Rima Grace

Neil Scarborough is vice president and general manager of Marketplace.

And our theme music is by Wonderly.

All right, we'll catch y'all next week.

Why do we keep putting off the financial tasks we know we need to do?

I'm Rima Grace, and this week on my podcast, This is Uncomfortable, I talk with a behavioral expert about commitment devices, the tricks we can use to force ourselves to follow through.

Okay, so I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I think I might have money somewhere, maybe hundreds or thousands of dollars, that I have no idea how to access.

When I was in my 20s, I didn't really think about retirement.

That was a problem for future me.

But now I am future me.

I'm 35 years old, and I'm trying to figure out what happened to those retirement accounts for my early 20s.

My employers automatically enrolled me in them, or at least I think they did.

I don't know.

If I'm going to be honest, I can't even remember the name of the companies that managed my retirement accounts.

One night not long ago while lying in bed, I spent like an hour digging into this, but because everything was saved under my old work emails, I couldn't figure it out.

And as I was going to sleep, I thought, surely I can't be the only one in this situation, right?

So why don't I make an episode out of this?

Maybe if I document my process, it'll encourage other people to do the same.

But apparently, even turning it into a work assignment didn't really help.

After I pitched this to my team, days passed, inertia kicked back in, and soon enough, I found myself on a call with our producer, Alice, who was gently laying down the law.

Why do you keep putting this off?