Psychology of Money

Dr. Cooper

The key to financial success is obvious. You just need to know all about stocks and bonds and then somehow get access to the top minds in the financial world, right? Well, actually no. As you’ll learn in this week’s hidden gem, our single most popular guest of all time across 177 episodes, knowledge and success, well they’re rarely coordinated when it comes to our money. Welcome to the latest episode of the Catalyst Health, Wellness, and Performance Coaching podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Bradford Cooper of the Catalyst Coaching Institute and today’s guest Morgan Housel brings together two fascinating topics, money and psychology. He’s the partner at the collaborative fund, a former columnists at both the Motley fool and the wall street journal, a successful author of the book the Psychology of Money, and a two time finalist for an award for distinguished business and financial journalism. If you’ve been considering pursuing your wellness coach certification by the way, our August program is just around the corner. And then your last chance is coming up here in 2021 in October if that August training is already filled. Both are approved for the national board for wellness coaching and both allow you to register at the old rate, speaking of money before those go up later this year. As always feel free to reach out to us with any questions, results@catalystcoachinginstitute.com or visit the website CatalystCoachingInstitute.com. Now it’s time to go beyond the spreadsheets and the algorithms and discover what’s really happening between our ears when we think about money with Morgan Housel on the latest episode of the Catalyst Health, Wellness, and Performance Coaching podcast.

Dr. Cooper

Mr. Housel, very good to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us.

Mr. Housel

Thanks for having me happy to be here.

Dr. Cooper

Let’s jump right into your book. I’m super excited about this. It comes out in a couple of weeks here titled the Psychology of Money. And you note in the intro that doing well with money, isn’t necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you behave and behavior is hard to teach even to really smart people. So that’s the end of the quote. Obviously we talk a lot about behavior change here on this show. So you got some folks nodding their heads right now that are listening, but others are saying, wait a minute, seriously, money’s a math problem. That’s just straight forward. We will dig into this big time today, but can you give us the 10,000 foot view of this concept of money behavior?

Mr. Housel

Yeah. Well, let me explain it this way. Here’s I think the easiest way to sum it up, you can be someone with no financial education, no financial background, no financial experience, and do very well with money. You can be a good investor. You can accumulate a lot of savings over time, achieve a high net worth over time. On the other hand, you could go to Harvard business school and become a partner at Goldman Sachs and work at the best hedge fund in the United States and have the best financial education, the best background and go bankrupt and that happens. And my point that the biggest takeaway for me is that that does not happen in any other field. There’s no other field where someone with the best education, the best background, the best training, even has the potential to underperform someone with no financial background, no training, like it’s impossible to think of a, you know, someone from the street, just with no education, performing open heart surgery, better than a Harvard trained cardiologist or performing a root canal better than, you know, a dentist who did his training at Stanford isn’t that doesn’t happen in any other career, but it happens in finance.

Mr. Housel

So the takeaway from that, for me, just, just the mere fact that it is possible is that what really propels financial results over time is not how smart you are. It’s not even the financial training or education that you are, it’s whether you kind of have mastered your own behavior, your own psychology things like patience and your relationship with greed and fear, your ability to keep your ego in check so that you’re not using all of your savings to, you know, just increase your lifestyle, uh, and just have lifestyle creep over time. Those things have nothing to do with the financial skills that are taught in school or in the financial workplace for people who are in the profession, but they make all the difference in the world. They are the biggest thing that separates people who do well from people who don’t with money. So it’s not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you behave.

Dr. Cooper

Great start. Great start. Alright. So speaking of behavior, you wrote a great blog post back in January, where you compared financial behaviors with eating and exercise, and we’ll link to that. You start off the sentence, let me tell you, or two sentences. Let me tell you a story about why some people aren’t financially secure as they could be. It starts out with a weight loss study. Now, could you dig into that a little bit? What does one have to do with the other? I think this will really resonate with our audience.

Mr. Housel

So there are, you know, it starts out with the observation that Americans spend billions of dollars on personal trainers and gym memberships and exercise equipment. And leave aside like the, the gym memberships that don’t get used, Americans work out a lot. They’re exercising a lot, but there’s also an obesity problem. Americans are not healthy on average, you know, large swath of the population is overweight, high blood pressure, etc. And then so some doctors looked at that. Why do we spend so much on physical fitness? And so much time and energy on physical fitness and yet so many of us are, are overweight. The conclusion that they came to and what basically happens is a lot of people just summarize it in really basic terms. People will go to the gym and burn, let’s say a 500 calories. And then immediately after they go to the gym, they go to Dunkin donuts and they eat 600 calories to make up for it because they go to the gym and they burned a bunch which increases their metabolism, makes them hungry.

