Nicole Lapin

Make yourself pull out your card.

Put a $100 plus cooling off timer on purchases.

If something costs more than 100 bucks, you wait 24 hours.

If it still feels necessary the next day, buy it.

If not, you just saved money.

Now for the other side of the equation, let's remove friction from investing.

Download the apps that you're gonna need for investing on your home screen, not bury it on page six.

and set up an automatic monthly investment so you set your investments up once for the year, not for every month.

This is how you build wealth, not by removing all of the fun from your life, but by designing your environment so that the right decisions happen with less effort than the wrong ones.

Resolution number two, use identity based investing.

Psychologists will tell you that people don't change because they set goals.

People change because they adopt an identity and then behave consistently with that.

This concept comes from behavioral researchers and is rooted in the principle of self-consistency.

Once you believe something about yourself, you subconsciously act in alignment with that belief.

So this year, your money resolution isn't to save more or invest more.

It's to be the kind of person who saves and invests consistently.

I know that sounds kind of fuzzy, so let me translate that into real behaviors.

You can say, I'm the person who doesn't miss contributions.

And that will drive you to make sure that you're always making retirement contributions, even on months where you can only invest five bucks.

The amount doesn't really matter here.