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We judge ourselves by our intentions and everyone else by their actions. To find out what you truly value, look no further than the intersection of money and time.  Ask me who I am and I'll talk about a list of intentions. I value my physical health. I love being in the mountains. I like giving back to my community. These are some all true things about me. But this describes the person I want to become more than the person I actually am. I rarely make it to the gym these days (although having a 5-month old may have something to do with that). The closest mountains are hours away and I don't have the time to visit them. I spend a lot more time helping retirees who have built up a significant nest egg than with pro bono clients who could seriously use my help. There is a name for the mechanism behind this divergence. It's called the fundamental attribution error: a cognitive bias that says we judge other people by their actions and ourselves by our intentions. If a coworker misses a deadline, it’s because they’re disorganized. But if you miss one, it’s because the week got away from you when you truly meant to finish. We extend ourselves a courtesy pass based on our good intentions while judging everyone else strictly on their results. But what happens when you judge yourself strictly on your results? The question gets uncomfortable: Do you actually value what you think you value? What the Money Catches Dr. Daniel Crosby takes a swing at that question in his book The Soul of Wealth, and his prescription costs very little but may be slightly painful.¹ Pull out your credit card or bank statement. Value healthy habits? The statement shows $200 of fast food last month. Value your kids' future? $0 in 529 contributions over the last year proves otherwise. A credit card statement doesn't care about your intentions. It's a record of what you did with real money under real constraints, and it will contradict your self-image without a hitch. Economists have trusted this kind of evidence for nearly a century, ever since Paul Samuelson formalized it in 1938 as revealed preference: watch what people choose when resources are scarce, because talk is free and spending is not.² If you've never done this exercise, do it today. Most people I've walked through it find at least one line item that they’re embarrassed by, and that’s the point! Dr. Crosby is right about using a credit card statement to audit your values. But I want to push his idea one step further, because only evaluating financials creates a blind spot. What The Credit Card Statement Misses Some purchases are intentions wearing a costume. Picture the $5,000 mountain bike hanging in someone’s garage. An auditor reading only the credit card statement would write this person up as a committed cyclist. Whether the bike has touched dirt since January is a question the statement cannot answer. This pattern is so common that economists have measured it. In a 2006 study titled "Paying Not to Go to the Gym," Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier tracked 7,752 health club members across three years of contracts and daily attendance.³ What they found:
Why do we do this to ourselves? Because buying the equipment feels like progress. Psychologists Robert Wicklund and Peter Gollwitzer called the mechanism symbolic self-completion: when we commit to an identity we haven't earned yet, we acquire its symbols instead.⁴ Commit to an Identity ➔ Try to Buy It ➔ Feel Real Progress ➔ Skip the Actual Work The purchase discharges the psychological tension of the unmet goal without requiring any of the actual work, and then it shows up on your bank statement as evidence of virtue. So, the audit designed to catch the intention vs. action gap can itself be fooled. Sometimes it just represents a down payment on who you meant to become. Time Can't Be Gamed There is a second record, and it closes the loophole left by the credit card statement. It’s your time. Time is the one resource that cannot be spent aspirationally. Every hour gets used on something, whether or not you chose it deliberately, and the record of those hours is pure behavior. This is where the two records stop competing and start working together. The bank statement shows what you funded. The calendar shows what you did. Your actual values live where the two records agree. The bike purchase plus the Saturday morning rides is a value. The bike purchase alone is a hope. It runs the other way, too, though. The hours reading to your kid or a casual walk in the park cost exactly zero dollars and will never appear in any financial audit, which is why time plays such an important role in our values. To be clear, this isn't an anti-spending sermon. I've written before about research showing that money spent to buy back time is some of the best money you'll ever spend.⁵ But even that purchase has to survive the calendar audit: if the Saturday you bought back went to the couch and the phone, you just bought another bike for the garage. The Double-Barrel Audit Here's a good exercise to evaluate your values vs. intentions on yourself. Step 1: Audit the Money. Pull last month's credit card/bank statement and find your top three non-essential spending categories. For each one, ask a simple question: Did I choose this, or did it just keep happening? Step 2: Audit the Time. Take last week and estimate, honestly, where your non-working, non-sleeping hours went (round numbers work just fine). This half of the exercise stings more than the money version, because you can always earn more money but you can’t buy back time. Step 3: Cross-Examine. Find out what you truly value by examining where your time and money collide. Takeaways Every value you claim is a hypothesis about yourself. The credit card statement and the calendar are how you test it.
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