You will be able to pull the course together into a playbook that you keep and review.
Your final project is a money behaviour playbook, a document of one to two pages that sets out the two or three money patterns costing you most, the evidence for each from your own records, and the rules and setup you use to limit them. It finishes with a review date and the name of someone who will help you keep to it. You should be able to read it in five minutes and update it easily, and you should be comfortable handing it to a person you trust.
By now you have a decision log, a reference point review, a map of mental accounts, a spending diary, a saving rule and a commitment, a trade audit, a cooling-off checklist, if-then rules, and a set of defaults and frictions. Spread across a notes app and a few spreadsheets, these are easy to lose track of. The playbook collects them into a single short document.
The length limit matters because of when you'll open it: in a bad moment, or at a quarterly review. On both occasions you need to get through it fast. A playbook longer than two pages usually holds rules you could do without.
Start by reading back through your decision log, spending diary, mental accounts map and audit. Choose the two or three patterns behind the biggest losses of money or the decisions you most regret.
Give each pattern three lines: what it's called, how it shows up in your own life, and the evidence. A name such as "present bias" by itself is just a label. Evidence is the specific decisions and amounts, like "seven months of delay in starting to save, about S$2,100 not saved" (an invented example). When you're having a bad day, those numbers are what persuade you to follow the rule.
Beneath each pattern, write down what you've set up to work against it: if-then rules from lesson 8.1, defaults and frictions from lesson 8.2, and whichever parts of your cooling-off checklist from lesson 7.4 aim at that pattern. Where a measure helps with more than one pattern, put it in once, under the pattern where it does the most work.
Once the patterns are done, add your cooling-off checklist in full: the threshold, the waiting periods, the questions, and the person you contact.
Next, bring across your automatic saving rule and commitment device from lesson 5.4. Record the amount, the date, the account and the trigger, along with the conditions that would lead you to change them. Add the date you last confirmed both were working.
Then put down the date of your first quarterly review, following lesson 8.3, together with the three questions you'll ask yourself at it.
Last, choose one support person, for example a partner, sibling or friend. They don't run your finances. They know what your rules are, they're the one you ring before you break a rule, and every quarter they ask you how the review went.
Darren's playbook, shown here in shortened form, names three patterns.
Stress borrowing. He took a S$500 cash advance in August (all of Darren's figures are invented) while S$16,000 was in his savings, and had taken two other advances during the previous year. Now he waits a night and phones his sister before borrowing from any source, his card is paid in full by GIRO, and his buffer rule now allows him to clear expensive debt. Late-night and tired spending. His diary recorded S$328 over two weeks from scrolling late at night and being tired, roughly S$700 a month. Anything he wants after 10pm goes on a list on his phone, and he decides in the morning. He deleted saved cards from four apps, and his phone switches to greyscale from 10pm. Present bias in saving. He put off starting to save for seven months, which left about S$2,100 unsaved. S$300 now transfers automatically on payday, and within a week of his first new payslip after his next pay rise, half the rise gets added to that transfer.
His cooling-off checklist sits below the three patterns. It applies from S$300, makes him wait 48 hours on purchases up to S$2,000 and seven days on anything over S$2,000 or any financial product, asks five questions, and names his sister as the person to call. Below that is his review date, the first Sunday of next quarter. He gave a copy to his sister, who printed it and stuck it on her fridge "for emergencies".
Hui Min's playbook follows the same layout with different contents. Her patterns are treating the purchase price as a reference point, following the herd on tips, and checking too often. She drew her evidence from her audit, and it adds up to about S$3,195.
Read the whole thing through and trim it until it fits on two pages at most. Write your own playbook now, share it with the person you've chosen, and put the first quarterly review in your calendar.
Write your playbook, show it to one person you trust, and set the date of your first quarterly review.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).