What if No One's Watching?

I was reading one of my favorite debt-reduction blogs, I've Paid For This Twice Already... today, and paidtwice mentioned The Prioritizer. The Prioritizer is a tool created by CNN Money to help folks focus on their financial goals.

It works very simply--you enter up to 15 goals in the boxes (long-term or short-term), and the Prioritizer pits them against each other in various ways, with you having to choose not between all of them, but just between two of them at a time. Once you've made all your choices, it spits out a ranking of which goals you have indicated are most important to you.

Seems like something we shouldn't need a tool to help us with, right? For me at least, not really. It's very difficult to look at a list of things, all of which I want, and rank them. Much easier to pick between two things. So I decided to try it.

First, I listed some goals. I went back to my 43 Things list to remember some of them.

The 12 goals I came up with were:

• travel


• get a Ph.D.


• get Lasik surgery


• see Gustav Klimt's paintings in person


• donate more to charity


• pay off my student loans


• work for myself full-time


• publish writing


• have my photo taken by Karen Walrond


• start my own dog rescue


• move back to Oregon


• build a retirement fund

After going through the exercise, the tool told me my priorities lined up like this:

1. move back to Oregon (100)


2. travel (90.9)


3. pay off my student loans (81.8)


4. work for myself full-time (72.7)


5. see Gustav Klimt's art in person (63.6)


6. get Lasik surgery (45.5)


7. build a retirement fund (37.9)


8. donate more to charity (34.8)


9. start a dog rescue (28.8)


10. have my photo taken by Karen Walrond (25.8)


11. get a Ph.D. (18.2)


12. publish my writing (0)

There are definitely some surprises here. The first two are what I expected, with moving back to Oregon being my #1 long-term priority and traveling in general being the most important way to spend money I can think of right now (though my actions don't necessarily line up with those priorities). The rest, though, is interesting. I had no idea that getting a Ph.D. would rank so low, or that build a retirement fund is more important to me right now than donating more to charity or starting a dog rescue. And publishing writing might as well just drop from the list completely, since I rank it behind everything else.

I don't know how much this list will change the way I spend money, but it certainly gives me a new way to thinking about some things. So what about you? Try it and see if you are as surprised as I am.