 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.
0 Comments
 I recently watched Jay Kelly on Netflix, where George Clooney plays a fictional movie star who dedicates his life to his craft and succeeds by every external measure. The catch? He later admits to choosing his career over his family, only to realize he’s missed many of life’s most meaningful moments and relationships.
I don’t generally sit down to watch a movie looking for financial metaphors, that would be weird. But every so often, a story brushes up against a question I already spend time thinking about. In this case, Jay Kelly’s story happened to remind me of the FIRE movement. Whether it’s Coast, Lean, or Fat FIRE, the core philosophy is the same: front-load sacrifice in your early years to buy freedom later. The math is sound. Saving aggressively from an early age is essentially the equivalent of a financial superpower. The appeal is also undeniable. Who doesn’t want the freedom to do whatever they want in their 40s? I’ve always joked that my dream job is retirement, and FIRE is a good mechanism for getting me there. But the FIRE movement raises a complicated set of questions. What are the movement’s disciples missing by deferring their lives in their 20s and 30s? And how do we find the "goldilocks" zone between saving responsibly for the future and actually living along the way?  Budgeting may easily be the least sexy habit in personal finance. And to be honest, it can really suck. It’s tedious, it’s boring, and it often confronts us with truths we’d rather keep in the background.
In my line of work, I routinely hear clients say: “Well, we tried tracking our spending, but life just got in the way and we couldn’t keep it consistent. If things ever get tight, we’ll hunker down then.” But that’s just kicking the can down a road paved with hidden stress. Eventually, a "surprise" expense or heavy financial decision reveals that we weren't as prepared as originally thought. We avoid facing the discomfort for the sake of "ignorant bliss," but as with any bad habit, the cost of that clarity-avoidance compounds.  Did you know that the most popular finishing time for marathon runners is 3:58?¹ A while back, I read about common marathon themes in Adam Alter’s Irresistible and came across a fascinating detail: finish times aren’t distributed smoothly across the clock. Instead, runners cluster at round numbers (3:30, 4:00, 4:30).
The evidence points to a meaningful takeaway: people will sprint to cross a finish line before a psychological threshold. Cross at 3:59 and you’re triumphant; cross at 4:01 and it feels like you fell short. This isn’t unique to running a marathon. Psychologists call this the goal-gradient effect: as we approach a target, our motivation increases sharply.² Runners sprint the last mile. Sandwich shop customers order more often when their punch card is nearly full. Investors save harder when they’re closing in on a milestone.³  There are two versions of you.
There’s the one who genuinely wants to get ready for bed early, read before bed, and wake up feeling rested. And then there’s the version of you who lies in bed scrolling on your phone till 11pm. You know, the who had a long day and “deserves to relax”. You know which version you want to be. But you also know which version usually wins. That’s present bias: the magnetic pull of right-now comfort, even when it pushes the person you want to become one more day into the future.  I noticed this sign on my way to the gym the other day (I changed the phone number for privacy). I’ve seen plenty of these signs before, but this was the first time I really stopped to think about the business model behind them.
These signs target a very specific kind of homeowner: someone under pressure. It might be foreclosure risk, divorce, job loss, relocation, or major repairs they cannot afford. The common thread is distress and a willingness to accept a cash offer at a steep discount in exchange for immediate relief. This is a textbook example of the liquidity gap: the difference between what you think your asset is worth and what you can realistically sell it for when you need cash quickly. Selling a house is rarely fast, smooth, or cheap; under pressure, people often trade price for speed. What does this tell us? There is an entire industry built on profiting from the moments when people are in financial distress and lack the liquidity buffer to overcome their struggles. Need some evidence? Just ask the managers of Yale’s endowment fund.
|
RSS Feed