Mr. Housel

They also feel like they owe themselves a nice treat because they just spent an hour on the treadmill. So they say, Oh, I’m going to go, I’m going to go to McDonald’s. Now I’m going to go home and eat an entire pepperoni pizza. I’m generalizing here. That’s not how they framed it in the study, but basically what it is is people overcompensate for the exercises that they’re putting in. It’s not that they don’t exercise. It’s just that they compensate for their exercise with more food, more than they would have eaten if they didn’t exercise at all. And I think that it’s a good analogy for what happens in finance as well, which is that a lot of people earn a good income and whatnot and, you know, have a lot of money coming in. But by and large, we’re not, we’re not necessarily wealthier than we were in previous decades, previous generations when we had lower incomes, it’s because so much of what has been made and what is earned is just being spent. It’s not accumulated. So in health and diet and exercise, what matters is not how much exercise you put in for, in terms of losing weight, um, all else equal, it’s how much you exercise and then do, and then don’t compensate for it with more food. It’s the gap between your exercise and what you eat after your exercise to simplify it and finance, it’s the same, like doing well with money. It’s not how much you make. It’s the gap between how much you make and how much you earn. It’s that like putting in a, you know, the sacrifice that you make after you earn the money to accumulate it and save it and invest it for the long-term. That’s what matters.

Mr. Housel

It’s that gap between the two afterwards, but you know, just like an exercise, it’s hard for people to wrap their heads around that because what they think is I’m going to the gym five days a week and I’m sweating my buns off and I’m tired and I’m still maybe even gaining weight what’s going on here. I think finance is similar for people who are like, I went to college and got a, you know, spent a bunch of money and got a good degree. And now I have a high salary job, but for a lot of these people, not, not all of them, of course, but for a lot of these people, even after 20 years in the workplace, they survey their finances and say, I’m effectively broke. And why is it? It’s the same thing. It’s like, it’s the compensation that takes place after you put in the hard work that overcompensates and like makes up for all of the good work that you put in. So good financial results, just like good health results have to do with the sacrifice that you go out of your way to make after you put in the hard work.

Dr. Cooper

You know, I’m just, I’m just shaking my head. Like, why is it, I mean, you hear that all the time. People say, well, I’ll donate money to this charity when I make more. I’ll do this when I make it. It’s like when I’m making six figures, when I’m making, you know, high six, whatever it is, whatever their number is, it’s like, it’ll work then. But the reality is you’re saying, no, not really. The amount you make has very little to do with your financial situation.

Mr. Housel

Yeah. And that’s really hard. It’s difficult for everyone. It’s difficult for me. And I think about this for my career I wrote a book on it. And it’s difficult for everyone, but I think the hardest financial goal, but the most important financial goal is getting the goal posts to stop moving. Because most people not, and not everyone, of course, for some people, it will be the opposite, but most people will go throughout their career with gradually higher earnings. From the time they start their career in their teens and twenties, the time they may retire in their sixties or their incomes will be gradually rising over time. But for the majority of those people, it doesn’t necessarily lead to an increased level of happiness because the goalpost is moving over time. Now, of course, with increased income, people will move into maybe a bigger house, a safer house. You’ll have a lifestyle upgrade that is reasonable and meaningful. Everyone’s done that. I’ve done that. But at some point you got to get the goalpost to stop moving. You have to say, okay, if I’m going to get a raise next year, I’m going to use that for savings. And I’m saying that for people that you have to do that if you want your money to lead to a greater sense of wealth, a greater sense of net worth, that gives you security and options and kind of a safety net gives you control over your time. The only way you can accumulate wealth is if you don’t spend the money that you have, that is such an obvious statement, but it gets hard for people to contextualize that statement if their goalpost is always moving, I’ve been dealing with this my whole life.

Mr. Housel

Everyone has this sense, if you are a saver an investor, it’s so natural to say, once I have X dollars, then I’ll be that. Then I’ll feel fine and everything will be great. And I can just coast from there on out. And it’s always BS, it never works like that. As soon as you hit X, you say, okay, X plus one, and then X plus two. It’s like that for everyone. And I think that is true. Whether you were talking about a net worth of a thousand dollars or a billion dollars, honestly, I think that that dynamic is true for the wealthiest people in the world because people judge their well being, their financial well being, not in a vacuum or not in a spreadsheet. They judge it by those around them, but by the people that are around them. So if you are a billionaire and you are socializing with other billionaires, there are always people who are, who look like they’re way ahead of you. Jeff, the amount of money that Jeff Bezos, his net worth has increased by this year, like in the last eight months, just that increase in the last eight months would be the 10th richest person in this world.

Dr. Cooper

Wow. There’s a perspective.

Mr. Housel

His net worth has increased by $90 billion this year. Just this year. So look, even if you were someone whose net worth is $20 billion, there are people who you can look up to who are in a different stratosphere than you are. And look at more practical levels. If you are someone who has a salary of a hundred thousand dollars, by any definition, you are entering the upper echelon of earners, you know, probably top 10% in America. That’s what it’s probably roughly, right? But look, if you are earning $30,000 and someone who earns a hundred seems like they’re doing great. But as soon as you earn a hundred, you start looking to people, you know, your boss is making 200 and then you get to 200 and oh, now the boss ahead of you is making 300. That level never stops. It never stops.

Mr. Housel

There is a friend of mine who, uh, used to go to Vegas a lot. And he asked one of the dealers one time, I think it was a blackjack dealer. He said, Hey, what, what games do you play? You’re a Vegas dealer. You you’re on the inside. You know how this all works. What games do you play? And the dealer looked at my friend and said, the only game that is worth playing in Vegas in terms of making money is to get up out of your seat and walk out of there and don’t come back. And I feel like it’s the same, there’s a similar philosophy for getting the goalpost to stop moving with money. It’s like the only way that you are going to feel happier with your money and be more satisfied with the money that you have is if you eventually stopped playing the keeping up with the Jones’s game, you just, just stop.

Mr. Housel

And it’s so hard to do, my wife and I have put a lot of effort into it. And I think we’ve probably done an above average job at it, but it’s so difficult. It’s so difficult to get the goalposts to stop moving. But I, I don’t know if any other way that you can lead to a greater level of just life satisfaction with your money. Let’s leave aside the satisfaction that comes from your relationships and your purpose in life, etc. If we’re just focusing on the narrow lens of money, the only way that you can use it as a tool for increase happiness, uh, is to get your goalposts to stop moving.

Dr. Cooper

So give us some practical steps, you and your wife are doing this. You’ve talked a lot of folks that either are or aren’t, and you’ve seen both sides of it. You’re in that industry. You’re with a lot of the very wealthy and other people that are kind of moving their way up. Any tips on, because it is, it’s obvious advice, but how do we stop that goalpost from moving?

Mr. Housel

I, you know, I wish I had two or three pieces of just concrete advice. So I could say, just go do X, but I think it’s hard to do that for a couple of reasons. One is that everyone is different, uh, like leave aside differences in age and whatnot, but there’s so many differences in who your friends are and your social standing and what your goals are and what not. I have, I personally just have zero desire whatsoever to be, you know, a managing director at an investment bank who puts on a suit and gets in his BMW and drives to this, his glass walled office every morning. That’s like my nightmare. But for some people, that is the dream. So, but you know, a lot of people and I, I respect people for whom that’s their dream. I have nothing against that. We just have to recognize that one person’s goal is another person’s nightmare. And therefore we can’t give blanket advice in terms of how to get that goalpost to stop moving, because it’s going to be so different for everyone, for my wife and I, and maybe we’ve been blessed in a way of, of just having a personality that fits this, but so much of what we, what we want to do and what gives us happiness and joy doesn’t cost money. It’s going for a walk, going for a hike, hanging out with our kids. Things that don’t cost any don’t really cost any money. I get to do a lot of travel for work, which makes up for, you know, it scratches, the itch of personal travels. Like we don’t have to spend a lot of money on, on going out to vacations and what not. Cause we get to go so many places for work. So it’s different for everyone.

