What you should do is wait until the end of each month, and then say, "OK, how much money do I have? How much do I need? Let me send the rest to retirement."
Dan ArielyThatโs a lesson we can all learn: the more we have, the more we want. And the only cure is to break the cycle of relativity.
Dan ArielyMotivation, basically getting people to be happy at work, everybody - everybody benefits.
Dan ArielyOne of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in.
Dan ArielyIn the U.S., I think there is an ideology of not telling kids what to do. Nobody to tell you who to marry, not tell you what job to pick. You're your own person. You have the freedom to choose, including the freedom to fail in magnificent ways. And I think that's the big difference. In other countries there is basically a social norm about saving that is passed from generation to generation. In the U.S. there isn't.
Dan ArielyImagine 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.
Dan Ariely