The birth of my own ADR

Yesterday I was talking to my friend about ways to accumulate tuition fees for kids. He suggested going with Chit funds, as they promise 12% returns. I was shocked to hear it from him. We have known each other for over a decade now. Through countless discussions on personal finance, we concluded long back that protecting money is as important as accumulating it. Chit funds are notorious in our society. During my schooldays, chit fund scams were all over the news every other week.

I screamed at him for this idea. The frustration peaked because the person I am referring to the person who calculated how the chit funds could be profiteering in a spreadsheet by comparing the investment against the returns. Finally, the call concluded and I was wondering what could have happened to him.

Learning from others mistake

What he did was not a criminal offense. It’s a human tendency to question our past judgements while encountering an unknown situation. For him, he got tempted by the unreal returns—12% per annum. Achieving 12% year-on-year is either unreal, or we are living in a new world. No wonder he advocates to revert his strong belief.

This could happen to me. No one can be sure of our future. How our monkey brain reacts to the situations is unknown. But we should build a guardrail to protect ourselves from the wavering mind. We think of others’ problems in an objective way while we get subjective when it comes to our own problem.

Some of the problems in life might take place in a corporate setting. Some MBA grad might have come up with a sane situation. It’s sensible to apply it to our personal life.

How the problem is handled at workplace

Last week, I collaborated with the enterprise architect to establish the process for architecture decisions record (ADR) in my organization. The ADR is a process of writing down the decisions made, why they were made, and what other options were explored. The whole thing is hosted in a Git repo for quicker access, and the markdown format ensures portability into other tools if they are chosen in the future.

ADR is critical during the time when we question the choice. The write-ups will help us understand why we chose, along with the situation that made us pick the decision among the many other alternatives.

Why not apply ADR to personal life?

ADR is for the team and so its published in the intranet and anyone in the team can view it. My financial decisions are personal, privacy is must. I considered going with Obsidian or some other second-brain tool. The problem is typing is not same as writing. Even now I write my notes in hands during the certification preparation. You may call me old school or a boomer. But I like the pen tip to meet the paper than simply typing it down.

That is when I decided why not to add a section in diary and write down why I choose this stock at this price, why this mutual fund folio over something else. Thus