From the podcast

My money non-negotiables

A client told me she spent twenty minutes deciding whether to buy a forty dollar software subscription, the same week she approved a five figure equipment purchase in about ten seconds. That is not a maths problem.

She was not being careless with the big number and careful with the small one. She had already decided about equipment. Equipment was a known category with a known answer. The forty dollar subscription had never been decided, so she had to decide it from scratch, alone, at the end of a long day.

That is decision fatigue. By the time a business owner reaches the small money question, the good thinking has already been spent somewhere else. The size of the number has very little to do with how hard the decision feels.

The fix is fewer decisions, not more information

Most people respond to this by gathering more information. Another comparison, another review, another week of thinking about it. That makes the problem worse, because the work was never the research. The work was the deciding.

So I use money non-negotiables. Hard yeses and hard nos, decided once, when I am calm and nothing is on the table, then applied every time after that. It is not a budget. A budget tells you how much. A non-negotiable tells you whether the question is even open.

Three categories I decide in advance

The first is revenue and investment. Anything that grows the business, or has a solid and identifiable return, is close to an automatic yes once the due diligence is done. Not before the due diligence. But once the numbers hold up, I do not sit on it for a month waiting to feel differently.

The second is relationships. Spending on staff, on key customers, on the vendors who make the business run is an investment, not overhead. I have watched owners squeeze that category first because it is the easiest line to cut, and then wonder why the people around them stopped going the extra distance.

The third is health. It is the least business-sounding of the three and it is arguably the most important. A business built on a founder who has been run into the ground does not hold up. The whole thing rests on one person continuing to function, and that person is treated as the one line item that can always absorb a bit more.

Most day-to-day money decisions get faster, because you are checking against a known list instead of starting from scratch.

The 24-hour rule for everything else

Plenty of spending does not fall cleanly into a category. For that, I wait twenty four hours. Not a week, not a month. One day is long enough for the pull to fade and short enough that a real opportunity is still there when you come back to it.

And it matters mostly because of the pattern. One bad subscription is noise. A pattern of them is a line item, and by the time it shows up in the accounts it has usually been running quietly for a year.

Retirement planning needs the same rethink

The same habit applies further out. The retire-at-sixty-five paradigm was built for a different life expectancy. It made sense when the expected gap between stopping work and the end of life was measured in a handful of years.

That is not what I see. I have clients in their seventies, their eighties and their nineties who are still working, some because they want to and some because the plan assumed a much shorter horizon. If you are planning, you are planning for a three or four decade window, not a two year runway. The money decisions that follow from that look very different.

This is a planning question

None of this is decided on the return that gets filed every April. It is a conversation worth having with a CPA who looks at the whole picture, the business and the household and the horizon, rather than only the document at the end. Charter works with business owners on this year round.

This is general information, not advice on your own situation. Whether any of it applies to you depends on facts this article does not know.