What reminds you in your environment about saving? Nothing.

Money is a wonderful invention. It lets us save, it lets us specialize, right? I couldn't be a professor if there wasn't any money. Every day I would have to raise chicken and bread and broccoli and go ahead and spend all my time trading. So, money is a wonderful mechanism.

The retail industry has its own headache: it loses $16 billion a year to customers who buy clothes, wear them with the tags tucked in, and return these secondhand clothes for a full refund.

I don't want to say that the poor are inherently cognitively diminished, but at the end of the day of making difficult, tough decisions, it's very hard to have the energy to think about things with the right mindset.

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.

Brands communicate in two directions: they help us tell other people something about ourselves, but they also help us form ideas about who we are.

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.