Why one shops crazily and the other saves

I was only out of the office for one day. I left the night before at five to seven and came back the day after around half past nine, and my desk looked like I had shopped my credit card into destruction. A box from MyTheresa, something from my favorite jeans supplier, a new tube of Embryolisse, a fresh notebook for notes… I started to panic a bit at the sight. Because: who is going to pay for that? Me, of course, you understand that.

I'm not very good with money. Correction: I'm bad with money. Sometimes I suddenly have one of those shit-together moments and I efficiently work through my paperwork, but the next day that urge can be gone as if it never existed, and I let my letters pile up unopened. They say you don't do this anymore once you've turned thirty, let me help you out of that false dream right away because I still can't manage it. I do want to, though, that's not the problem.

But now it turns out it's just due to my brain. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman explains financial behavior: it can be divided into fast thinking and slow thinking. With fast, you react on feeling and decide within a nanosecond, slow already says: you take your time, think deeper about things, and concentrate much more on a choice. I suspect I think too fast.

Expert psychologist Jonathan Haidt compares it to an elephant and the rider (which you shouldn't do, by the way, because elephants are not meant to be ridden). The elephant is big, emotional, and reacts instinctively. The rider has control over the elephant, but sometimes it's exhausting to steer such a large animal in the right direction. And then suddenly you get a very generous bonus of a thousand euros from the boss, you have to choose: spend it now on a vacation with cocktails and food on a Greek beach or save it for when you retire (in about 35 years). I don't know what you think, but I'm already on that Greek beach. That's what the elephant in my brain does, it lumbers very hard towards the tzatziki. I should be the rider making sure it doesn't happen, but sometimes the tzatziki is stronger than I am. It takes discipline to keep the beast in your brain under control, and let me just say I sometimes have a lack of discipline.

The way to ensure that you don't let the elephant run wild at MyTheresa? A motivation that is bigger than that. Hmmm, I need to think about what on earth that could be. In these kinds of stubborn cases, a financial advisor or planner seems to help. You get it: I'm looking.

Source: HuffPost