AVID Chat #58: The Value of Systems

If you had to think about every breath you took, you wouldn’t have much time to do much of anything else.

That’s because breathing is an automated system for your body that supports your life. At AVID Planning, our goal is to automate our financial systems so that they run without you having to give any brainpower to them. So often, we see investors making a lot of manual decisions with their money.

They pay bills manually, organize their cash flow manually with each paycheck, and manually move money to savings or other earmarked financial goals. The truth is that the more “hands-on” you have to be in your finances, the less progress you’re likely to make. Every decision you make to move toward your goals is a chance to make mistakes, which adds to the pressure with every new opportunity that comes up. This can be incredibly tiring for investors. On average as humans, we make an estimated 35,000 decisions each day.

When you have to make additional decisions about your finances, you’re likely to slip up.

Instead of funneling money toward savings, you might decide to make a purchase (like a car, or a boat) that derails your debt repayment goals. When you automate these actions by putting systems in place, you’re reducing the total number of decisions you have to make about your money. Your goals are achieved on autopilot, and you aren’t giving yourself the opportunity to make mistakes.

Automation and systems in your financial life can also help you to free up creativity, time, and emotional bandwidth to pursue other exciting opportunities. You may be spending less time worrying about your money and your financial goals, so you’re able to perform better at work, which may lead to a future promotion. Or maybe you’re just able to spend an extra hour or two each week with your family, playing board games and connecting. Either way – reducing the amount of time you have to spend on mindless tasks that could be automated through financial systems that are uniquely designed to help you achieve your goals is a win.

At AVID Planning, we work to help our clients create unique-to-them systems that automate their finances and put them on the path to achieving the goals that matter most to them.

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