“The question we ask, whether you think about your car, your job, your house, your bank account, your investment account, is: knowing what I know now, would I choose this again? If the answer is no, then you should choose something else and move. But inertia and stickiness and all these other things keep us with outdated systems when other things have changed.”
sputnikintelligence.com
Brad Barrett asked for a quick definition of zero-based thinking, the idea behind the series about rebuilding a British couple's finances from scratch as they move to the US. Alan Donegan gives the test he applies to any financial or life choice.
Why are you still sending each other checks as well? I think that's a whole different story.
…decades, and we took advice from different people, who the heck knows, and it all just kind of came into this hodgepodge. So, zero-based thinking is something that you guys have mentioned previously. Let's just give like a quick definition for that. So, what zero-based America is playing off of?
The idea is for everyone: if you were starting from zero, how would you set it up today? And the question we ask, whether you think about your car, your job, your house, your bank account, your investment account, is knowing what I know now, would I choose this again? If the answer is no, then you should choose something else and move. But inertia and stickiness and all these other things keep us with outdated systems when other things have changed. So, the idea is to shake us out of the way we've always been doing things. And you've always, you hear this at work. Someone says, Why do you do that? People go, Well, that's just the way we do things around here. Or someone shouts, Well, we've been doing it since 1982. It worked then, it works now. Stop changing things. And we just have this energy of, if it ain't broken, don't fix it. However, that's a very strange energy at times because just because it isn't broken doesn't mean we can't make it much better.
And this is not a persecution or prosecution of past you. Like they were making the best decision they could at the time, and actually might have been the right decision for that version of you. But perhaps there's a different choice that current you and future you could benefit from.
Yeah, like you said, inertia, stickiness, which Aubrey introduced, some cost is another one, right? So many people think, oh, but I've put so much X, Y, and Z into something. Well, under zero-based thinking, that doesn't exactly hold water. So, okay. So, Aubrey, if someone came to you having…
Well, the first thing is this isn't as strange as you might think. A lot of people, including people in the Phi community, are going through major transitions. Phi, the whole goal of Phi is to be able to make that transition. And often there is a huge opportunity to maybe simplify, consolidate, to…