Can’t wait to retire this mortgage and be debt free!

“I called my brokerage, and they suggested that I send a copy of a recent bank statement, along with my wife’s name and account information, showing that she is, indeed, a joint holder of the checking account. This sounded like a lot of work, and I’m just not in the mood for a lot of work.”

Faxing a bank statement is a lot of work?

In the time you spent calling your bank getting them to modify their software system, you probably could have emailed/faxed/snailed ten statements along with your wife’s info.

Honestly, I think you were just trying to make a point – not trying to avoid “a lot of work”. In the end, the result was (hopefully) the same … however the fundamental problem here is barriers – you weren’t in the “mood for a lot of work”, so you changed your behavior. You didn’t want or were unwilling to do X so you did Y instead. X became a barrier. What if your wife’s name STILL isn’t on your future online bill payments? Then you’ll be back at square one: facing a big barrier.

This is a common problem with those of us that have (or had) financial problems – we build barriers to our financial success.

Here is a guest article written by Ramit Sethi, author of the book “I Will Teach You to be Rich”, which discusses these “barriers” that we often build for ourselves, often without knowing we did:

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2009/03/17/the-psychology-of-passive-barriers-why-your-friends-dont-save-money-eat-healthier-or-clean-their-garages/

Reading that article/post really opened my eyes, and made me more conscious of the decisions that I make today and how they will impact my future.

Roth IRA

Good Luck