If you talked to me three or four years ago and asked me about my approach to personal finance, I would’ve told you that you should always pick the mathematically optimal path and try to adhere to it as much as possible. I was fortunate enough to have the discipline, a credit to my parents, to almost always be able to follow what I believed was the optimal path. I didn’t have any credit card debt, I contributed as much as I could to my Roth IRA and my 401(k)’s, and I worked hard at my job.

However, in the last few years, I’ve come to recognize that it isn’t the path that you take that’s important, but how quickly you can achieve your goals. The fastest way for you to reach your goals may not come from going the best way. When climbing a mountain, a seasoned climber can scale rock faces while the novice sticks to the paths. The optimal path is by climbing the rocky walls, but a novice might make it up a few handholds before they gave up.

(Click to continue reading…)

One of Dave Ramsey’s most popular ideas is that of a debt snowball. The idea is that you pay off your smallest debts first, then roll that debt’s monthly payment into the next smallest. When the next smallest is paid off, you roll the two former payments into the next smallest debt.The snowball grows and grow with each debt that’s repaid.

Here’s a real life example in case that general one was unclear. Here are your three debts and minimum payments:

• $10,000 @ 20% APY, $500 minimum monthly payment
• $4,000 @ 10%, $200 minimum monthly payment
• $1,500 @ 12.5%, $75 minimum monthly payment

The debt snowball method states that you should put all extra debt payments towards the $1,500 balance. When you finally pay off that debt, your new payment schedule should look like this:

• $10,000 @ 20% APY, $500 minimum monthly payment
• $4,000 @ 10%, $200 minimum monthly payment + $75
• $1,500 @ 12.5%, $75 minimum monthly payment

Why is that brilliant? From a strictly mathematical point of view, it’s a bad plan. It’s bad because you’re paying off a 12.5% APY interest debt when you have a 20% APY interest debt staring you in the face. You save more in interest payments if you pay towards the 20% APY debt first.

However, that ignores human psychology. Big mistake.

It’s well known that children aged up to about 7 (the end of Piaget’s pre-operational stage) believe that taller, skinnier objects are “bigger” than shorter, fatter objects (they lack Piaget’s concept of conservation). Ask them to tell you which glass is bigger, a tall skinny glass or a short fat glass, and the taller skinnier one looks larger. It’s not much of a stretch that on an unconscious level this may still apply. The debt snowball method plays on that psychology by making your debt seem shorter and fatter. Two debts may seem less than three, though the two debts are “fatter.”

It also affects your motivation and feelings of success. Drawing a line through one of your debts is a very powerful motivator. It inherently builds on that success by rolling your now unnecessary minimum payment into your next debt. You knock out a few early quicker wins (smaller debts) and that enables you to push onward towards the larger, harder ones. Progress is crucial in motivation, everyone is cognitively aware of that.

Dave Ramsey might not be giving you the mathematically correct plan but he also knows that personal finance is as much about psychology as it is about math.

And if you’re not Dave Ramsey’d out, my friend Pinyo has a very descriptive post about Dave Ramsey’s Baby Steps.

(Photo: redjar)