Mr. Housel

But I think in general, it just comes down to realizing what makes people happy in life. And it is very common for people to say, if you were to dig in and ask them, why do you want more money? Why do you want to be wealthier? What seems like a silly question, but it’s a really important question. Why do you desire more money? I think what most people will tell them, if you really dig down into it is they will tell you something along the lines of, I want respect and admiration from people who I like, from people who I admire. They would say, I want the people who I want to love me to love me some version of that. And they think intuitively and I get this intuition, but they think that having a nice car or a fancy house or a diamond encrusted necklace will bring them respect and admiration from those people.

Mr. Housel

It’s natural to think that your BMW is going to serve as a signal, as a flag for people to say I’ve made it and therefore you should respect me. So I get that into some small extent. There is truth in that. I don’t want to say that that’s just false. Of course, there’s a little bit of that in the signaling to other people that you’ve quote unquote made it to the next level. But I think by and large, and this is again another obvious statement, but it’s so easy to overlook is that what makes people by and large respect and admire you, it’s not how much money you make. It’s whether you’re a nice person, whether you can listen to them, whether you help them, whether you are doing good in the community, whether you’re a good spouse, a good parent, etc. These things that really don’t have much to do with money. Now, there is some, an element to that as a, you know, particularly for fathers and in working mothers, you know, being able to take care of your family financially, is a big part of a general goal. So this is not black and white, but there’s such a level that what makes people admire people doesn’t have to do with money and the best way to show that is of course, people who have gotten to know very wealthy people, however you wanna define that, I don’t think there’s any correlation whatsoever between how rich you are and how nice you are, if anything, it’s opposite. There can be people who are very wealthy people for whom their wealth has gone to the head. They are some of the biggest jerks you’ll ever meet, right? And therefore, and therefore they gain the least respect the least admiration for people who they want. Maybe people who admire them, because they’re trying to get on the inside. They’re trying to get down to ride the coattails or use their money, but by and large it’s like who, who are the best friends, the best coworkers that you’ve had, that you really admire, the people who you would do anything for. It’s people that have proven their ability to their worthiness of being admired and respected in ways that have nothing to do with money. So that, to me, it can be kind of like this battle between we want more money to gain more, respect, more admiration.

Mr. Housel

But if we really dig into it, is it going to gain this respect? One way that I’ve kind of quirk that I’ve used to summarize that idea is what I call men in the car paradox, which is this thing where if you see someone driving, let’s say a Ferrari down the freeway, and let’s say, you really like Ferrari’s, rarely do you look at the driver and say, wow, that guy’s cool. What you do is you look at the car and you say, if I was driving that car, people would think I’m cool. And you see the paradox. You don’t care about the guy in the car, but you think in the car, people will care about this big paradox. I think, I love nice cars. I love fancy sports cars. I love luxury cars, love them. Uh, but rarely when I see one, do I even pay any attention to the driver? I don’t care about the driver. I don’t care about the guy driving it. I just picture myself in the car. And it’s so hard to wrap around the ridiculousness of that paradox, but it’s very common.

Dr. Cooper

That’s great coming back to, so you and your wife, you said you’ve, you found things that you enjoy, that don’t cost a lot of money. Is it the chicken and egg situation here? Did you say we’re not going to spend more than X and as a result, we’re out of money, honey, for this month’s entertainment thing, what do you want to do? Well, let’s go for a walk. Hey, we ended up enjoying this walk. Is that a piece of it? You know, we, I always recommend to family members, kids that kind of thing, a 70, 20, 10 strategy where you spend 70%, doesn’t matter what you’re making you spend no more than 70%. You save 20% and you give 10%. Everybody has a different strategy, but when you put those kind of envelopes or breaks or restrictions or boundaries, whatever you want to call it, does that create an ability to say, you know what? We really like hiking. We really like going for a bike ride. We really like sitting on our deck and just enjoying the sunset. Does one cause the other? Or do you think it’s more a personality type thing?

Mr. Housel

I think it’s more personality because look, I don’t think this is common, but we’ve been, we’ve been good savers for our whole careers. We’ve been patient investors. We’ve let our money compound, but we have never once not once, and I’ve been with my wife for 14 years. Never once have we set any sort of budget. Never, never, never, never, it just kind of come natural to us. So we’ve never said, Oh, I want to do that. But, we don’t have it in the budget. That’s never happened. And, but never have we even said, okay, our income is X and Y. And so we’re going to spend Y and save Z. We’ve never even done that. We spend what we want. We spend money on whatever we want, but we just don’t want that much relative to our income. That’s the key.

