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Gas prices are advertised on 10-foot signs, but do they really represent the economy? A look at salience bias, wallet share, and controlling what matters.  I passed by a local Costco gas station recently, and the line had to be at least 15 minutes long. Based on recent gas price surges following the conflict in the Middle East, that’s becoming the norm.
I’ve always been fascinated by the lengths people will go to save a couple of dollars on fuel. If you drive a heavy-duty truck with a 35-gallon tank, sure, the math might make sense. But driving ten minutes out of your way in a Toyota Hybrid just to idle in a queue for a 20-cent-a-gallon discount? I can’t imagine the savings are worth it. Yet thousands of logical people do it every week. Why does gasoline have such a powerful grip on our financial psyche?
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I’ve never heard people talk about their energy bills as much as they have this summer.
“$350.” “$460.” “$1,300! I never should have put in that damn pool.” It’s top of mind because people genuinely can’t believe what they’re seeing. They’re running to their neighbors just for sanity checks: “This can’t be right... right!?” Granted, it’s been a hot summer and running the A/C has never been cheap. Still, the sticker shock on energy bills is a worrisome subject for virtually everybody. From utilities to home and auto insurance, structural living costs have skyrocketed over the last several years with little relief in sight. So far, people have mostly managed to stay afloat -- propped up by record asset prices and an exorbitant amount of debt. Beneath the surface, though, American households are starting to run on fumes. Cash flows are stretched thin, and budgets are breaking under the weight of bills people never explicitly chose to increase. Having A Plan Means Knowing What To Do When the Paychecks Stop.  Article Highlights
I'd say retiring early, in some fashion, is a widespread goal of the American labor force. Hell, it's mine too: coffee in hand, the scent of pine, a sunrise morning somewhere in the mountains, sometime before 60 I hope.
That's the dream, financial freedom, the ability to do whatever you want whenever you want. Who wouldn't take that? But for the millions of Americans chasing it, success in retirement is impossible without a good plan. So many hinge that plan on a 401(k), an IRA, and Social Security, when in reality, they aren’t enough. To tell you the truth, odds are slim that any of us actually gets to choose our own retirement date. And if we don't get to choose, we're being forced out of the workforce for exogenous reasons, not because we decided the time was right. So what happens on the day the paychecks actually stop? The 401(k), the IRA, Social Security: these are real answers to a real question, which is how did you save. They don't answer the question that decides whether your retirement works or not. How much of that money you can safely spend, in what order you draw it down, and what happens if you don't get to pick when it starts are the much more important retirement questions. We judge ourselves by our intentions and everyone else by their actions. To find out what you truly value, look no further than the intersection of money and time.  Ask me who I am and I'll talk about a list of intentions. I value my physical health. I love being in the mountains. I like giving back to my community. These are some all true things about me. But this describes the person I want to become more than the person I actually am. I rarely make it to the gym these days (although having a 5-month old may have something to do with that). The closest mountains are hours away and I don't have the time to visit them. I spend a lot more time helping retirees who have built up a significant nest egg than with pro bono clients who could seriously use my help. There is a name for the mechanism behind this divergence. It's called the fundamental attribution error: a cognitive bias that says we judge other people by their actions and ourselves by our intentions. If a coworker misses a deadline, it’s because they’re disorganized. But if you miss one, it’s because the week got away from you when you truly meant to finish. We extend ourselves a courtesy pass based on our good intentions while judging everyone else strictly on their results. But what happens when you judge yourself strictly on your results? The question gets uncomfortable: Do you actually value what you think you value? Normal financial advice tells us that skipping the bar tab saves money, but it may be costing us in mental health over the long run.  A new survey from the American Psychiatric Association found that 54% of adults cope with loneliness by watching TV, movies, or online videos. Another 54% listen to music. Thirty-eight percent turn to social media. All of these come under a thread of emotional regulation, ways of numbing discomfort without confronting it.¹
While Americans continue to retreat from social life, they're also paying for the privilege of doing so. Many households are pushing past $100 a month in digital media subscriptions. Meanwhile, the number of adults who say they drink alcohol has fallen to 54%, the lowest rate in nearly 90 years according to a 2025 Gallup poll.² Gen Z drinks roughly 20% less than millennials did at the same age.³ Honestly, on paper, this looks like progress. Less money on alcohol and nights out = more money in the bank. But the trend is signaling something far more worrisome: the migration from social spending to isolation spending costs an enormous amount in mental health. Happy Money Series Part 4 | How to Spend Well and Enjoy Your Money More  "First round's on me!"
It is one of the most universal phrases in adult life. It represents a small celebration, a way of saying I am glad we are here. Often, it's a fight between friends to put a card down for a round. Typically, our brains flinch at an $80 charge. In this scenario however, it feels like the money is well spent. Why? Because that bill carries much more weight than just the $80 paper value. 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. Happy Money Series | How to Spend Well and Enjoy Your Money More  In the winter of 2025, after five years of 'we should really do this,' my friends and I boarded a flight to Hokkaido, Japan. We were going to experience "Japow", the legendary powder snow that has made Hokkaido one of the most coveted ski destinations on the planet.
