Rima Grace

Of course I'm not going to save into a college savings account.

Of course I'm not even going to move money away from my checking account when I feel like I don't have enough right now to cover what I think are my basic needs.

That's interesting.

The decision-making frame and the decision-making framework of people's minds just becomes like an ostrich, right?

I'm in a bad situation.

I don't want to think about anything.

I just want to hoard.

I want to cut in here because this point shifted something for me.

What Wendy's saying is that how we feel about our money predicts what we do with it more than the actual number.

So feeling like you don't have enough, even if you objectively do, can lead you to make worse financial decisions.

I've felt like this before.

Like, I can remember specific moments when I've told myself that I'll start investing once I make more money and then just kept pushing it off.

It feels ironic that the feeling I was trying to fix, the anxiety of not having enough, was actually the thing keeping me stuck.

Okay, now back to Wharton professor Wendy De La Rosa.

We often tend to think about financial decision-making as hard numbers on a spreadsheet, and it's not.

Like, there's nothing more emotional than how we feel about our money and how we make financial decisions.

Yeah.

And this is like a lot of this conversation assumes that you have the basic needs met, right?

Rima, I think that's such a great point.

I think I have a personal convulsion that happens inside of me when people say like money doesn't make you happy.