Mr. Housel

And that was true when our income was much lower than it is today. It’s always kind of, it’s always kinda been there. So I think we’ve done, back to what we were talking about, I think we’ve done a decent job getting the goalpost to stop moving, but the pressure to move it is always there. Now, some things that are kind of not necessarily unique, but I think important about our background. My father started his undergraduate college when he was in his early thirties and had three kids, which is a weird time to start your undergraduate college. And he became a doctor in his mid forties with three teenagers. So, and so that set up two phases of my upbringing. One was when my parents were students and we were as broke as broke comes. We were living off of grants for low income students that made sure that we didn’t starve. It was just completely broke. And then my father became a doctor and we had a much more comfortable upper-middle-class, uh, life. But what was so important is that the frugality that was demanded out of my parents when they were in school, they didn’t have any choice. It was just, you know, it wasn’t necessarily frugality. It was just, they had so little money to raise three kids on that it was just forced that frugality stuck with them after he became a doctor. So even when he became a doctor, their savings rate was very high. Our standard of living increased from the literal poverty that we were in before, but it was very modest, well below the means, no fancy, no thrill, no frills, nothing crazy over the top, zero. And so that just kind of instilled in me that savings mentality.

Mr. Housel

And it wasn’t even like something that I went out of my way to learn. It was just, that was how I was brought up. You have, you have a modest house, a modest car. You spend money on food, you do some things that enrich your life. But other than that, there’s, there’s no frilly spending. And my wife’s upbringing was very similar. So for us, the kind of the frugal life living well below your means has never been intentional. I think it was just kind taught to us. Now, I think we both feel lucky for that. Cause there are a lot of people who it’s the opposite. The parents were very poor with money. And just like in politics, your parents’ political views are very likely to rub off on you. And you think you’re thinking independently, but there’s such a high correlation, particularly between your father’s political views and what you go on to do the rest of your life.

Mr. Housel

I think money is very similar. It’s not a hundred percent. Of course there are people who do things very different than their parents, but the money skills that your parents instill in you subconsciously it’s not like sitting down at the dinner table and talking to you about it. It’s just what you see them do is likely to rub off on you in some ways. So, maybe we got, you know, fortunate in that. I’ve also seen people, you know, in some examples definitely overcome. And a lot of cases when their parents were very poor with money, then it becomes, you know, this life mission of I’m not going to do what they did. I’m going to do the opposite. Like you’ve learned from it. So like on the extreme ends, maybe it goes the other way, but we’re all products of the life that we’ve lived. Our upbringings, not just in childhood, in our teenage years, but throughout our life, what we’ve seen in the economy, what we’ve seen in our own individual fields and the differences between, someone like myself versus a baby boomer versus their parents, what we’ve seen in the life, or, you know, let’s take an American versus someone who grew up in India or some who grew up in Europe, we’ve all seen very different. We’ve seen the world through a different lens that is instilled with us, these different financial goals and values and just models of how we think the world works. So we all think about money in very different ways. We’re all just kind of prisoners to our own past for better or worse.

Dr. Cooper

Okay. So if these are the key aspects, these things you’ve talked about and we’re going to circle back to them for everybody who’s listening. But if these are the key things to building wealth, to having that life that you’ve maybe dreamed about at some point, is this part of what financial advisors need to be integrating into their services. And do you see that happening at all?

Dr. Cooper

I love the quote from a financial advisor named Tim Mauer, who says personal finance is more personal than it is finance. And I think that should be like tattooed on every financial advisor, because it’s so important that, and this gets back to the theme, the thrust of my book, which is that finance is not a math based field. It’s not who has the best data who has the best formulas, the best models it’s who can master their behavior and remain patient within the context of their own goals over time. So I think there’s a chapter in the book too, that makes a related point, which is that people should stop trying to be rational with their money and just have a goal of being reasonable with it. Because there are things that you can do that on a spreadsheet on paper, according to the math based formulas of finance don’t make any sense because they’re not quote unquote rational.

