What reminds you in your environment about saving? Nothing.
When we save, everybody in the household is just suffering. By having the coin in a visible way, when you scratch, you can say the person that is in charge of the making money for the family is doing the right thing.
None of us always make the best financial decisions.
You can think about life as a battle between you and a doughnut shop. The doughnut shop wants you to eat another doughnut and pay the money, and you want to do it in the short term, but in the long term it’s not good for you either financially or from a health perspective.
Why would you take money out of your paycheck at the beginning of the month when you don’t know how much money you’ll need?
The people who need to overcome temptation to the highest degree have the hardest time doing it.
Money is all about opportunity cost. Every time you spend on something, that’s something you can’t spend on something else.
When parents have college savings accounts for their kids, their kids show higher social and cognitive performance.
MONEY, AS IT turns out, is very often the most expensive way to motivate people. Social norms are not only cheaper, but often more effective as well.
The danger of expecting nothing is that, in the end, it might be all we’ll get.
There are many examples to show that people will work more for a cause than for cash.
Thoreau wrote, “Simplify! Simplify!” And, indeed, simplification is one mark of real genius.
Resisting temptation and instilling self-control are general human goals, and repeatedly failing to achieve them is a source of much of our misery.
Tom had discovered a great law of human action, namely, that in order to make a man covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
I do believe that an improved understanding of the multiple irrational forces that influence us could be a useful first step toward making better decisions.
We all think that in the future, we are wonderful people. We will be patient, we will not procrastinate, we will exercise, we will eat well... The problem is we never get to live in that future. We always live in the present.
The effort that we put into something does not just change the object. It changes us and the way we evaluate that object. Greater labor leads to greater love. Our overvaluation of the things we make runs so deep that we assume that others share our biased perspective. When we cannot complete something into which we have put great effort, we don’t feel so attached to it.
Every enticing item you pass in the window and don’t buy is a crushed impulse, slowly whittling away at your reserve of willpower – making it much more likely that later in the day you will fall for temptation.
This is the problem of relativity-we look at our decisions in a relative way and compare them locally to the available alternative.
The question, then, is whether the only force that keeps us from carrying out misdeeds is the fear of being seen by others...