For all of us, it's very hard to think about money, and because of that, we need help. In the same way that for all of us, it is hard to eat well, and we need some help. The poor have a particular challenge, which is that their life is actually much more complex - and they're much more complex cognitively.

Disasters are usually a good time to re-examine what we've done so far, what mistakes we've made, and what improvements should come next.

There's something about [cyclically] doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.

With money we really fool ourselves. We are our biggest enemies with money and there are some things we can do about it. Automatic deductions are a wonderful thing. But ideally, you should wait until the end of the month, you can see how much extra money you had, and you should put that in your savings account. We don't do that too well, and if we did that, we would never save. So, what we do, is we take money out of our pocket into the saving account at the beginning of the month, take it outside of our control and as a consequence, we spend less and we save more.

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.

Once you break the social norm and create a new social norm, all of a sudden it can stay with us for a long time.

Why would you take money out of your paycheck at the beginning of the month when you don't know how much money you'll need?