Mr. Housel

And I just think, well, look, people don’t make their financial decisions in a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table where all these things that take place in your life, your own quirks, your own personality, the own dynamics of your career and your relationship with greed and fear. All play into this melting pot of how you make a decision, the odds, or the idea that we can summarize that in an Excel spreadsheet that just says, you should go do X, because that’s what the number tells you to do. I just don’t think that’s a right way of looking at it. Even if the number is mathematically correct, it’s just not reasonable for a lot of people to do. Um, you know, what, what the textbook should tell them to do. I make the example in the book of this, fevers, when you get a fever, when you’re sick and you get an illness, you get a fever, that was a very rational thing for your body to do because a fever helps fight infection. That’s the purpose, but everyone in the world, including virtually every doctor treats a fever as a problem that needs to be corrected. Oh, you have a fever. Here’s some Tylenol to get rid of it. And the reason they do that is because fevers suck. They hurt. They’re miserable. They’re not any fun. I want to get rid of it cause I’m shivering. And I don’t feel good. So a fever is rational because they help you fight illness, but they’re not reasonable because they don’t feel good and people want to feel good. And so I think it’s the same thing with money. There are things that are rational that technically you should want to have happen, but a lot of them aren’t necessarily reasonable.

Mr. Housel

So if you have, you know, a textbook financial model might say, you should have 70% of your money in stocks and 30% in bonds. That’s just what the facts say. Based off the historical models that we’ve made. That’s, that’s the answer for you, but everyone has completely different risk tolerances based off of the experiences they’ve had in life. If you had a big financial traumatic event early on in life, or, you know, you let’s say you lost your job when you were a single parent and it just scarred you for life, that having 70% of your, of your money in stocks will probably just scare the crap out of you for the rest of your life. It’s just not a reasonable thing that you should do. Even if it’s rational, it’s not reasonable. And I think we just accept that everyone’s different. Everyone’s psychology is different and therefore we should just do, we should just make personal finance more personal than it is finance. We get so much closer to getting people to an area where they are using their money to actually make them happy at night.

Mr. Housel

And I’ve always said with my personal finances, my goal is to not maximize my returns as an investor. My goal is to maximize how well I sleep at night, which is a very different goal. But of course, if I’m thinking about, look, if you’re lucky enough to save some money and be able to invest it, I want it to make me happier. And so if I want it to make me happier, of course I should do what’s going to help me sleep at night. Why would I, if my money is keeping me up at night and I’m worried about it always is the market going to crash? Am I going to lose this? Am I going to have enough for my goals? What’s the purpose of it? It’s becoming an anchor on your happiness. It’s almost like you’re better off without it, at that point to some degree. So just doing what makes you sleep at night and realizing that what makes people sleep well at night is going to be very different from person to person, I think is a really integral part of financial planning.

Dr. Cooper

Wow, you’re giving us so much here. All right. As you were researching the book, were there things that surprised you? Are there things that you went, huh? Cause you’ve been in this industry for, you know, 15, 18 years. Were there things that you said, well, didn’t expect to see that.

Mr. Housel

So the stories from the book, the thrust of the book are things that I had come across over the last 15 years, rather than, you know, sitting down and researching the book in one fell swoop, so to speak. These are kind of the quirks that I’ve come across over the years. And to me, I think what took me a long time to get comfortable with, but I just started realizing that it was really the key to finances is a lot of what we’ve just been discussing, that it’s not a math based field, has nothing to do with your education or your sophistication. It has to do with how long can you remain patient and level headed for. That’s the first thing that’s kind of surprising because I was taught finance, finance as a math based field. And I assumed that it was, that the person with the biggest IQ wins. And I just realized it’s, it’s not even close to that. You know, some other things that have surprised me, you know, kind of come to terms with in recent years is this idea, this is the first chapter of the book that nobody is crazy. People do crazy things with their money, but nobody is crazy because what people do with their money makes sense to them in the given moment with the financial model that they have built in their head, based on the life experiences that they’ve had.

Mr. Housel

Let me give you an example. The people who buy the most lottery tickets in the United States overwhelmingly by a huge degree, are the poorest people. People from the lowest income, they spend an average of $400 per year on lottery tickets. And these are people for whom they do not have $400 in savings for an emergency. So it’s just off the charts. People who are in the highest income, spend nothing on the lottery, people in the lowest spend a huge portion of their income. It would be intuitive for people to say, well, that’s crazy. You people are being reckless with your money. That’s something you should not do. You’re not very smart. That’s intuitive. And there is some degree where it’s like, that answer is the right answer. It’s not, it’s not a smart thing for them to do, and ideally they should stop doing it. But I think if you try to put yourself in their shoes, when people from the lowest income, many of which are kind of stuck in that income, not all of them, but feel like they’re stuck. They don’t feel like they have, they’re looking ahead to the big job promotions. And when they’re going to get on the other side where they have a really good middle class income and they can get ahead and have a stable house, a lot of them don’t have, and I’m really generalizing here. I’m going to make that clear. But a lot of them don’t have that degree of hope and the ability to look ahead and dream in a rational way that people in upper income brackets do just naturally. And therefore, if you feel like you are stuck in a lower income bracket, then buying a lottery ticket is the only time in your life where you can say, I have a chance to get to the other side. It’s the only time in your life where you have that. So people like me and you, and probably most of the people listening to this podcast, get that naturally from our workplace, the opportunities that we have in our workplaces that we’ve maybe taken for granted from, you know, our ability to invest and grow our money over time.

