Does Your Behaviour Decide Your Financial Health? Psychology of Finance

Ever heard someone say, “Oh, his poor financial decisions have led him to this troublesome situation”? Your psychology of money and behavior patterns have a strong relation with your personal finance management. Richard Thaler, a professor at the University of Chicago, spread the concept of ‘behavioural economics’ on the foundational work of Nobel laureates Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. 

But what is the root cause of this decision-making, good and bad both? Through this blog, I’ll walk you through some of these mind-boggling questions about financial psychology while providing you with clear insights, and I’ll aim to explore possible answers. 

Psychology & Finances: Killing Two Birds with One Stone

Personal finances are not just about numbers and spreadsheets, but thoughts and values; it’s about what you do with those numbers and what you think & feel about it. Your cognitive biases, emotional responses, and mental shortcuts (heuristics), loss aversions, herd behaviour, and mental accounting can highly impact your money management strategies. 

Research suggested 32.2% of the variation in financial literacy is explained by behavior, risk perception, and overconfidence. There’s also been an impulse buying in today’s generation to just follow trends. 

The most common and everyday example can be procrastination in money tasks; sometimes, we delay bill payment or just handle it like just another thing to do and fail to calculate long-term losses while paying extra charges or late fines. As you know, everything starts small. 

What is Behavioral Economics?

Behavioral economics combines psychology and traditional economics to simply understand why people end up apparently making irrational financial decisions. It explains theories like:

Present bias: Choosing present and instant gratification over long-term savings and asset management. Loss aversion: Fear of losing the amount is greater than the enjoyment of gaining the same amount of money. Example -When investors hold poor stocks, hoping they’ll recover instead of reallocating funds strategically.  Herd mentality: If everyone is doing it, why not me? Making decisions without any research, regardless of whether that expenditure is beneficial or not. 

Why Is Personal Finance Dependent Upon Your Behavior?

Even when people know where they should be headed in making financial decisions still their habits and behavior lead them in a different direction. 

Overconfidence: A lot of individuals overestimate their financial capabilities and knowledge, trying to be a know-it-all, taking high-risk investments, landing huge debts, thinking they’ll manage, but often get trapped in these debts.  Underconfidence: Too much of anything is not good, nor is the lack of it. Even a person with the right financial knowledge can fail to make decisions that can benefit them just because of a lack of confidence. Habits: Your habits can either make you a fortune or bring you to the streets, be it too much saving or over expenditure. E.g., some people invest in saving schemes, even compromising their basic comfort to live. Emotional decision: Emotional spending and saving can often direct you towards poor financial regrets. These decisions are often driven to gratify temporary feelings of stress, sadness, or excitement. Lacking action: Just knowing doesn’t yield results without practically implementing that knowledge. If you know about compound interest and still don’t invest early, how is that wisdom serving you? 

Steps to Build a Better Financial Behavior

You can drastically change your financial life by training your behavior and understanding your psychology of money management. Below are some practical, research-backed solutions to cultivate wealth-building habits. 

1. Automating finances

Automation of savings and bill payments makes you save first, spend later. 
Example– According to an NBER study, when companies automatically enrolled employees in retirement saving plans, in three months there was an increase of 35% in people who started saving, and even two years later the number was still 25% higher compared to when employees had to sign up themselves. 

2. The nudging technique

It’s a type of behavioral science where small, subtle changes are presented in an influential manner to encourage people to make better decisions without pushing them or cutting their options. 
Example– If your company enrolls you for a workshop yet gives you an option to opt out, it will mostly nudge you towards attending that workshop.

3. Incorporating cooling-off periods

Allow yourself a 24-48 hour window before any impulsive buying. It helps you regulate and mitigate your emotionally driven financial decisions. 
Example– Many shopping applications and websites have a “save for later” option, reducing your chances of impulse buying, and you can later visit those items in your ‘save for later’ list if needed. 

4. Creating a positive financial and thinking framework

It’s a human tendency to oppose something that restricts you; you tend to do it more. Hence, applying negative financial goals like “I can’t spend on my entertainment” makes you get frustrated while achieving them. Instead, set it as “I am saving up for financial freedom to have a better long-term comfort” to allow your mind to work with a positive approach. 

5. Educate & invest in mindful spending

Keep up with the basics of finance and investing, budgeting, current economic scenarios, and risk management to avoid being prey to FOMO. 

The biggest examples of these scenarios are the crypto boom of 2021, where people lost millions investing in crypto without proper knowledge and research, just following the trend and hype. 

Make a habit of reading financial blogs, books, or news to stay updated. 

Technology & Financial Behavior

The digital landscape has completely changed the way we handle our money and its management. The effortless one-click payments have surely made things less complicated and faster for us, but have come to extensively reshape our viewpoint towards saving, spending, and managing money, affecting decisions, choices, habits, and even emotions around money. 

Digital and hassle-free payments have incentivized instant spending as they reduce the stress and pain of paying. The investment apps, trading apps, and digital advisors have made investments easy and accessible to everyone, but they also drive high-risk decisions and herd mentality, where people end up investing without proper research. There are several cases of people losing millions overnight in Options Trading.  Social media is one of the key reasons for impulse buying, as people get inspired by their favorite creators or influencers and end up buying stuff they really don’t need, but just because it’s in the trend.  Technology has also given some tools to navigate through these financial behavioral challenges due to technical advancements. Budgeting tools like Walnut, PocketGuard, and Goodbudget help you analyze your spending patterns and make you conscious about unnecessary spending.  AI-Powered Nudges support you in correcting behavioral biases, such as banking apps sending you alerts when you overspend. 

Conclusion

Handling your personal finances isn’t just about knowing the graphs, sheets, and numbers. It’s about managing your spending patterns and behavior. Your financial knowledge can serve as a foundation for a step to excel in your financial life, but your small habits, your ability to regulate emotions, and identifying your biases and working towards building healthy decision-making patterns will determine your financial health. 

Also, it’s very important to understand that in today’s world, technology is a blessing and a curse at the same time. It gives you reasons and influence to overspend and mismanage money. But it also offers you tools to nurture better habits to lead a stable financial life with the help of budgeting apps, automated savings, and more. 

Small habits make big changes in your life. Learn to set positively framed financial goals, track your pennies, inculcate mindful spending, and maintain financial hygiene. Remember, your finances are not the digits in your bank account but your ability to manage those digits in the best way possible. 

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