If you're not familiar, many ski resorts in Hokkaido (the north island in Japan) receive well over 500 inches of snowfall in any given winter. It's one of the snowiest places in the world, and we had been waiting years to finally ski it firsthand. The planning phase of this trip alone was a rewarding process; locking down the tour company, mapping out resorts, researching restaurants, building a loose itinerary for Tokyo and Kyoto. Months of excitement and anticipation materialized on a shared google doc, building toward our January departure date. Then, in the week before we left, a dry spell appeared in the forecast. We weren't too worried… a few days without fresh snow wouldn’t completely ruin the trip. But it was not a just few days… 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. 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.
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.  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.  When you hear the word advertisement, what comes to mind?
A TV commercial? Maybe a billboard on the highway or a bus? The painfully unskippable 30 seconds before a YouTube video? For decades, advertising announced itself. And over time, we learned how to ignore it. Popups, sponsored news content, promoted websites. We’ve become increasingly attuned by filtering out the noise. But of course, every time we adapt to a new style of advertisement, a more effective one takes its place. Today, social media has essentially erased the boundary between content and advertisement, making it increasingly difficult to spot an ad six inches from our face. One moment we’re watching a humor-filled reel. The next, we're being pitched products by an influencer in their messy (but familiar) bedroom. We don’t brace ourselves for a sales pitch because it doesn’t feel like one. After all, who expects an ad from someone who looks like a friend? Ads have never been this well camouflaged, and the numbers prove it's working: social media advertising hit $276 billion in 2025 and shows no signs of slowing down¹. Companies are following the returns, and those returns are staggering. In this article, I want to unpack why social media ads are so profitable for companies, how they’re getting increasingly invasive, and what we can actually do about it.  You're reading this just after Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the unofficial Olympic Games if impulse spending. Billions of dollars flew across checkout pages in a 96-hour sprint, and retailers everywhere are still high-fiving their data scientists. The party isn’t over, however, as it’s time to gear up for the next round: holiday shopping, Secret Santa pressure, and the constant drip of “last chance” year-end deals.
Somewhere in the last decade, online shopping has transformed from a convenient alternative to purchasing goods to a finely engineered behavioral machine designed to get you to overspend. The digital economy depends on our wallets, and it’s increasingly turning to addiction science to extract more of our hard-earned dollars. Just look at the numbers: this year, Americans are expected to take on $55 billion in post-holiday debt, with the average shopper dropping $300–$340 on Black Friday and Cyber Monday alone¹. And that’s before the December avalanche even begins. Consumer debt is one of the biggest obstacles to long-term financial well-being, so it’s worth understanding what we're up against. What makes online shopping so exhilarating? What is that irresistible feeling we get right before clicking purchase? Why does that impulse make it so difficult to stop? By analyzing this unconscious pressure, we can gain the tools to combat it and reclaim our spending decisions.  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. How Frictionless Payments Trick Your Brain and Drain Your Wallet  It’s a quiet Sunday afternoon and you’re scrolling through the Lululemon website. The new Scuba Oversized Full-Zip Hoodie jacket catches your eye. It’s sleek and looks extremely comfortable. $148.
You hover for a moment. It’s not outrageous... but it’s enough to give you pause. The price is just a bit too much to stomach. Then, right beneath the price, a soft gray line appears: “Or 4 payments of $37 with Afterpay. Interest-free.” Your mentality shifts. That $148 doesn’t feel like $148 anymore. It feels like $37, a number small enough to slide past your internal budget filter. The hesitation fades. You’re not deciding whether to spend $148; you’re deciding whether to part with $37 today. And that’s easy. Click. Add to Cart.  In the 1970s, CEOs were paid well, but not obscenely so (around 36 times as much as the average worker)¹. Compensation was high, but it wasn’t outrageous. Pay packages were opaque, boardrooms benchmarked internally, and the public wasn’t aware of the numbers.
By 1993, however, CEO pay was beginning to balloon, averaging about 131 times as much as the average worker². That year, in an attempt to stop the rise in executive pay, federal securities regulators required firms to begin disclosing this information publicly³. The idea was that once executive compensation was public, boards would be reluctant to give executives outrageous salaries and benefits out of fear of stoking outrage. What happened next was the complete opposite.  This past summer, my wife and I decided to take a trip to Europe. She had never been before, so I was especially excited. While browsing for plane tickets, I spotted what I thought was a steal: a round-trip flight for $617 per person. Score! But then came United’s dreaded Basic Economy warning. No flexibility, no checked bags, no real seat selection. I couldn’t stomach the restrictions, so I upgraded to the much more ~luxurious~ ‘standard economy’. The squeeze didn’t stop there. Next, I found myself agreeing to pay extra just to sit next to my wife on both legs of the journey. A couple clicks later, I looked at my cart, only to find that the cost had ballooned to $986 per person. What on earth happened?  Mental accounting is one of my favorite concepts in money psychology. It’s the act of automatically assigning different values to our dollars based on context. Traditional economics tells us that a dollar is a dollar. But if you’re human, you know that’s not how it feels.¹
You don’t have to look far to see this concept in action; the proof is in our daily spending quirks. If you’re anything like me, you’ll pat yourself on the back for skipping a 50-cent coffee upgrade… then think nothing of dropping $20 on a ballpark beer that sells for $3 at the grocery store. We grumble at paying a $3 ATM fee, then happily tack on $12 for an app at dinner. We’ll wait in a long line at Costco to save $5 in gas, but pay a premium to board a flight slightly before anyone else. |
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