Mr. Housel

We might take those for granted, but if we don’t have them, then the only chance, the only time in your life, where you can hold onto it, to a piece of hope that says, I’m going to, you know, this is my ticket to a better future is a scratcher ticket. And therefore, I don’t think people who spend even a ton of money on those things are crazy. I don’t agree with it. I would push them to not continue to do it, but I can kind of understand why they do it. And I think that idea that what you’re doing is crazy or it looks crazy. And I don’t, I don’t agree with it, but I kind of understand why you’re doing it. I think you can make that argument for everyone. People could say that to things that I do with my money, probably things that you do with your money. Like we all do crazy things with our money, but no one is crazy. We’re all just trying to use our money in a way that makes sense for the world that we live in, in the world that we’ve experienced, that kind of creates this model of how we think the world works.

Dr. Cooper

Good stuff, my friend. All right. Let’s jump into a few financial tips. You note that 90% of finance comes down to three things. Number one, live below your means. Number two, invest diversified with a longer horizon, 10 plus years you identify. And then number three, expect I love this one, expect and accept volatility. Why are those key and why is it so doggone hard for all of us to follow those three basic things?

Mr. Housel

I think that’s literally 90% of money, live below your means. So you’re saving, invest it for the long-term and expect there to be volatility. That’s it, that’s 90% of finance. The reason that I think it is so hard for people to follow it is because people assume that it must be more complicated than that. No one wants to think that if you take the stock market where you can become wealthy over time, if you’re investing for 20 or 30 or 40 years, even with modest savings, you can become wealthy over time. I think it is intuitive to think that anything in the world that has the capability of making you wealthy over time of making you a millionaire or more must be complicated, because if it was simple, why would, why would the game be there? You know, starting a business is complicated building a car is complicated. You know, most things in life that have big rewards are complicated. Becoming an NBA player is complicated and takes tremendous effort and skill and whatnot. So it’s just easy to assume that the correlation between payoff and effort has to be really strong. The more effort you put into it, the bigger the payoff. And I just don’t think money is one of those fields. There’s so much evidence that it’s actually the other way around that the more energy, the more effort that we put into, particularly our investments, the worse we’re going to do. And there’s no other field, which that’s the case. Like imagine if the key to becoming an NFL player was to never practice football, it gets ridiculous. There’s no other field that works that way. But the key to becoming a very good investor is to never check your brokerage account. That’s the key, just leave it alone.

Mr. Housel

Don’t check it, invest and leave it alone for 20 or 30 years. That’s the ticket. That’s the key, but there’s just no other field that works that way where the, the, you know, that has a negative correlation between effort and results. That’s why I think it’s so hard. So when I explain that to people, 90% of finances save some money, invest for the long-term, expect there to be volatility. People kind of like giggle and say, yeah, that’s neat, but what’s the real secret? What’s the real secret? What’s the economy going to do in Q2? What’s the next big stock? What sector should I be in? What’s the U S dollar going to do over the next 90 days? People think it must be more complicated even though it’s, it’s just not. So, and I just think back to what we started with. There’s no other field that I can think of for which that’s the case that has a negative correlation between effort and results. Not, like there’s nothing else in life that works that way, which is why it’s so hard to take seriously, because it’s just not intuitive to people.

Dr. Cooper

Let’s stay on this one for a little bit. You’re a great follow on Twitter. So will you give us your Twitter handle real quick? So folks can jump on.

Mr. Housel

Sure. It’s Morgan Housel, my first and last name.

