The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life - Hardcover

Housel, Morgan

 
9780593716625: The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593716620 ISBN 13: 9780593716625
Verlag: Penguin Random House, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

From the bestselling author of The Psychology of Money and Same as Ever, lessons on harnessing the power of money to live a happier life

Most of us don t know how to spend money. We chase things that impress others but leave us cold. Or we save endlessly, afraid to spend on what would actually make life better. We confuse admiration with envy, comfort with excess, and utility with status. 

The Art of Spending Money doesn't provide budgets, hacks, or one-size-fits-all solutions. It gives you understanding of how your relationship with money shapes your decisions and how to reshape it so money works for you.

Morgan Housel s work has helped millions rethink how they earn, save, and invest. Now he turns his attention to the other side of the equation: how to spend. With insight and warmth, he shows why the most valuable return on investment is peace of mind, why expectations matter more than income, and why doing well with money has less to do with spreadsheets and more to do with self-awareness.

This book isn t about getting rich. It s about getting the most out of what you already have and learning to want what s worth wanting.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Morgan Housel is a partner at The Collaborative Fund. He is a two-time winner of the Best in Business Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, winner of the New York Times Sidney Award, and a two-time finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two kids.

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All Behavior Makes Sense with Enough Information

Most debates about what's worth spending money on are actually just people with different life experiences talking over each other.

An important question I love is: What have you experienced that I haven't that makes you believe what you do? And would I believe the same if I experienced what you have?

It applies to so many things in life. Including money.

The most important topic in spending money, one that's the cause of so much financial frustration and disappointment, is that there is no "right" way to do it. There are no universal laws of what kind of spending will make everyone happy and fulfilled.

What I like spending money on might make no sense to you. My fears might be your joys. Your goal might be the thing I most want to avoid.

There's a saying: Never make fun of someone for mispronouncing a word, because it means they learned it from reading. As a corollary: Never make fun of how someone spends their money, because they learned it from living.

Everyone is a product of their own unique past. To understand why people spend the way they do, you have to dig deep into their life experiences.

My brother-in-law is a social worker. He works with kids from the lowest levels of abject poverty and broken homes who are pushed in and out of the foster system.

A lot of these kids struggle at school. Their behavior is poor. They skip class. They don't pay attention. They get into fights on the playground. They can't focus on the future.

It is easy for people to not only criticize these kids' behavior but shake their head in confusion.

"Why are you acting this way?" "Why can't you understand that if you behave better, you'll have a better future?" "How could you possibly think that's an OK thing to do?"

But there's a saying inside the foster care system: All behavior makes sense with enough information.

Once you understand what some of these kids have dealt with at home-the uncertainty, the lack of security, love, and attention-their behavior begins to make sense. They're in constant survival mode and never learned some of the basic social skills other kids take for granted.

You don't want to encourage or even justify their behavior. But once you see the world through their eyes, you quickly understand why someone would make decisions that seem foreign to you and me.

All behavior makes sense with enough information-including behavior about the different ways we spend our money.

By the late 1920s, America was at the tail end of a full social and economic cycle. The devastation of World War I was followed by a crippling recession. And then, after a decade of misery-finally-people got to relish an economic boom that gave name to the Roaring ‘20s.

Roaring doesn't do it justice-it was an absolute party. For a good five years in the mid 1920s the economy was fueled by cheap debt, a stock market bubble, and bootlegged liquor.

In June of 1928, syndicated columnist Robert Quillen wrote a newspaper headline that in fourteen words describes something so simple and important:

That's it. So much of the late-1920s desire to show off wealth with new cars, new clothes, new toys, was driven by a reaction to the poverty and uncertainty that preceded it.

When you at one time feel held back, then suddenly feel released, a common reaction is to frantically sprint ahead to make up for lost time. Historian Frederick Lewis Allen wrote about the era:

Like the suddenly liberated vacationist, the country felt that it ought to be enjoying itself more than it was, and that life was futile and nothing mattered much. But in the meantime it might as well play-follow the crowd, take up the new toys that were amusing the crowd.

People seemed to justify wild, unsustainable spending because they were making up for being snubbed and suppressed during the dour years. It felt as if they were righting a wrong, like getting revenge. They weren't spending wildly because they crunched the numbers and determined it was the right thing to do. They were trying to heal an emotional wound.

That behavior is timeless, and explains so much.

A close family member grew up extremely poor and in a broken home, snubbed in every way. He then became a successful businessman. When his daughter was preparing to go to college, he told her, "Pick the most expensive school you get into." Sending his daughter to an expensive school was such a powerful symbol of what he had overcome that, in his mind, it was almost as if he preferred to pay the most absurd price he could. High tuition was like a social trophy that made him feel great about the arc of his life.

If you didn't grow up snubbed, or snubbed in a different way, that might make no sense to you. But that's the point: A lot of spending makes no sense until you peel back the onion layers of someone's personality, identifying the specific thing they're trying to accomplish, or the hole they're trying to fill.

How your past influences your spending decisions can manifest in different ways, with opposite outcomes depending on the person. Tiffany Aliche-a former preschool teacher who became a wildly successful financial educator-once said that she suffers from "post-traumatic broke syndrome." It's made it hard for her to spend her newfound wealth. "I was broke for so long, and it was so hard, that I'm afraid of going back there," she says.

If you try to make sense of spending habits-yours or other people's-you have to start with the understanding that people don't just spend money on things they find fun or useful. Their decisions often reflect the social and psychological experiences of their life. And since life experiences vary dramatically from person to person, what makes sense to you might seem crazy to me, and vice versa.

Spending a ton of money on a college degree might feel like a waste to one person, a nonnegotiable requirement to another, and the ultimate sign of climbing the social ladder to another. The same product has very different meanings to different people.

To someone who grew up in an old-money affluent family, a Lamborghini might be a symbol of gaudy egotism; to those who grew up with nothing, the car might serve as the ultimate symbol that you've made it.

No one should pretend that there's one right answer to these questions, because they fill a different psychological need for different people.

A lawyer who works one hundred hours a week and hates their job may have an urge to spend frivolously in an attempt to compensate for the misery of how their paycheck was earned. Never have I seen money burn a hole in someone's pocket faster than an investment banker receiving their annual bonus. After twelve months of Excel modeling until 3 a.m., you have an urge to prove to yourself that it was worth it, offsetting what you sacrificed. It's like someone held underwater for a minute-they do not take a calm breath when they surface; they gasp. A lot of spending is gasping. Related: I have noticed that those most capable of delayed gratification are often those who enjoy their work. The pay might be good, but the urge to compensate for your hard work with heavy spending isn't there.

The important point in all of this: Most debates about what's worth spending money on are actually just people with different life experiences talking over each other. How much you should spend, and why other people spend the way they do, starts to make sense when you accept that people who have lived different lives than you have want different things than you might.

I think it's a sign of deep immaturity to think that because you like spending your money a certain way, other people should too. It's a sign of deep immaturity to think that because you don't value something, no one else...

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Verlag
Penguin Random House
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593716620
ISBN 13 
9780593716625
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

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