Money Philosophy
Being great with money is tough, requiring discipline, habits, and systems. To create a configurable, multi-dimensional player map for financial services, we first need to agree on the challenges faced with money and the skills and habits required to overcome them.
Financial Fitness
As banks and fintechs build empathy with customers and serve them better, the incorporation of financial fitness at the centre of the digital value proposition separates those that get it and those that don't.
More than a race to the bottom on speed, it requires a race to the top on emotion:
Gratitude
For all customers have done—earned, spent, saved, and invested
Empathy
For how difficult money is for everyone
Support
For staying at it and not giving up
Building Trust
With principles in place, we can set the field and begin defining success—rewarding, encouraging, and supporting it.
Timeless Lessons on Money
These principles help us identify the complexity of money and guide how we build engaging financial experiences.
Money Stories Are Unique
Everybody's money story is unique, based on their experiences, history, pride, and motivations. This doesn't make anyone's view better or worse—just different.
Luck and Risk
Luck and timing play a major part in outcomes. The line between "inspiringly bold" and "foolishly reckless" is a millimetre thick.
Enough
Goals help us establish what's enough and what we aren't prepared to risk for more. Reputation, family, friends, freedom, health, and happiness are worth preserving.
Compounding
Much of money success comes down to starting early and staying in the game. It's not timing the market but time in the market.
No One Cares
Once you realise no one cares how big your house or new your car is—because they're too busy worrying about their own—you can focus on what matters for you.
Prepare for Failure
Few plans survive contact with reality. The important part of good plans is that they plan on the plan not going to plan.
Long Tails
Success has often been determined by staying in the game and dollar cost averaging to ride the failures and pick up the occasional wins.
Freedom
Money allows you to choose what you do, with whom, for how long. That's the prize—the highest dividend money pays.
Save More
Building wealth has a lot to do with your savings rate—saving as a hedge against life's inevitable surprises at the worst possible moments.
Reasonable Over Rational
Making fully rational decisions requires complete data. It's reasonable decisions that keep us in the game doing the things that make life worth living.
Room for Error
Build in strong margins for error. Spread your risk. The best way to avoid massive pain is to avoid single points of failure.
Create Your Plan
We're all playing different games with different resources, risk, and timelines. Stay in your lane without getting caught up in others.
Discipline Equals Freedom - Jocko Willink.
Core Behaviour and Habit Set
By collapsing these principles into a core set of habits and behaviours, we create financial player maps that encourage and reward them.
Save
Build and maintain a strong savings and investing rate. The foundation of financial fitness.
Get In and Stay
Start doing that early and regularly. Time in the market beats timing the market.
Be Frugal
The best way to increase your savings rate is to manage the gap between your income and your ego.
Expect Failure
What can go wrong probably will. Build in strong margins for error and protect what matters.
Create a Plan
Figure out what's enough, build your systems, and provide moderate amounts of all things that matter.
Build a Foundation
Build a strong asset base that is protected and protects from likely calamity.
Financial Fitness Codified
Odyssey tracks progress across time, space, and momentum to create coordinates that consolidate as a score—measuring financial fitness in a way that rewards good behaviour.
Time
Measuring the length of the relationship as well as the time within a mission. Longevity matters.
Space
Measuring spread and depth across missions—saving, spending, investing, lending—and to what level.
Momentum
Pace is a metric of all fitness. The monthly cadence of saving, spending, investing, and debt management.
Build Engaging Financial Experiences
See how Odyssey turns these principles into game-based player maps that help your customers thrive with their money.