Gamify Your Financial Life

Gamification is all the rage in the startup world. Trying to get in shape? Gamify with FitBit and compete against your friends.

When I first started this website, I gamified the early stages by turning the process of creating content for MightyInvestor.com into a personal challenge. I pledged to donate $1000 to the charity of my digital mentor’s choice if I didn’t produce a new piece of content for at least 90 days. If you think about it, that $1000 guillotine was really just a game we constructed, with rules and consequences. It worked. I hustled like a dog for 90 days (actually 121), and MightyInvestor.com was born.

More broadly, turning most things into a game will help you stay motivated and accountable. Here are the other games I have going. I’ve made my bed every day for 134 days straight (tracking this with TDP.me). I’ve also done at least ten minutes of yoga for 32 days in a row (shooting for 90).

Gamify Your Financial Life

Having a hard time saving money? Pledge to your friend a goal of savings for the month, and give it some consequences (they don’t have to be financial) if you don’t reach it.

The drive towards financial independence was, for me, one big game. In the beginning, the construct that really got me going was the thinking outlined in the book Your Money Or Your Life. Your Money or Your Life represented one huge gamification of savings and investing. (The book didn’t focus much on how to optimize earnings.), and it was a lot of fun.

If you watch the best investors in the world, the ones who keep actively investing even after they have made their fortune, it is obvious that they continue spending so much time on the practice because they love the stimulation and challenge of the game.

Do you enjoy managing your finances? If not, maybe you should gamify the entire process.