Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter by Dan Ariely (PDF)

Description

New York Times bestselling author, Dan Ariely, teams up with financial comedian and writer Jeff Kreisler, to delve into the truly irrational world of personal finance, blending humor and behavioral economics to help people understand the psychology behind their financial decisions and show them how they can make better ones. He entertains critical questions such as these:Why is paying for things painful?Why are we comfortable overpaying for something in the present just because we’ve overpaid for it in the past?Why is it easy to pay $4 for a soda on vacation, when we wouldn’t spend more than $1 on that same soda at our local grocery store?We think of money as numbers, values, and amounts, but when it comes down to it, when we actually use our money, we engage our hearts more than our heads. Emotions play a powerful role in shaping our financial behavior, often making us our own worst enemies as we try to save, access value, and spend responsibly. In Dollars and Sense, bestselling author and behavioral economist Dan Ariely teams up with financial comedian and writer Jeff Kreisler to challenge many of our most basic assumptions about the precarious relationship between our brains and our money. In doing so, they undermine many of personal finance’s most sacred beliefs and explain how we can override some of our own instincts to make better financial choices.Exploring a wide range of everyday topics—from the lure of pain-free spending with credit cards to the pitfalls of household budgeting to the seduction of holiday sales—Ariely and Kreisler demonstrate how our misplaced confidence in our spending habits frequently leads us astray, costing us more than we realize, whether it’s the real value of the time we spend driving forty-five minutes to save $10 or our inability to properly assess what the things we buy are actually worth. The result not only reveals the rationale behind our most head-scratching financial choices but also offers clear guidance for navigating the treacherous financial landscape of the brain. Fascinating, engaging, funny, and essential, Dollars and Sense provides the practical tools we need to understand and improve our financial choices, save and spend smarter, and ultimately live better.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐What’s not to like when the co-author of this book describes himself as “just another Princeton-educated lawyer turned award-winning comedian, author, speaker, and advocate for behavioral economics.”Here are my two take-aways from this book:#1. I’ve been misthinking about money. Yikes. This book has immediately changed the way I think about how I spend money—and I’m not a spender.#2. Besides being well-researched and very practical, this book is hilarious!Fifty pages in, I started marking the funny lines with an exclamation point. No joke: my well-underlined pages include more than 100 exclamation points. (LOL!)THE BIG IDEA: “…this book is about the odd, wild, and yes, completely irrational ways we approach spending decisions and about the forces that cause us to overvalue some things and undervalue others.”After laying out a very convincing case, Dan Ariely (the professor) and Jeff Kreisler (the funny guy) invest their final five chapters on how to “build on the shoulders of flawed thinking.” Insightful ideas.Examples of flawed thinking:–“Some people go on a $10,000 vacation but spend twenty minutes each day looking for free parking.”–JCPenney’s short-lived CEO, Ron Johnson, “paid a high price for failing to understand the psychology of pricing,” when he instituted “fair and square” pricing and eliminated “sales, bargains, coupons, or discounts.”– “Had Albert Einstein been an economist rather than a physicist, he might have changed his famous theory of relativity from E = MC2 to $100>Half Off of $200.”–According to “loss aversion” research, when doctors frame survival options as “there’s a 20 percent chance of survival,” you’ll go for the remedy. But more people decline the option when framed as “there’s an 80 percent chance of death.” Flawed thinking!–On “investing effort,” Ariely and two other researchers dubbed one money phenomenon, “The IKEA Effect—so named after the meatball restaurant/umlaut factory/children’s playland that moonlights as a furniture store.”The chapter, “We Lose Control,” begins, “Rob Mansfield will be able to retire shortly after pigs fly.” With little or no retirement savings—many are thinking they must work until they’re 80 (“even though our life expectancy is 78”). Why the flawed thinking? Making sense of the IRS and IRAs and 401(k)s and 403(b)s, “can be intimidating and confusing. It’s like trying to think of another word for ‘synonym’ or what the best thing was before sliced bread.”But…I’m way ahead of myself. One of my favorite “Wall Street Journal” columns, several Saturdays each month, is “Ask Ariely,” a Q&A feature by Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, and founder of the Center for Advanced Hindsight (and he’s not the funny guy!). The questions are practical and his answers are research-based. So when this book was published in November, I bought it and it’s already on my hot list for Top 10 books of 2018.What changed my thinking about money? Check out the chapter titles in the section, “How We Assess Value in Ways That Have Little to Do With Value.”–We Forget That Everything Is Relative–We Compartmentalize–We Avoid Pain–We Overvalue What We Have–We Worry About Fairness and Effort–We Believe in the Magic of Language and Rituals–We Overvalue ExpectationsI highlighted about a zillion one-liners and concepts:– “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” (H.L. Mencken)– “Don’t believe everything you think.”– “We stand on the shoulders of giants . . . even if those giants are the giant mistakes we ourselves have made.”–In the commentary on confirmation bias, a restaurant consultant notes that the highest-priced items on a menu “actually generate revenue by getting people to buy the second-highest-priced items.”By the way, don’t put too much stock into fairness and effort in your money calculations. Apparently, we’re willing to pay more when we see the effort someone has put into a product or service—but bristle when a locksmith unlocks a door for us in a minute—but charges $200. More flawed thinking!And when asked how much work a husband and wife do around the house, researchers have found it adds up to over 100 percent! (The authors warn against borrowing the PowerPoint progress report from work to document progress on household chores.) “Or should we just make a lot of deep sighing sounds—so our spouses will value us more?”Would you pay more for a cheeseburger described thusly: “Artisanal goat fromage graces hand-crafted grass-fed bovine composite, with heirloom vine-ripened ‘tomate,’ curated greens, and special reserve spice blend, parsed for variance by expertologists.” Most will.There’s more:– “The leading practioners of language manipulation may be winemakers.”–Copy writers: read Chapter 10 on the magic of language. (All together now, sing the Big Mac jingle: “Two all-beef patties, special sauce…”)–What was the “Mona Lisa” painting worth before July 1911? “In August 1911, it was stolen from the Louvre. While the authorities tracked it down, there were suddenly huge lines of visitors waiting to view the empty space where the painting had hung.” What’s it worth today?– “About 16 percent of NFL players file for bankruptcy within 12 years of retirement, despite average career earnings of about $3.2 million.”–Comparing apples to oranges—turns out—is very helpful. “What’s hard is comparing apples to money.” Flawed thinking twists how we value an apple.–On the illusion of wealth: “In one set of experiments, when we gave people a salary of $70,000 but framed it as hourly earnings of $35 an hour, they saved less than when we defined it as a yearly sum of $70,000.”– “We react differently to ‘Oh, this coffee is $4 a day’ than to ‘Oh, this coffee is $1,460 per year.’”–To save for the future, we should manage our money with our “future self” in mind. “Maybe our pay stubs or credit cards should have a picture of our face morphed to look older.”Who should read this book? Parents, grandparents, students, co-workers, and anyone who buys or sells anything. Did you know that the first price you see (or previous prices you’ve paid) influences your future purchases (see the must-read section on anchoring—you won’t believe the research).I hope you buy this. I can’t stop talking about this book, or dropping in the witty one-liners in almost every conversation!

