Pay yourself a commission

How to make tedious money tasks a little more fun

We’ve all got little money drains in our lives. Maybe it’s a subscription for a streaming service that is no longer airing new episodes of your favorite shows. Maybe it’s an app or a tech tool that was useful when you needed it, but circumstances have changed. I paid $20 a month for quite a while for a subscription where people could text LAURA to a certain number to join my email list. Theoretically, I could show the number on a slide during a speech and people could sign up right away. But then I had a revelation that I don’t use slides when I talk. The speaker who raved about the idea did use slides, so it made sense for her. Not for me.

So why don’t we cancel these fees quickly? For starters, it’s rarely much money. Most money drains amount to just a few dollars each month. We also know that canceling takes time and might be unpleasant. Some places let you just send a note or click somewhere, but some companies, unfortunately, require you to call customer service. If canceling a $9/month fee would take 20 minutes of your time, a number of people reading this could rationally feel it wasn’t worth it (even if $9, month after month, does add up).

Unfortunately, that inertia also extends to bigger money tasks that we know we should do, like shopping around for car insurance, or switching to a higher yield savings account, or to a lower-fee brokerage account. We know we should do these things. We just don’t want to.

How to conquer your inertia

So here’s a way to change the incentives: Pay yourself a 25 percent commission from the annual savings. Decide that 3 months of a monthly expense, or a quarter of a bigger, one-off savings, goes straight to something fun.

So when I turned off that auto-billed $20/month, that was $60 for something I’d enjoy more, like two sushi lunches. If you manage to save $1000/year, you could give yourself $250 for an overnight getaway, or two massages.

Now on some level, money is just money. When you are an adult, all of this comes out of the household budget. You’d think we’d be automatically incentivized to look for savings simply because it would free up more money for anything we’d like to do.

And yet precisely because everything does go in and out of the same pot, it can all feel nebulous. What’s $15 a month when I’ve got this giant mortgage anyway? And yet, my guess is that if you were sitting in a restaurant, and the waiter came up to you and said, hey, this dinner will be free if you fill out this survey that takes 5 minutes, you’d probably do it.

Taking 10 minutes to do a money task that will save you $120 over the next year, and $240 over the next two years, and so forth, is very similar.

Make money exciting

When you can concretely see the savings, and enjoy what they can buy, saving money feels more exciting. Now obviously, you don’t want to spend all that cash on frivolous stuff, as that somewhat negates the point of doing the savings, though not entirely. You’re still re-allocating money from things you don’t care about to things you do! But I find that most people don’t need a 100% commission to feel motivated. A 25% commission will do just fine.

So create a list of these money tasks, and set a time to blitz through them. Keep track of all you’re adding to your household bottom line. Then pay yourself 25 percent of that for pure fun. Do whatever you’d like to do. You just might make saving money feel like something enjoyable, rather than a tedious chore.