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Happy Money Series | How to Spend Well and Enjoy Your Money More  Every Saturday afternoon through my high school years, I mowed the lawn at my childhood home. Week after week, I'd push that mower around in the SoCal heat, across the multiple grass areas in the front and back yard. All in all, the job took a grueling hour and a half.
Now I live in a house with a much smaller, but still reasonably sized, patch of grass. Ask me if I mow it myself. Heck no. The way I see it, I pay for lawn care one way or another. I either a) pay money for someone else to do it, or b) pay with my time and suffer through the dread of a chore I can't stand. For most people, option b) is the default. We grind through the chores we can't stand because outsourcing them feels lazy, or because we figure the money is better spent on almost anything else. It rarely registers as a financial decision at all. As it turns out, behavioral finance research says otherwise.
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Happy Money Series | How to Spend Well and Enjoy Your Money More  There's a personal finance cliché that has been running for decades: stop buying lattes, invest the money instead, and you'll retire with an extra $170,000. David Bach, a renowned financial author who coined "The Latte Factor," was not wrong in pointing out the massive effect of compound interest over a long period.
Skipping the morning coffee run can indeed save us thousands over the long run, but the argument fails to address an even larger problem. Buying a latte every single day costs more than a few dollars — it costs us the enjoyment of the treat itself! When that $6 coffee becomes an everyday habit, we slowly kill the dopamine boost that made it worth buying in the first place. From denial to acceptance: A guide to moving through the five stages of grief during an inflation shock.  I recently walk into a Chase Bank branch, which, yes, is still a sentence in 2026. The teller I was talking with has a family of 4. While discussing the astronomical cost of raising kids in this day and age, he jokingly said “Every time I leave the house, it costs me $200”. While I'm sure he was embellishing a bit, the statement rings true for a lot of Americans.
Gas is $5/gallon. A casual dinner out for two means $100 with tip. Movie theatre tickets are $20 each (before concessions), and you can forget getting a decent seat at a live sporting event. I mean I just bought a $30 polo from Target for goodness’ sake. What on earth happened? Sadly...the prices we knew are gone. The consumer price index has risen roughly 26% over the course of this decade¹. That's cumulative, and it's permanent. 5% inflation for services and healthcare. 3% inflation on goods. The sub 2% inflation of the 2010s is long gone. Around 46% of Americans in a recent Politico survey said the cost of living is worse than ever². YouGov has tracked inflation as Americans' most important issue every year since 2022³. What makes this dynamic even stranger: the economy, by most measures, is holding up. GDP grew 2% in 2025 despite everything thrown at it⁴. Unemployment has stayed near 4%. Private sector wages grew close to 4% year over year⁵. Leisure travel is booming. Many asset classes are hitting record highs. From a pure data standpoint, we should mostly feel better. But that’s just not the case. Americans are still intensely grieving the prices of the past, and unable to fully move on. The fear of running out of money often results in an overly conservative retirement plan. The flat-line spending model doesn't properly reflect the math behind a typical retirement spending glide path. Here's what the research suggests we do instead.  Open up almost any retirement planning tool, run a projection, and 99% of the time you’ll see a flat withdrawal rate (usually 4%) from 65 to 90, adjusted for inflation. It’s predictable and tidy.
It's also entirely oversimplified. The problem with the flat withdrawal rate is that it implies you, at 65, will have the same spending behavior as you at 85. Do you think you’ll have the same appetite for life, same desire to travel, same interest in a new car, same urge to go out for a drink at these vastly different ages? Probably not, right? Aging is dynamic. Every stage of life looks very different at its beginning versus its end. When your financial plan is built on a flat line, the math often tells you there's a crisis looming at 90 that demands significant restraint today. The result is a scarcity mindset that isn't entirely reflective of your evolving financial wants and needs.
A 5% market dip is one of the most normal events in investing. So why does it reliably send sentiment off a cliff?
Every market drawdown, you'll see the same red banner headline: “Stocks sell off as Wall Street worries about X”.
