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Let’s face it: it’s human nature to do things the easy way. Why else would diet pills be so popular?

We may not really believe that swallowing a little pill will make us thin, healthy, and happy, but compared with the alternative of hours in the gym each week and taking care to eat the right foods, many of us opt for the “easy way” out instead.

What can it hurt, we figure. (The answer: Lots.)

The same thing is true in personal finance: we often take the easiest route, which isn’t necessarily the best.

Suppose we’re looking for a mortgage, and we come home to find a flyer on our door from a mortgage broker. We might be tempted to use them because the information is right there, but they may or may not actually be a good choice.

A better route would be to research the rates offered by a variety of mortgage brokers, after first researching the options available in a mortgage, what our credit score is, what we might expect, etc.

But we can use this tendency to take the easy route to our advantage in some situations, if we can just force ourselves to do a TINY bit of work first.

For instance, 2 minutes spent automating the payment of a bill can prevent money wasted on expensive late fees and high rates on loans due to poor credit. And once the bill is automated, we don’t have to spend time making sure it’s paid on time, etc. We can take the easy way out by just checking our statement for accuracy and letting it be paid automatically.

Or if we have a tendency to let piles of clutter build up on our desk (*cough* me *cough*) we can counteract that by setting the shredder right next to the desk. If all it takes is 5 seconds to shred a document, we’re more likely to deal with it right then.

Just remember that it’s too much work not to be organized, with all the time spent searching for things and the money spent that we didn’t intend.

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