Behavior #5: Automate everything

Wealth

Jan 16

The biggest danger to building and keeping your Wealth is you.

In the face of ever-volatile markets and inflammatory news cycles, your emotions and the cognitive biases that infect your decision-making will create the desire to do exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time.

You’ll want to sell out of falling markets, suspend putting new cash to work during recessions and downturns, hold on to overly-concentrated positions, and take on speculative investments to make up for paper losses. You’ll want to buy in only when markets are moving higher, and when they do, you’ll feel confident in your ill-advised decisions to spend more on consumer goods rather than save for an uncertain future.

Without fail, every one of these actions will work against your goals of building and keeping wealth — a process built on the foundation of saving as much as possible, buying in regularly, and ignoring the incessant calamities of inflation, market crashes, and current world events.

This benign wealth-building neglect is achieved by automating everything. You should have your paychecks direct deposited, your savings auto-withdrawn, and your investments made every month by brokerage account software according to allocation decisions you made long ago.

You should then engage in little to no monitoring of either your accounts or the news cycle — awareness that your investments are automated and the sun will rise tomorrow is sufficient for our wealth-building purposes.

Your primary goal then becomes backstopping this low-attention policy with environmental controls, ending any remaining paper statements, sending e-statements to archived email folders via filters, uninstalling investment apps from your phone, forgetting your brokerage account password, and unsubscribing from any investment channel or newsletter that provides advice on anything other than maintaining everlasting equanimity.