Yesterday was the start of the NCAA tournament, otherwise known as March Madness. Unfortunately my alma mater, Brigham Young University, performed like they always seem to and choked at the end of the game. Throughout most of the entire game, the score remained pretty close, but BYU just seemed to give up in the last few minutes. So now that I’ve lamented the loss of my team, what does it have to do with our financial lives?

All too often as we’re struggling to reach our goals, we choke shortly before we achieve them. We start out with great resolve, passion, and the desire to succeed, but at some point we give up and fall short. Here are just a few examples of what I’m talking about:

1. You’ve decided to start an emergency fund and you’ve been adding to it now for about 8 months. Watching the balance grow has been pretty exciting, and it’s now larger than you’ve ever had it before. After a while you start to think of all the things that you could do or buy with that money, even though you know that’s not what it’s for. Eventually you succumb to the temptation to raid the fund and use it to take a nice vacation or purchase that new TV you’ve been looking at. So what happened to the goal of having an emergency fund? Why did you choke?

2. You’ve managed to find some extra money each month that you’ve started investing. You’ve decided to purchase relatively simple investments at regular intervals. Things have been going rather well for you for the last while and again the balance has been growing. Then the time comes where the market starts to head south and your investments begin losing value. Eventually the pressure is too much for you to handle and you sell out of the investment so that you don’t lose any more. What happened to the long term investing strategy that you began with? Why did you later choke?

So you get the idea. Why do we so often give up on something that we started with the best of intentions? To eventually realize the goals you’ve set for yourself, you can’t choke along the way. Things will get difficult along the way, but you’ve got to give a hundred percent for the duration. So next time you’re thinking of giving up, remember that you decided not to choke.

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