Ways to rewire your brain and take control of your finances
Written and accurate as at: Mar 14, 2025 Current Stats & Facts
Whether you’re saving up for a home or you just want some extra breathing room in your budget, hitting your goals often starts with small changes to your daily routine. Below, we look at some of the healthy habits you might be able to forge to give your finances — and life — a boost.
Write down your goals
Whether your goals are financial or not, one of the best things you can do is write them down. That’s because of a psychological concept known as the generation effect, which states that we have an easier time recalling ideas we come up with ourselves.
When you write down your goals, the generation effect kicks into gear twice — first when you conjure up the thought and then again when you commit it to paper (or your preferred device).
Doing this — and, better yet, displaying it somewhere in your home — encourages your brain to file the goal in the ‘important’ category and increases the likelihood you’ll take the necessary steps to achieve it.
Use habit stacking
Sometimes we have to coax our brains into doing things that are good for us. A tried and true method is to reward ourselves each time we do something positive, but another involves simply tying one behaviour to another.
‘Habit stacking’, as it’s known, involves pairing a habit you want to adopt with something that already comes easily to you. The goal here is to introduce the new habit into your lifestyle in a way that doesn’t feel forced — after all, it’s more likely to stick if it feels like a natural extension of your daily routine.
So what does this look like in practice? You could check your bank account while eating breakfast, transfer an equivalent amount of money to your savings account each time you buy a coffee, or read a personal finance article while commuting to work.
Make good behaviours as easy as possible
If you think back on your day so far, you can probably point to several times you leaned on technology to make things easier for you, from booking an appointment to finding the best route for travel. When it comes to your finances, finding similar ways to reduce the effort involved can be your ticket to some easy wins.
These days, many banking apps let you automate payments, meaning you can set up direct transfers to pay bills, chip away at debt, or top up your savings account. And there are also apps that round up purchases to the nearest dollar and deposit the difference in a savings or investment account, giving your money a chance to grow as you go about your day.
Make bad habits difficult
An alternative to making good habits easy is making bad habits difficult, and one way to do that is by introducing some friction. Think about how easy it is to splurge online when your credit card details auto-fill at checkout. Wouldn’t it be easier to resist the temptation if you de-linked your account and stored your card in another room instead?
By putting extra steps between you and each purchase, you give yourself more time to think about whether you genuinely want or need an item, rather than letting yourself be guided by impulse.
Some strategies include setting restrictions on shopping websites and apps, keeping your discretionary spending money in a separate account with no card attached, or committing to waiting a day before you buy something.
Track your progress to see how far you’ve come
Similar to starting a new workout program and looking at the results in the mirror each week, it’s much easier to stay motivated in your financial journey when you can see evidence of your progress.
That might be something as straightforward as a steadily increasing savings balance, or as complex as a spreadsheet that highlights your income and expenses. The important thing is that you’re able to point to tangible results that remind you of how far you've come and encourage you to keep going.
