purchase turned out badly, you'll be tempted to remember having doubts. Write what you can honestly recall, and if you can't recall, write "not sure" rather than inventing a neat story.
Here are four of Darren's ten entries, with amounts as he recorded them.
On 3 August he renewed a gym membership for S$1,188 for a year. He expected to go three times a week and felt motivated. He went six times in two months. He wrote "status quo? signed because it auto-renewed" in the pattern column.
On 17 August he bought S$96 of concert merchandise on BNPL in four parts. He expected not to notice it and felt excited. He did notice it, in four separate weeks. He wrote "felt like S$24".
On 24 August, after his phone screen cracked, he took a S$500 cash advance on his card. He expected to repay it on payday and felt panicked. It took two months and cost him fees and interest. He left the pattern column blank because he wasn't sure.
On 29 August he moved S$300 to his savings account on payday. He expected to leave it there and felt pleased. It's still there. He wrote "worked because I did it first thing".
The last entry matters as much as the others. A log of only mistakes tells you what goes wrong but not what already works, and the rules you write in module 8 should copy whatever made the good decisions easy.
You don't know most of the names yet. Module 2 covers reference points and loss aversion, module 3 mental accounting, module 4 the pain of paying, module 5 present bias and defaults, module 6 investor behaviour and module 7 big purchases. As you meet each one, come back and fill in the blanks. For now, plain words are fine: "panic", "felt free", "didn't want to lose", "everyone was doing it".
From today, add each new money decision within a day or two, while the feeling column is still accurate. Most people find two or three a week is a realistic pace. Put a reminder on your phone for Sunday evening if you tend to forget. You'll use this log in lesson 2.5, again in module 6 if you invest, and in the playbook you write in lesson 8.4.
With ten rows in front of you, read down the feeling and pattern columns together. You're looking for the word or the situation that comes up more than once, because that is the first candidate for a rule.
Log ten recent decisions and write the one pattern that seems to repeat most.
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