Category: Behavioral Economics
The Number One Joy of Financial Security
Joshua Sheats describes financial security as being debt free and having enough investment income to cover your basic needs (housing, transportation, food, utilities, and insurance). That definition works for me, and that will be the working definition of financial security for this post. The opposite of financial security is, of course, financial insecurity. For this…
You Have All the Opportunity You Need
I didn’t get married until I was 40 years old. This was largely because of rampant bigotry in the dating world. I grew up on Long Island where a sizable portion of the eligible females in New York City, Nassau County, and Suffolk County were non-white (roughly 40 percent). And many black, Hispanic, and Asian…
If You Have Just One Free Hour a Day, You Can Kill Your Money Woes
I never saw the movie Predator in its entirety. But I do remember this epiphany that the character Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger) had when he discovered the blood of the movie’s super formidable villain on the ground. If it bleeds, we can kill it. Dutch didn’t say that killing ol’ crab face was going to be…
The Broken Windows of Personal Finance
In the early 80s, two social scientists, James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, came up with a crime-abatement theory called broken windows. In a nutshell, the broken windows theory goes like this: Broken windows on a building or a home that aren’t fixed send the message that the owners of the structure don’t care. Since…
Tips to Help You Forge a Frugal Mindset
Several posts ago, I suggested three strategies to help you subdue your appetite for stuff: strategic ignorance, strategic aloofness, and strategic participation. Here’s a quick review. Strategic ignorance: This is the practice of consciously removing yourself from the loop, of being purposely ignorant of whatever is “cool” or “hot” or “fashionable.” The logic behind strategic ignorance…