The Psychology of Money

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It’s not a book about what to do with your money. It’s a book about what happens in your head when you try to do things with money.

I started writing about investing 13 years ago. A big part of my early writing career was centered around the 2008 financial crisis. I wanted to know: Why did it happen? What were people thinking? Why did they do the things they did? Can it happen again? Did people learn from their mistakes?

There was no ah-ha moment, but over time I realized the answers to these questions weren’t in finance textbooks. Economics textbooks could’t make much sense of them either.

But you could find subtle clues in psychology textbooks. And sociology studies. There were plenty of examples in history books. Political theory could explain why policymakers did what they did.

The biggest realization I’ve had about investing is that it is not the study of finance. It’s the study of how people behave with money.

There are people with no financial training or background who do well with money. There are also partners at Goldman Sachs with PhDs in economics who go bankrupt. That kind of gap between knowledge and results does not exist in any other field. And the mere fact that it’s possible in finance shows that doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave.

The neat thing about this is that behavior is the center of many different fields. A lot of important things in life fall under an umbrella of, “What is your relationship with greed and fear? Are you able to take a long-term mindset? How gullible are you? Who do you trust, and where do you get your information?”

That’s all investing is.

This book is 19 chapters. None are long, because I don’t want to waste your time. I just want to explain the 19 most important quirks about how people think about money, often through the lens of topics that have nothing to do with money, but everything to do with how people behave.

Hope you enjoy it.