Keep a log of your money decisions so you can see your patterns.
Darren is asked what his money mistakes are and gives a vague answer about spending too much on weekends. When he tries to list his last ten money decisions, he can barely name five.
Your memory works the same way. It keeps the decisions that stood out and quietly drops the routine ones, and the routine ones are usually where your money goes, so memory is a poor guide to your own patterns. A money-decision log is a record of money decisions of all sizes. Each entry has the date, amount, expectation, feeling, outcome and suspected pattern. You fill it in from the past few months and then keep adding to it, and the rest of the course builds on this record.
A spreadsheet, a notes app or a paper notebook will all work. A spreadsheet is easiest to sort later, but the best format is the one you will still be opening in week six.
Every entry needs five 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
People most often skip the expectation and feeling columns, and those two do the most work. The expectation column lets you compare your forecast with what actually happened. The feeling column is where patterns first show up, because the same mood tends to come before the same kind of mistake.
The Critical thinking and better decisions course has a similar tool in lesson 8.2, "What goes in a decision journal". That journal records important decisions before the outcome is known. Your money log is different in scope and timing, because it covers money decisions of every size and starts by backfilling the past few months from your records.
Open your bank app, your card statements and your broker account for the last three months. You are looking for each decision, meaning a moment when you could have done something else. A routine grocery run usually doesn't count, but agreeing to a S$240 dinner on an evening you had meant to stay in does count.
Log ten to start. Mix the sizes, with at least two small decisions under S$50 and at least one over S$1,000 if you have one, and include anything involving borrowing, investing, insurance or a subscription. Ten entries is enough to begin with, and logging more than fifteen at once tends to become a chore.
Hindsight rewrites the expectation and feeling of past decisions. If something turned out badly, you will be tempted to remember having had doubts all along. Write only what you can honestly recall, and where you can't remember, write "not sure" instead of inventing a tidy story.
Log the decisions that went well as well as the mistakes. A log of only mistakes shows you what goes wrong and leaves out what already works. In module 8 you write your own rules, and those rules should copy whatever made your good decisions easy.
Darren built a log of ten entries. Four are shown here, with the amounts as he recorded them.
On 3 August he renewed his gym membership for S$1,188 for a year, feeling motivated and expecting to go three times a week. In the next two months he went six times, and in the pattern column he wrote "status quo? signed because it auto-renewed".
On 17 August he bought S$96 of concert merchandise on BNPL, paid in four parts. He felt excited and expected not to notice the cost, since each part was S$24 (S$96 / 4 = S$24). He did notice it, in four separate weeks, and his pattern note reads "felt like S$24" because that was how the purchase seemed at the time.
On 24 August his phone screen cracked and, feeling panicked, he took a S$500 cash advance on his card, expecting to repay it on payday. It took two months to repay and cost him fees and interest. He wasn't sure what the pattern was, so he left that column blank.
On 29 August he moved S$300 to savings on payday, feeling pleased and expecting to leave it there. The money is still there, and his pattern note reads "worked because I did it first thing". This last entry matters as much as the three mistakes, because it records a habit he can build a rule on.
For now, the suspected pattern column can stay loose and in plain words, such as "panic", "felt free", "didn't want to lose" or "everyone was doing it". The formal names come later in the course: 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 each concept is covered, come back to the log and fill in the pattern blanks. You use the log in lesson 2.5, again in module 6 if you invest, and in lesson 8.4, where you write a playbook that draws on it.
From now on, add each new money decision within a day or two, while you still remember accurately how you felt. Two or three new entries a week is a realistic pace for most people, and if you tend to forget, set a phone reminder for Sunday evening.
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, then write down the one pattern that comes up most often.
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