Rainy day savings are incredibly important, because from time to time, bad things happen. And if you're not prepared for that, it's going to be really terrible.

Take a brilliant, creative social scientist, without any respect for conventional wisdom and you get Ellen Langer. She is a fantastic storyteller, and Counterclockwise is a fascinating story about the unexpected ways in which our minds and bodies are connected.

I don't know what exactly the translation is but when we do consume something now, something else has to give at some point.

When we save, everybody in the household is just suffering. By having the coin in a visible way, when you scratch, you can say the person that is in charge of the making money for the family is doing the right thing.

A very simple bad decision is to get into debt. And that is very expensive.

The people that lend you money basically give you an answer based on the risk that they are willing to take. But just because a bank is willing to take a particular risk doesn't mean that that is the right amount for me to spend.

We are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless: they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains.