226: How to Escape Your Financial Wilderness: Finding Hope and Direction

And here's the crazy thing is that people actually do this Researchers led by Jan Suman study people trying to walk straight through unfamiliar terrain.

They track participants with GPS in a forest in Germany and in the Sahara Desert.

When people had a reliable external reference like the sun or the moon, they were much better able to maintain their direction.

But take away those reference points and something strange happened.

People just started wandering.

Some eventually walked in circles without realizing it.

And there wasn't one predictable direction.

It wasn't that everybody naturally drifted clockwise or everybody drifted counterclockwise without something fixed to orient themselves toward.

Their sense of straight became really unreliable.

Tiny deviations, they accumulate.

A little this way, a correction that way, another slight turn until eventually back where they started.

i read about this i thought well if that isn't personal finance i just don't know what is because there's definitely a financial version of walking around in circles you make money you pay your bills you spend money you decide you're spending too much you make a budget you start paying down your credit cards then the car breaks the credit card comes back out you pay it down again christmas comes up and then something with the house January rolls around and you tell yourself, this is the year I'm finally going to get serious about money.

Start saving.

You stop saving, you pay down debt, you rack it back up, you get a raise.

Somehow your expenses find a way to increase right along with it.

Three years later, you look around, you think, wait a second, haven't I been here before? Same debt, same lack of savings, same stress, same arguments, same feeling that you're behind.

You're not standing still.

That's what's so frustrating.

You've been moving the entire time.

You've been working.

You've been trying.

You've been putting in effort.

But movement and progress aren't the same thing.

You can walk 10 miles in the wrong direction.

That's the financial wilderness.