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With the exchange rate, the trip is basically on sale. I mean you can get Michelin Star quality food for the price of a fast food meal. And don't even get me started on the thrift shopping. Japan's second hand scene is legendary, and your dollar, well, your yen, is going to stretch so much further than you think. I'd love to go in late March or early April to see the cherry blossoms. Yes, that's peak season, but I have a plan for that. One way I can earn a little extra cash for the trip is by hosting my place on Airbnb while I'm out of town. Hosting my home on Airbnb can help offset the cost of travel, making that dream vacation less of a dream and more of a reality. But it's not just me. While you're away, you could host your home on Airbnb, and now hosting is easier than ever with Airbnb's co-host network. You can hire a vetted local co-host to take care of the hosting for you. A co-host can create your listing, manage reservations, message guests, and provide on-site support so the stay runs smoothly even when you're away. You get to share your space with someone traveling to your area while you're off making memories somewhere else. If you've considered hosting but need a little help, find a co-host at Airbnb.com slash host. I'm listening to How to Keep House while drowning, and it feels like forgiveness. I picked it up thinking it would have a few tips on organizing my home while working more than full-time and being a wife and mother. Don't get me wrong, it does have tips and tricks, but it's also a masterclass in understanding why organizing the bathroom counter is a little harder for some people than others. And what to do when that's you. It's time to take care of you. Who better to help you do that than the top voices in well-being on Audible? You can level up your parenting, career, finances, sleep, relationships, or mindset. 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Every single year, right around this time, we all get bombarded with the same, boring, obvious money resolutions. Like, make a budget, save 10% of your paycheck, track your spending. And look, these things are absolutely fine, and they are certainly important. But they are not revolutionary. Plus, they're pretty vague. They're joyless, and they require you to white-knuckle your way through day-to-day decisions. Your brain hates that. So today, I want to give you three New Year's money resolutions that actually work. Now, because they're clever or trendy, but because they're backed by psychology, behavioral science, and real research on how humans change. And they will absolutely move the needle on your financial life. So let's get into it. Here's resolution number one. Make your friction your financial superpower. Most people believe that willpower drives financial progress. It does not. What actually drives progress is friction, strategically adding or removing little steps that change your behavior without relying on motivation. I want you to think about friction like a financial remote control. You can turn your good habits up or your bad habits down simply by adjusting how easy or how hard they are. This idea is backed by behavioral economics research and the work of Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler, who found that people naturally default to whatever is easiest, even if it's bad for them financially. So your resolution this year is this. Make the bad behaviors harder and the good behaviors so easy. Here are tactical ways to do that. I'll start with some ways to add friction to your spending. Delete your saved credit cards from Amazon, Uber Eats, Target, everywhere. It adds about 30 seconds to check out, and those 30 seconds are the difference between impulse spending and intentional spending. Turn off tap to pay on your phone. Tap to pay is frictionless. Way too frictionless. Make yourself pull out your card. Put a $100 plus cooling off timer on purchases. If something costs more than a hundred bucks, you wait 24 hours. If it still feels necessary the next day, buy it. If not, you just saved money. Now for the other side of the equation. Let's remove friction from investing. Download the apps that you're going to need for investing on your home screen. Not bury it on page six. And set up an automatic monthly investment so you set your investments up once for the year, not for every month. This is how you build wealth. Not by removing all of the fun from your life, but by designing your environment so that the right decisions happen with less effort than the wrong ones. Resolution number two, use identity-based investing. Psychologists will tell you that people don't change because they set goals. People change because they adopt an identity and then behave consistently with that. This concept comes from behavioral researchers and is rooted in the principle of self-consistency. Once you believe something about yourself, you subconsciously act in alignment with that belief. So this year your money resolution isn't to save more or invest more. It's to be the kind of person who saves and invests consistently. I know that sounds kind of fuzzy, so let me translate that into real behaviors. You can say I'm the person who doesn't miss contributions and that will drive you to make sure that you're always making retirement contributions even on months where you can only invest five bucks. The amount doesn't really matter here. The identity does. You can say I'm a person who cares about how much money I have. And that means you'll check your accounts monthly. You read your pay stubs, you'll check your credit card statements. You won't miss any money falling through the cracks because that is not who you are. Here's why this works. Identity-based behavior is automatic. If you tell yourself that you're someone who runs, you don't negotiate with yourself about contributing to your Roth, you just do it. Resolution number three, set anti-goals. The financial things that you will not do this year. People love setting goals. I want to save more. I want to invest more. I want to spend less. But research from Stanford and Harvard actually shows that setting anti-goals can be much more powerful because they remove decision fatigue and protect you from making them a step further. And that's what I'm trying to do here. Anti-goals are the things that you refuse to do. These are non-negotiables. Think of these like financial boundaries, but with teeth. Here are some anti-goals that work insanely well. I will not let my checking account drop below $500. This prevents overdraft fees, keeps you from living paycheck to paycheck, and forces you to slow down spending before things get messy. Or I will not carry a balance. I will not carry a balance. I will not carry a balance. Or I will not carry a balance on high interest credit cards. This one rule can save you thousands of dollars in interest and regret. I will not buy anything on sale that I would not buy at full price. Well, this eliminates emotional sales shopping and the fake frugality trap. I will not invest in anything I can't explain to a friend. If you can't explain what the investment is, how the investment works, how it makes money, and what the risks are, you honestly shouldn't touch it. Anti-goals make money management easier because you're not deciding in the moment. You already decided. Anti-goals create clarity, simplicity, and peace. Three things we all need more of in our financial lives. Why are these things the three strategies that will help you win in 2026? Well, because they remove reliance on willpower. Willpower is a terrible tool for long-term change. Friction, identity, and anti-goals rely on structure, not self-control. They also reduce decision fatigue. The average adult makes 35,000 decisions per day. Your brain cannot debate every single purchase. Instead, you decide once with good information and live by it. And most importantly, they work with human psychology, not against it. That's it. These resolutions don't ask you to do the impossible. They don't ask you to be perfect. They just ask you to design a life where good money decisions become the default. For today's tip, you can take straight to the bank. I hope you're listening to this conversation and getting especially stoked about investing. And now you want to take action. I love that for you. Let's do it. But you want to make sure you don't forget your motivation when this episode ends. And that's where automating your investments come in. If you want an easy solution for automating your money moves, check out the investment plans offered on public. Public's investment plans are a collection of assets that you can automatically contribute to on a recurring basis. You can create your own plan from scratch with up to 20 stocks, ETFs, and more. Or you can choose from their list of plans. If you want some inspo, they have something for everyone. They have a plan that invests in the mag seven, a plan that's focused on stocks that pay dividends, plans by industry like AI, real estate, tech, or healthcare. They also have a bond ETF plan and different geographic options like a plan that focuses on Europe. So truly something for everyone. An investment plan can help you take the emotion and the mental load out of investing and help you focus on your long-term financial goals. It has never been easier than now to spread your investment strategy out across multiple asset classes, regions, and industries. So check out public.com slash money rehab to get started. Paid for by public investing. Full disclosures in podcast description.
