Because cheating is easier when we can justify our behavior, people often cheat in small amounts: We can come up with an excuse for stealing Post-It notes, but it is much more difficult to come up with an excuse for taking $10,000 from petty cash.
What people do is they pay the small loans first. Why? Because they enjoy making the number of loans smaller. But of course it is a very ineffective way to pay debt down.
It was shocking to realize how many low-income Americans don’t have savings accounts.
Money is a wonderful invention. It lets us save, it lets us specialize, right? I couldn’t be a professor if there wasn’t any money. Every day I would have to raise chicken and bread and broccoli and go ahead and spend all my time trading. So, money is a wonderful mechanism.
Money are very difficult to think about. So, we think about money as the opportunity cost of money. So, we at some point went to a Toyota dealership and we asked people, what will you not be able to do in the future if you bought this Toyota?
We don’t really want a huge house, but we want the house to be slightly bigger than our neighbors, and a car that is bigger than our neighbor’s, and they’re going on vacation that’s slightly more expensive, and this escalation happens that things got out of hand.
If I gave you now, $10 as a gift, how happy would you be? Would you be happy, is the marginal $10, the best use of $10 you can use? Of course not. If I have you a CD, you know exactly what you are getting and you will have a value for it. So, money has lots of problems with it.
Believing you are a bad person leads to a slippery slope.
Once you break the social norm and create a new social norm, all of a sudden it can stay with us for a long time.
Not all debt is bad. From time to time we should get into debt when there’s a good reason for that.
A very simple bad decision is to get into debt. And that is very expensive.
I don’t want to say that the poor are inherently cognitively diminished, but at the end of the day of making difficult, tough decisions, it’s very hard to have the energy to think about things with the right mindset.
I don’t know what exactly the translation is but when we do consume something now, something else has to give at some point.
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.