Imagine you have six loans, small to huge. People want to close loans and because of that, they try to pay off the small loans, but that's not the right strategy. The right strategy, of course, is to pay the loan with the highest interest rate. People make this mistake and it costs them lots and lots of money, it's a very expensive mistake because interest rates accumulate and become very, very expensive very quickly.

I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them?

When you're in pain, tomorrow doesn't exist - just the pain - and the only thing that you want in the world is for it to go away.

What people do is they pay the small loans first. Why? Because they enjoy making the number of loans smaller. But of course it is a very ineffective way to pay debt down.

It was shocking to realize how many low-income Americans don't have savings accounts.

It is very difficult to make really big, important, life-changing decisions because we are all susceptible to a formidable array of decision biases. There are more of them than we realize, and they come to visit us more often than we like to admit.

Your immediate environment is comprised of coffee shops, supermarkets, websites, apps and all kinds of things - none of which have an interest in your long-term or short-term financial well-being.