You will be able to run a short quarterly review of your money behaviour.
In January, Hui Min wrote three good rules. By April she'd broken one of them twice and couldn't remember the other two word for word. Nothing dramatic had happened. The rules had just faded, the way a gym routine fades once nobody is checking. Rules decay without a fixed time to look at them again, and the fix is a short, regular appointment with your own records.
A quarterly review strikes a balance. Monthly is too often for behaviour patterns to show: one bad weekend can look like a trend. Yearly is too rare, because by the time you notice a broken rule, it may have been broken for months. Every three months gives you enough decisions to see a pattern and is soon enough to fix it.
The review brings together the records you've built in this course: your decision log from lesson 1.4, your spending diary from lesson 4.4 if you keep it going or repeat it, your trades since the last review, and your rules from lesson 8.1, laid out side by side. The whole thing should take forty-five minutes to an hour.
Critical thinking and better decisions, lesson 8.3, Review your decisions every quarter, teaches a quarterly review for decisions in general, and its lesson 8.2, What goes in a decision journal, explains the journal method. This review uses the same rhythm but looks at something narrower: how your money behaviour matched the rules you set.
Go through each rule and mark it kept, broken, or not tested, because the situation never came up. For each broken rule, write down what happened in the moment. Which situation was it, how did you feel, and what did you tell yourself?
The reasons matter more than the count. A broken rule usually falls into one of three kinds. Some rules are fine, and you broke them because the friction around them was too weak, so the fix is in your environment, as in lesson 8.2. Others are too vague, so the situation arrived and you didn't recognise it as the one the rule was for, which means the "if" needs sharpening. And some are wrong, asking for something you don't actually want or can't sustain, which means the rule itself should change.
Then look for new patterns. Scan your log for any repeated mistake that none of your rules cover. That's a candidate for a new rule, or for replacing one that's no longer needed.
The hardest discipline in any review is separating how you decided from how it turned out. Critical thinking and better decisions, lesson 8.1, Good decisions can have bad outcomes, makes the general case. In money, it shows up constantly.
Suppose you followed your rule and kept investing through a fall, and the market fell further. The outcome this quarter was worse than if you'd stopped. The process was still right, because the rule was built for a long horizon, and one quarter tells you very little. Now suppose you broke your seven-day rule, bought a stock a forum was excited about, and it rose 20%. That's a good outcome, but the process was the same one that cost Hui Min S$1,680 in lesson 6.6. If you reward yourself for the lucky result, you're training the habit you wanted to stop.
So in each review, ask two questions about every notable decision. Did I follow my process? And separately, how did it turn out? Only the first one tells you what to change.
Her rules: raise cash from investments by the buy-today test, wait seven days before buying anything from a group or forum, check the portfolio on the first Saturday of the month. Over the quarter, the first rule wasn't tested. The second was kept once and broken once, on a tip from a colleague over lunch, which she hadn't counted as a "group", so she sharpened the wording to "anyone, online or in person". The third was broken in a volatile week when she checked daily. She looked at why and found the news app on her phone, not the broker, had pulled her in, so she turned off its market alerts.
She also found a new pattern in her log: three purchases over S$300 made in the week after payday, all with the cooling-off checklist skipped, and that became the subject of a new rule.
Put your first quarterly review in your calendar now, three months from today, and decide the three questions you'll ask yourself when it comes.
Put your first quarterly review in your calendar and write the three questions you will ask.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).