I’m reading a book titled Think Ahead by Craig Groeschel, and one of the premises of the book is to pre-decide how we will react in given circumstances. My first thought was this would be a great book for teenagers to read. Planning beforehand for the outcome we know to be right is better than waiting until we’re under stress to think through what we should do. Under stress we may make bad decisions.

One of the reasons Groeschel said we sometimes make poor decisions is we are fatigued by all the decisions we have to make. He writes, “Experts estimate that we make 35,000 decisions a day.”

Think about how many basic decisions you made before you even left your house this morning. You had to think about getting up, brushing your teeth, what to eat, what to wear, taking the dog outside, and the list could go on.

The issue is by the time we get hit with a big decision we may not make our best decision because we have not predetermined our belief system about the topic.

In my previous volunteer work with a local ministry called Jumpstart, I learned that one of the ways prisons control the detained is by limiting the decisions they can make in a given day. Instead of 35,000 decisions they may have 6,000 decisions they can make a day. It stands to reason that the way we can control our outcomes is to limit the amount of mental energy we need to expend on making decisions.

As evidenced by major stock market trading platforms going down on Monday due to large quantities of people placing trades in their equity portfolios, a lot of investors may not have pre-decided what they should do in a market downturn. When we don’t have a plan, we subjugate ourselves to making decisions based on feelings and not on hard facts. The stock market likes predictability and we’ve seen historically unpredictable events transpire recently.

The cool thing about our financial planning process is we have pre-determined how we should react in a down market so we don’t have to frantically attempt to make wise decisions in the chaos of the moment. In our 3 Roles of Money process we have our “red money” in the market, but we’ve segregated out our “blue money” to use over the next ten years.

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