Why personal finance is hard

A few weeks ago, I had a great chat with someone who runs her own human behavior consulting firm. It was a fintech happy hour and she has done significant work for many of the large fintech companies.

It was a fascinating discussion and I wish I had a lot more 1:1 time with her in a better setting to really dig deeper into her insights. One of her simple insight points was that personal finance is difficult because people want immediate satisfaction. They don’t want to do something now that will benefit them in 10-20-30 years. Of course, this makes sense. We’re humans and we crave immediate gratification.

It explains why a lot of personal finance apps never really take off. Typically, personal financial planning puts off immediate gratification like buying that nice car in favor of saving for the future. On top of that, it takes a decent amount of work to get up and going. That work is easy to put off in light of other things in life like watching Netflix.

While Secfi isn’t a personal finance app, we have a lot of growth when it comes to human behavior. At a little over 5 years in, I’m taking this as an opportunity to revisit some of our existing processes and deliverables with a human behavior lens. We’ve done well, but we have a lot of room for improvement.