Mind over Money: Why Understanding Your Money Behavior Will Improve Your Financial Freedom - Softcover

Lucas, Evan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1922611484 ISBN 13: 9781922611482

Verlag: Major Street Publishing, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Understand how your thinking drives your money behavior to master your finances and make better financial decisions.

There is limitless financial information in our modern-day, connected world. We can find stats, facts, investing approaches, wealth creation hacks and new ways to wealth (think cryptocurrencies). But leading economist and market analyst Evan Lucas believes we should cut out the external noise and look at ourselves first. What drives our behavior and attitude to money?

This fascinating book explores the things people do to overcome their money habits and looks to instill tips on how we can make better money decisions just by acknowledging our own learned behaviors.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Evan Lucas is a leading economist and Chief Market Strategist at InvestSMART. An experienced financial educator, his biggest lesson learned from his time working in markets, investing, and finance is that our individual behavior toward money is always different and always changing. Evan is a regular commentator on ABC television and radio news, TODAY, The Project and SKY News.

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Chapter 1
To be human is to
bereasonable
To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite
an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: we enjoy
not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to
appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better.
– Bill Bryson,A Short History of Nearly Everything
Ivividly remember sitting in a university lecture, wide-eyed and
completely overwhelmed by the things I was learning about physical
anthropology; you know, Homo erectus, Neanderthal man and of
course Homo sapiens – us.
The lecturer unveiled a human skull from a box, looked at us and
asked, ‘Is this a 10-year-old skull or a 10,000-year-old skull?’
No one responded.
‘It’s neither,’ he continued, ‘because it’s not a real skull: it’s just a
mould. But if it was real, you wouldn’t be able to tell just by looking at
it. We modern humans are basically identical to our Stone Age human
ancestors. Our brain size and physique are about the same.’
Think about that: your brain is the same as someone who
walked the Earth 35,000 years ago. It hasn’t changed in that time.
Scientists,anthropologists and historians largely agree that we were as
‘smart’ back then as we are now.
Think about the geniuses who have contributed to humanity over
centuries and millennia: Socrates, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Hypatia,
Galileo, da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, Hawking – the list is long. Then
think about the mind power needed to build structures like the
Pyramids of Giza, the Roman aqueducts and the Great Wall of China,
and the time in history they were built.
The human mind has been able to do a lot of what it does today for
thousands and thousands of years. But what is very clearly different
today is our lifestyle – our life stresses, our work, our wants, our needs
and our desires. Life was relatively straightforward for our ancient
relatives: find food and shelter, reproduce and escape peril. Simple. It
was a lifestyle of immediate return – find food, eat food; find shelter,
sleep; see big hairy beast, run.
The thing about living with immediate returns is that you don’t have
to think about the concept of time. Time just happens; day becomes
night and the seasons flow into each other without being questioned.
In today’s fast-moving, never-sleeping world, however, time is a
commodity. It’s something to be mined or put into intervals and sold –
think lawyers and their six-minute work units. Time is something we
don’t have enough of to do what we need (let alone want) to do.
That means making quick decisions, often very complex decisions,
almost every waking minute of every day. Research says we make as
many as 35,000 decisions daily. And plenty of them involve money.
Think about it. What money decisions did you make before you
even started work this morning? You might have considered questions
like this:
•Should I pack lunch for work to save money?
•Can I justify paying for a latte on the way to work when I have
an espresso machine at home?
•Should I pay for my train ticket with cash or card?
•Is the mortgage repayment due today? Do I have enough cash in
my account to cover it?
Then you might have gotten even further ahead of yourself:
•Do I need a new job?
•Have I planned for my future?
•Have I planned for my kids’ futures?
•Do I need to find more income?
•Do I want to go on a holiday soon?
•Should I think about buying a house?
The list goes on... 35,000 times every day.
It’s a mind-boggling array of decisions – and that’s before you’ve
even reached midday and started wondering if you should ditch your
homemade lunch after all and buy something more appealing from
the sushi joint downstairs.
The key point here is that each of these potential questions
is a delayed-return decision. The decision you make now has no
immediate return; that comes later (or so you hope) – like tomorrow
or next week or next year or even next decade, or somewhere even
further into the beyond.
This point is core to investing. Can you make a delayed-return
decision? Are you able to resist something now to get a greater reward
in the future? Can you embrace the concept that time has value, too?
We have to deal with rational and irrational decision-making
almost every second of the day. We can all crunch the numbers to
make rational decisions. I know if I’m taking a brown-bag lunch to
work, I’m probably going to save $10 and spare myself at least 10
minutes queueing at the sushi bar. So, it would be a rational decision
to skip the takeaway. But sometimes, that sandwich just seems a bit
meh by midday.
All too often we ignore logic and make a choice we know isn’t
entirely rational. That’s because money doesn’t just involve finances –
it’s deeply tied up with our emotions. And emotions are inherently
linked to one of the greatest psychological tools humans from ancient
times to now possess – choice.
Philosopher Alan Watts said we often experience anxiety about
decision-making. We wonder whether we thought the choice through
enough, if we considered all the data. The fact is, he says, we can
never take enough data into consideration – because data is infinite.
Choice, he said, is an ‘act of hesitation’ before we make a decision.
We always doubt whether we’re behaving the right way or doing the
right thing; we lack confidence. And, he said, ‘if you see you lack self-
confidence, you will make mistakes through sheer fumbling. If you do
have self-confidence, you may get carried away doing the entirely the

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Major Street Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1922611484
• ISBN 13: 9781922611482
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 180
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar