“My neighbor is driving me crazy. She always says she’s the most frugal person she knows, but she’s spending every dime on *&#$* at Target. It’s not frugal. It’s stupid.” A friend recently shared this sentiment with me, and it is an excellent example of the fact that some of us aren’t great at evaluating our own personal characteristics. Some of us lack self-awareness when it comes to specific attributes about ourselves. Frugality is …
In a Wall Street Journal article this week, the perils of debt-supported spending by Chinese Gen Z-ers and millennials were contrasted with the potential benefits of a hyper-charged consumer economy. The upshot from a macro-economic perspective is that while some amount of borrowing can be good for an economy (leading to job creation and more productivity), it can also lead to unhealthy levels of household debt, which in turn can lead to an overall …
One of the main missions of DataPoints is to help individuals improve the way in which they manage their financial lives using behavioral science. This mission has two important components: first, we have to understand our own patterns of money-related behaviors, personality, attitudes, and other characteristics as a starting point (our financial psychology). Then, if we have the desire to change our financial trajectory, we have to modify the way in which we save, …
Sometime around 2000, I gambled some of my money away while fooling myself into thinking I was doing something very sophisticated. I wasn’t in Las Vegas: I was sitting at my computer buying shares of Krispy Kreme Donuts on eTrade. I had seen the front page of Forbes or Fortune or some other publication touting the company’s success and its future prospects, and decided on my own, without seeking the counsel of my wiser …
When our first daughter was very young–not quite two years old–we attended our first-ever birthday party for a three-year-old. (I recently talked about this experience on the Afford Anything podcast with Paula Pant). We went as a family of three. It was 2:00 in the afternoon on a Saturday. We arrived and were somewhat taken aback by the scene: was this a wedding reception? Considering the evidence of the multitude of adults milling around …