Maybe you’re not bad with money.

It’s possible you have been picking the wrong times to spend.

After all, timing is everything.

There is a right time to make the best financial decisions and spend money wisely.

In this video, I help you figure out the exact day and time to make these important choices.

TRANSCRIPT:

What if you’re not actually bad with money, it’s just that your timing is off and you’ve been making spending decisions at the wrong time?

In this video, I’ll help you stack the odds of smart decision-making in your favor so you can stop overspending.

You can make infinitely better choices if you understand when your decision-making powers are at their best and when they are crap. We all know that we make the worst spending decisions when we are tired and hungry. So obviously let’s not be sleep deprived, hangry shoppers. The opposite of tired and hungry is when you’re energized and satiated and that would be the best time to make decisions.

And I can just hear some of you through the screen saying, lady, I wake up exhausted. I’m never not tired. I hear you. But you can still think of when you tend to feel the least tired.

Is there a time of day that your mind feels the most clear and your energy is the most grounded? For most people, that’s earlier in the day before you have spent hours and hours making one decision after another. We all get decision-fatigue which is when our decision making gets worse after having made so many decisions or when you’re faced with an overwhelming number of choices.

You may have never thought about this before but making decisions is mentally draining. It consumes real energy. The more decisions you have to make, the more mental energy is expended. Have you ever wondered why you’re so exhausted even though you haven’t done anything physically strenuous all day? It’s probably from making so many decisions throughout your day.

Hopefully, understanding how depleting it is to make choices will help you understand yourself better and have more empathy for why you haven’t always made the best decisions in the past. And just know, that decision fatigue is not a personal failure. This is a human affliction that studies have shown is actually a thing, so I hope you have some compassion for yourself.

If you’ve been hard on yourself for making impulsive choices or falling for temptations, then you might be expecting yourself to be superhuman. You don’t need to be a superhero with infallible self-discipline to make the right decisions, you literally just need to figure out the times you make the best decisions and make them at those times.

So let’s figure out, to the day and time, when you make your wisest selections. Like I mentioned before, the answer is probably sometime in the morning. And some of you super high-achievers out there will hear this as one more reason that you need to wake up at 3AM to start your day. But I am not saying that. In fact, I encourage you to get your sleep. Sleep is one of the things that rejuvenates all those mental resources that you use up while doing all that thinking and choosing all day long. So get as many hours of quality sleep as you need, and make important decisions, including spending decisions, fairly early on in your day.

You may even want to pick a window of time. It could be a few hours after waking up or it could be from when you wake up until a certain time, like noon, after which you don’t make money decisions because you know that after that, your self-control and willpower tend to decrease after having made so many decisions by that point in the day.

We can take this one step further and figure out what days of the week you make your soundest financial decisions. Is it early in the week? Maybe your mental tank is most full early in the week, like on Sunday or Mondays? We can even go one more level and ask ourselves what time of the month you can make your best decisions.

Me personally, I feel like there’s something about the beginning of a new month that reinvigorates me so the first day of the month is when I handle my finances including paying bills and tracking my spending for the previous month, and so with the energy of a new month and informed by the spending in the month that just passed, is when I make my bigger spending decisions for the month. You can get as narrowed down as possible so that you know the days and times that you’ll make the smartest decisions with your spending.

Another thing you can do to reduce decision-fatigue is to reduce or automate the decisions that you have to make. There’s no better example of this than deciding what to eat. What if, instead of asking yourself this question, 3 times a day, which is 21 times a week, that you only had to ask yourself once a week? You could do meal prep so that all your meals are made for you once or twice a week. You could also use a meal delivery service.

You might think that meal delivery services are too expensive but I bet if you added up how much you spent dining out and ordering in, in addition to grocery shopping, you could actually save money. Even if you wouldn’t, and it is in fact more expensive than grocery shopping and making your own meals, you might realize that it saves you money because you make better spending choices outside of your meal decisions, because you’re not as mentally fatigued from constantly thinking about your next meal.

Oh, and whatever you do, avoid making spending decisions at the last minute. Putting off decisions until right before you need to purchase an item will sabotage your good decision making efforts. Rather than procrastinating until your back is up against the wall, plan to make certain upcoming decisions for one of your best decision making windows, that’s hopefully well before whatever it is you’re doing like booking flights or getting a gift.

When we’re stressed and short on time it’s all but impossible to think things through well enough to make a smart selection because we rely on shortcuts or make choices based on convenience rather than careful consideration. I recommend scheduling purchases into your calendar – for things like flights or gifts – long before you need them.

So quick recap: trust yourself to make your best money related decisions by figuring out the days of the week and hours of those days that you are most refreshed. The name of the game is avoiding decision-fatigue, not making decisions when you’re tired, hungry, or stressed. Wherever you can, reduce the number of daily decisions you have to make, like what you’re going to eat, and even picking out your outfit, so that you have the mental resources to make the best financial choices you can.

Please let me know in the comments if you think this will help you.

And if you need more support on making smart spending choices, consider financial coaching. The link to schedule a complimentary call with me is the description.

Happy, smart spending and I’ll see you in the next video.