Money & Behaviour

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.

Money is one of the top causes of conflict in relationships — but the fights are rarely actually about money. Here’s what’s really going on and what research says actually works to resolve financial conflict in couples.

Affective forecasting — predicting how future events will make us feel — is something humans do constantly and badly. The mistakes we make consistently shape poor financial decisions about what’s worth spending money on.

The financial habits and beliefs formed in childhood can follow people for decades — often in ways they don’t recognise. Here’s what the psychology of scarcity actually does to decision-making, and how to work around it.

Most people rate themselves as above-average drivers, investors, and financial decision-makers. Most of them are wrong. Overconfidence bias is one of the most consistent and costly patterns in financial behaviour.

Your ability to make good decisions degrades throughout the day as you use up mental energy. Understanding decision fatigue explains why financial mistakes often happen in the evening — and what to do about it.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out and remember information that supports what we already believe. In financial decision-making, it’s quietly one of the most expensive cognitive errors people make.