Six guidelines for making grounded money decisions

Here are six guidelines that will help you keep your limbic system and your money separate so that the lizard in you does not get to make your money decisions.

Avoid making important money decisions when you are emotional. Heightened emotion –– good or bad — narrows your perspective, cuts you off from your sense of the big picture and makes it more difficult to logically see long-term consequences of your choices.
Avoid making important money decisions under tension or fatigue. Increased tension produces emotional regression with increased tension and advanced conflict. The stress response reaction can move someone into a more emotional pattern characteristic of a much earlier age. The same holds true for fatigue. Take important decisions after tensions have calmed and you are rested.
Be willing to sleep on it. There are few true emergencies in life. Investing isn’t one of them and neither is buying that plasma television. If it is a good decision today, it will be a good decision tomorrow after you’ve had the state change and perspective of sleeping on it.
Have a well-informed and fully structured plan. Look at the big picture and your long-term objectives and create a strategy and game plan based on facts rather than on emotions or instinctive reactions.
Stick to your plan especially in times of doing extremely well and feeling euphoric. Stick to the plan. Get your excitement and take your risks in areas other than finance.
Worry about the right things. Decide what you can control (your plan, your actions, your decisions) and what you can’t (market conditions,external events) and put all your effort, energy
and focus into those things you can affect. When things happen that are beyond your control and that you cannot determine, stick to the plan.