Money & Behaviour

Humans are hardwired to evaluate their circumstances by comparing them to others. In financial life, this social comparison drive shapes spending, career decisions, and definitions of ‘enough’ in ways most people never consciously examine.

Present bias is the tendency to weight immediate rewards far more heavily than future ones of greater value. It’s the most consistent driver of under-saving, over-spending, and financial procrastination — and it’s not a character flaw.

Relative thinking — evaluating financial decisions in percentages rather than absolute dollars — leads to systematically inconsistent choices. The same amount of money gets very different treatment depending on the context it appears in.

Humans evolved to reason about small quantities. When financial decisions involve millions or decades of compounding, our intuitions fail in predictable and expensive ways. Here’s how to work around them.

The spaces you spend time in, the people you’re around, and the digital environments you inhabit have more influence over your spending than your financial intentions do. Here’s the evidence — and what to do about it.

Financial shame — the feeling that your money situation reflects something fundamentally wrong with you — is one of the most powerful barriers to financial improvement. Here’s where it comes from and how to work around it.

Most financial literacy programmes produce little lasting change in financial behaviour. That’s not a failure of the content — it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what drives financial decisions. Here’s what the evidence says actually works.

We don’t just make financial decisions to maximise outcomes — we make them to minimise future regret. Understanding regret aversion reveals why we make certain choices that look irrational on paper but feel compelling in practice.

Once we own something, we value it more than we would if we were buying it fresh. The endowment effect is one of the most reliably demonstrated biases in behavioural economics — and it costs people real money in predictable ways.

Lifestyle creep is the gradual expansion of spending that tends to accompany rising income — and it’s one of the primary reasons people feel perpetually stretched despite earning more every year. Here’s how it works and how to interrupt it.