Why do we pay off any credit card debt with 24% APY first? We do it so that hard earned gains investing aren’t wiped out and exceeded by sources of “bleeding”.
It turns out the same way paying off credit card debt should precede investing, there is a best sequencing for problems in personal health, too.
If it is uncertain where a symptom impacting your daily quality of life is coming from, or whether something you’re dealing with might need major surgery or could be cured, stop everything else and get that sorted.
This sounds obvious but you wouldn't believe how many patients have given up on debilitating circumstances because someone told them nothing could be done, or settled for a mediocre half-baked plan because they didn't know where else to look.
Stopping your search because someone tells you there’s no answer would be like stopping paying off credit card debt because the credit card company told you it’s no big deal for them to keep receiving interest payments from you. It’s your problem. Don’t trust anyone else.
They are "debts" to be paid that are unevenly distributed, through our own choices and through the cards we were dealt. Some of us have genetics where our relatives live past 100 even if they chain smoke.
Some of us have family trees pockmarked with cancer, dementia, and coronary artery disease. Whatever chronic condition diagnoses you carry today, now you have them. You need to make space in your budget to service these debts.
Knowledge of chronic conditions (and genetic predispositions) and what you can do about them is power. The more aggressively you service them, the more space you'll have for step 3.
Once you’ve paid off your credit card debt (big unresolved questions), have a plan to manage your outstanding loans (chronic conditions and predispositions), and have savings beyond that, it’s time to invest and enjoy that compounding.
Just like investing money, investing in personal health can be extremely simple or extremely esoteric. Which you choose depends on which you enjoy.
Personally, I want health and wealth to enable pursuing my true passions. I don’t find the pursuit of health or wealth to be particularly satiating pursuits in their own right. So for me, setting it and forgetting it makes sense in both domains.
I have a boring high probability for success base investment strategy, and I have a boring high probability for success health strategy that outperforms all the speculative stuff.
Hopping from sauna to colonic to supplements without nailing down basic healthy routines is like picking random stocks without a portfolio foundation. if you’re doing it to get differential returns on health, recognize that the data do not support you achieving any alpha this way. Take an index fund approach.
There you have it. You knew the wise man’s hierarchy for personal finance. Now you know it for personal health.
