I wanted to…but I didn’t
For at least the past five years I’ve wanted to write a blog. I wrote three posts in 2014 and then stopped. My 2017 New Year’s resolution was to start blogging again. I didn’t.
Clearly “I wanted to…but I didn’t” is an essential component of the human experience. At Trim, we talk about this phenomenon all the time. Our customers tell us that they want to get out of credit card debt. They want to save more money. They want to call Comcast and negotiate their bill.
Guess what — they haven’t done it. And it’s unlikely, statistically speaking, that they will any time soon.
Let’s take a brief detour down “why not?” For someone in $10,000 of credit card debt, they aren’t feeling great. They’re probably feeling ashamed, scared, frustrated, and/or angry at their past self. Stepping back, they might also feel angry at the American financial system, which is designed to increase consumer credit card debt.
(I should also note that being in credit card debt means, generally, that you’re in the top two-thirds of American households, and likely in the top half. Many folks don’t have any access to credit at all, and they never have. So we’re talking about solidly middle-class and upper-class households.)
What do you have to do to get out of credit card debt? Typically, you pay it off gradually over time. But zoom in to the actual mechanics. You have two options to pay off debt:
(1) Set up a fixed, automatic payment through your credit card provider’s website, so that a significant amount of money — much of your free cash flow — is pulled out of your checking account and goes toward your credit card balance each month.
The vast majority of people don’t do this because they are worried that they’ll forget about the automatic payment and at some point it will overdraft their account or take money out that they needed for something else in an irreversible fashion. (From all of the user interviews we’ve done, very few people in this world have set up autopay for more than the minimum payment on their credit cards.)
(2) Every month, or whenever you remember, log into your credit card provider’s website. Then look at your outstanding credit card balance. Feel all those negative feelings again. Then go to the “Make a Payment” screen. Plug in some big amount, like $400. Compare that to the size of your balance. Suddenly it seems…very small. In fact, the psychological experience of then hitting the “Pay” button is similar to taking that money and throwing it down a long, dark well where you can’t see the bottom.
You see the problem now. It’s not exactly a walk in the park to pay down credit card debt, even if you have the free cash flow to do so. Rationally, sure, people “should.” But the reality is that, usually, they don’t.
How do people change? How could a person go from “I want to…” to “I did!”
In my own journey to actually write a blog, I was fortunate to find a friend who also wanted to write more. We did a deal: I’m planning to write a new post every week for the next year or so. For each week I don’t, I pay him $20. We’ll see what happens, of course (come back next week!) But certainly this particular post is propelled by the addition of that extrinsic motivation (both the shame and the $20) to my existing intrinsic motivation to write consistently.
So that’s one way. But it’s going to take a lot of effort (and seemingly it took years to build up the activation energy anyway).
If someone had come along and said, “I’ll write a blog post per week for you, they will be of very high quality, you can sit back and let the accolades flow in,” I would have jumped at the offer.
This is what we’re building for Trim users: a product that does the work for you. You get the benefits, without the hard work. Possible? Definitely — for getting out of debt, saving more, or having enough for retirement. These are problems that technology can actually solve.
We’re excited to share more about our upcoming products in the coming weeks. Until then — if you hear of any excellent & affordable ghostwriters, I’m all ears :)