The S&P 500 drops 4–5% from a recent high, and the tone notably shifts. Pundits start talking about caution, allocations get “reassessed,” and risk becomes the focus. Scroll through investment forums and it sounds even worse: “Bear market incoming”. “Market is officially broken”. “The smart money got out weeks ago”. Somebody always has a thesis. What makes this so remarkable is how routine the trigger is. Since 1980, the S&P 500 has declined 5% or more in 93% of all calendar years.¹ These dips occur 4-5 times per year on average.² The event that sends investors into crisis mode is, statistically speaking, closer to a scheduled occurrence than a warning signal. Yet, sentiment data shows the same thing over and over: bearishness spikes quickly and sharply the moment one of these pullbacks arrives. Why do these dips always feel so worrying? Why is our emotional response so consistently out of proportion to what the data suggests?
Research from Stanford Medicine reveals that aging happens in sudden shifts — not gradual decline. Here is a roadmap for deciding when your money should be used when factoring in good health.
When Your Body Peaks vs When Your Money Peaks
I’ve sat across from a lot of people who spent their financial lives doing everything right. They contributed significantly to their 401(k). They stayed the course through volatile markets. They deferred and saved and planned.
Then, they retired at 65 and watched their nest egg continue to grow; the habit of not spending had calcified into the default mode of their lives. What most current and prospective retirees don’t know, and what many financial plans don’t factor in, is that there’s a risk in financial planning that doesn’t show up in projections or Monte Carlo simulations: Capability Risk, or the risk that your wealth arrives after your ability to fully use it. Money compounds, but your ability to enjoy it doesn’t. How Travel Became a Protected Expense in a Fragmented Economy  Have you been to an airport lately?
Lines at security, crowded gates, flight after flight going out full. It feels like this century's Roaring 20s, an unexpected dynamic in an economy that, by most traditional measures, appears to be slowing down. Anecdotal as it may be, the crowding reflects a meaningful shift in how households are spending their discretionary dollars. Experiences, especially travel, have moved to the top of the priority list. There are several possible explanations: a post-pandemic reordering of priorities, the relentless visual pressure of social media status, or simply a growing acceptance of what psychologists have argued for years — that experiences tend to deliver more lasting satisfaction than material goods. I'll leave the cause for another day to focus on the outcome: travel has moved out of the discretionary bucket and into something that feels closer to a personal necessity. That thesis is becoming increasingly visible in company reporting. Even as consumer sentiment reflects ongoing concern around inflation, unemployment, and broader economic conditions, the travel industry is booming. My takeaway: the trip has become non-negotiable, but the way we travel has become increasingly fragmented across income levels. Why people consistently make the mistake of confusing the two  Over the past few weeks, the headlines have looked increasingly uncomfortable.
February Payrolls unexpectedly fell by 92,000 and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%.¹ Retail sales slipped.² Oil launched to the largest percentage gain in one week since 1983.³ Inflation expectations are rising again.⁴ Consumer sentiment, as measured by the University of Michigan, sits at 56.6, compared to a historical average closer to 84 (a level that often appeared only on the eve of a recession in prior cycles).⁵ Judging by the comment sections on these headlines, you might think the economy is headed for complete destruction, and your investments along with it. While volatility is certainly starting to pick up lately, the S&P 500 remains well within range of its peak; at these levels, the 'crisis' is mostly just noise. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the current market action proves to be a mere footnote in the 2026 performance report. It is a disconnect that leaves even seasoned investors baffled. If the macro environment feels this fragile, shouldn't the indices be much lower? This misconception has tripped up many generations of investors: the stock market is not the economy. Conflating the two is an expensive mistake, yet it’s one that countless investors make every single cycle. Many People Don't Need to Hire a Financial Planner. Here's How to Know If You're the Exception.3/3/2026  The financial advice industry operates on a simple assumption: professional guidance improves outcomes, no matter the client background. The reality is more conditional than absolute.
Some people try to captain their own financial ship and pay dearly for avoidable mistakes. Others would simply be giving away money by hiring an advisor. The goal of this article is not to sell you either way, but instead to help you figure out which type of investor you are, and whether you actually need to hire a planner based on that determination. Financial advice is more of a tool than an obligation, and like all tools, its value depends entirely on who’s using it and in what situation.  This year's tax refund season is shaping up to be quite a boon for taxpayers. Early reports have the average IRS tax refund is up 10.9% so far this season, with an average refund amount of $2,290.¹
For many Americans, this means a check of several thousand dollars or more landing in their bank account. The annual question remains: save it or spend it? Research suggests the answer depends less on your willpower and more on how your brain categorizes that money. |
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