⭐The information is probably good but the print is sooo small that I’m going to have a really hard time reading it.

⭐We are usually taught so little about how to perceive or use money. Good read

⭐This book will be appreciated by fans of Dan Ariely’s previous books, and the topic of managing your money better is relevant to everyone. The book does a good.job of mixing humor in with insights and advice. Not quite as much of a classic as Predictably Irrational but entertaining and insightful nonetheless. If nothing else, spending time thinking about how you think about money will be worth the purchase price alone.

⭐This book features a nice mix of humor, cognitive biases, and personal finance. It was easy to read, and it is broken into short chapters that are easily digested. The chapters seemed to each focus on one common error we can fall into with money, offering many good illustrations and approaching the problems from new perspectives.The book’s strength was how accessible it made complicated ideas (the endowment effect, confirmation bias, and more), and how it kept me entertained. It did a good job of highlighting ways that the reader, or her friends, may struggle with money, so it may be educational if you are not very familiar with cognitive biases and common ways our minds fool us. On the downside, the book was light on practical ideas for how to overcome those errors. Overall, this was an entertaining read that was informative in parts, but it could have done far more to help readers find fixes for their own lives.

⭐I love Dan’s books. This one is funny and insightful. Not as jam-packed with learnings as some of his others but a worthy a read all the same. People in the financial services industry should read it. Hey Dan, I am waiting for a credit card company that shows you in real time what your balance is on your card (perhaps on your phone) to slow spending. While that is at odds with what the Credit Card industry wants, it would be good for the consumer. Hey Master Card, Visa, Amex – you listening. Help your clients spend – less! While counter-intuitive, it would be a great position for a startup credit card company.

⭐This book is not the typical stodgy financial book. It is practical and helps us see why we have the relationships with money that we do. It’s not a how-to, nor is it a paint-by-numbers system. Instead, it helps you gain wisdom for designing habits and behaviors into your own life and business to rise above. A lot of cultural references to help break up the subject matter and bring it down to casual reader levels. Thanks guys!

⭐Dan has been my irrational master during the last 4 years, so whatever I say, won’t be objective.His studies had helped me to make better decisions everyday, based on what is important for me, and not for the aceptance of others. This book is as good as the others, but with updated insights about purchasing behaviours and experiential investments. The stories shared increase the spicy tone of the teaches (I’m pretty sure these come from Jeff).If you want to learn about your own traps everytime you purchase something, I recommend you to read this book and keep it next to you credit card, your purse, or your wallet.

⭐Some three years ago, I belatedly came around to reading Ariely’s original masterpiece, “Predictably Irrational.” Here’s verbatim the summary of my findings:1. Among two offerings, a merchant can reliably make us pick the one he prefers by sliding a “decoy” bad choice that is more similar to the choice he wants to steer us to2. The first price we see for anything is the one we remember forever. Get that high “anchor” in and you can sell anything at a high price (and vice versa)3. We are suckers for ambience/context. We won’t just pay up for a product if a setting looks upmarket or is sold in an upmarket setting, we’ll enjoy it more too. If something’s presented as expensive, basically, we are drawn to it almost automatically, with a very notable exception:4. We’re drawn to stuff even more if it’s FREE! FREE! (with an exclamation mark, like Yahoo!) is a law unto itself5. We can’t deal well with mixing social norms and market norms. We’ll do things for free that you could not possibly pay us to do. Conversely, if a price is put on something that has previously been rationed but free, the magic is gone and we can’t go back to looking at it through the prism of social norms6. We can do some very stupid things when the “animal” inside us comes to the surface7. We simply don’t have it in us to delay gratification. We’re not wired like that. We have to find ways to trick ourselves to save for a rainy day, toget medical checks etc.8. We value stuff we own higher by dint of owning it. Our house, our stereo, theatre tickets, the lot. It all goes up in our estimation because it’s ours9. We place immense value on keeping options open and waste disproportionate resources on keeping our options open relative to the potential benefit of exercising them10. When we think something will be good, we end up liking it and when we think medicine will work it will end up working better!11. In the same vein, a 50-Cent Aspirin can do things a 1-Cent Aspirin cannot12. When nobody’s looking, we all cheat, but we don’t cheat too much, lest we end up feeling bad about ourselves13. The more removed we are from actual cash, the less inhibited we are in our cheatingSmall Change covers exactly ZERO new ground, but omits point #5, point #6 and points #12Funnily enough, that makes it a better book. I guess the author has come to realise that nine of his thirteen points were about… money. So he got a very funny (but impossibly lazy, he could not even be bothered to dig beyond his personal experience for new stories/examples) co-author to repackage those ideas and hey, presto, a better-focused book is on the shelves.Also, a major beef of mine with psychologists is they have to get sex into everywhere, a fact that makes it impossible to recommend their books to my mom or even to read their work on the tube. With point #6 expunged, this is indeed a book you can recommend to your mom and a book you can read in the tube with little risk of embarrassment. Modulo the jarringly frequent invocation of a dominatrix throughout the text, that is.So to all those of you who’ve never read Dan Ariely before, you can now skip his original opus. Buy “Small Change” instead, supplement it with “The Honest Truth about Dishonesty” and be on the lookout for his upcoming work on social norms vs. market norms.On the other hand, if you’ve already read “Predictably Irrational,” I can’t recommend buying this book. Like myself, you’ll feel robbed of your valuable reading time. And of whatever not-so-small change you paid for it, of course.

⭐Interesting, and very easy to read. TBH the ‘funny’ comments from the co-writer don’t really work that well, and I bet Dan could have written this without him, and also maybe made it a bit shorter. But very interesting, especially if you have never read any other books by Dan, or anything along the same lines. If you spend too much money on stuff you don’t use, if you overspend when buying a car, or want to know what price to sell your house etc, you will get something out of it. Also some good stuff about savings and pensions, especially the point that we keep up with the neighbours in terms of their visible consumption, but peoples savings and pensions are invisible, so we see less peer pressure to do the same.

⭐It is an OK book but it can be a lot more succinct and the humor does not work for me in most cases. Predictable irrational is much better so I suggest you read this first.

⭐Useful advice – saw the YouTube vids on the author and just wanted a little more detail so read the book

⭐Good read

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