Dr. Cooper

Okay. Pretty easy. And last week you had a fun tweet where you said housing, isn’t a great investment, but for most people, it’s the best investment they’ll ever make because it’s the only asset they’ll ever leave alone and let compound for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. That is a great reminder of what you just talked about in terms of the stock market and the fact that people don’t. Can you expand on that a little bit for us?

Mr. Housel

Yeah. So if you look historically US housing, if you adjust for inflation over the last hundred or so years has returned virtually nothing about slightly less than 1% per year after inflation. The stock market has had a great return over the last hundred years. It’s about 7% per year after inflation. But my intuition, I haven’t seen a lot of data on this. So let me just tell you, this is coming from my gut. My intuition is that most people will do better in their house, as a quote unquote investment than they will from their stocks on average. And the reason is because people buy a house and they will hold it for 10 or 20 or 30 years. And so even though the return, isn’t that great, you’re letting it compound and compounding, particularly in years, you know, 10 through 30 is just extraordinary. When you leave something alone, even at a low rate of return, the returns, the gains just get bonkers after awhile. Whereas in stocks, even though they have a higher annual return, so many people, not everyone, but so many people are selling after, you know, stocks have declined because they say, Oh, there’s a recession coming. So let’s sell. And then they’d buy back in at the top. And in 1999, they get really excited and they put more money in. And then in 2008 they get scared and they pull their money out. Things that they would never in their wildest dreams do with their house. No one would say, Oh, there’s a recession coming in Q2 so let’s sell our house and then we’ll buy it back in two, three, no one would ever do that. Like it’s ridiculous, but people do that with their stocks.

Mr. Housel

So even though there is a higher return potential in stocks, there’s so much more activity, so much more effort. So many, just more knobs that people are fiddling with to try to do better. And it actually subtracts from their returns, in a way that does not happen with their homes. I’ve thought, you know, if you look at Warren buffet who was the greatest investor of all time, of course, you know, his average annual returns of course are great. They’re about 20% per year, which is very good, but 20% per year, even though that’s great, does not put them as the greatest investor of all time in terms of the returns he’s generated, what has made him so successful and so wealthy is that he has been, let’s call it a good investor for 70 years. That’s what’s made him wealthy. 99% of his net worth was accumulated after his 50th birthday. And like 95% came after his 60th birthday. Because that’s how compounding works. In the early years, it’s good. And then it gets great. And in the later years, if you can go, you’re investing for, you know, 30 plus years, it gets extraordinary. And then it turns from extraordinary to ridiculous to where, you know, his net worth went from 10 million to 30 million to a hundred million to a billion, to 50 billion to 90 billion. Like it just gets crazy after awhile. And that doesn’t necessarily have to do with the returns he’s earning. It’s just the time that he’s been investing for that, lets compounding really work its magic. And the only, the main place that individual investors, that average people get that in life is their house. Even though it’s earning sub-par returns on average.

Dr. Cooper

Wasn’t his biography written called snowball effect or snowball or something like that? It seems like.

Mr. Housel

It was called snowball. Cause that’s what his life was. It’s just, he’s a great investor, but his secret is time. I mean he’s 90 years old and he started investing when he was 11. I put some math about this in the book where I really dug into it. But if Warren Buffett started investing when he was 20, 25 and he retired when he was 65, like a normal person and he earned the same average annual returns throughout his life, the same investing results, you would have never heard of him. No one had ever heard of him. The reason that he’s so successful, the reason that he’s a DECA billionaire is because he started investing when he was 11. And he continues to today when he’s 90, that’s the whole story. But people like no one wants to think about that part of the story. Cause it’s too simple. People want to say, Oh, how does he, how does he think about management? How does he think about valuing companies this way? There’s things that are good, I don’t want to poopoo those, but the secret to his success, the answer of how did he do what he’s done is very simple. It’s just time he’s been investing for. He been a good investor for longer than anyone else. Even people who are great investors that have earned higher returns than him.

Dr. Cooper

Great. And that story just drives it home. Let stay on the story idea. Your book is a compilation of 19 short stories how just average folks ended up doing pretty well or struggling. Can you give us a sneak peek at one or two of those that you found super intriguing that might stand out a little bit?

Mr. Housel

One that’s that’s stuck out to me is this idea of getting rich versus staying rich, very different skills. We often think of just rich under the same umbrella, but getting rich and staying rich are totally different, they’re actually opposites. Getting rich by and large requires taking risks, swinging for the fences. You know, being optimistic. Staying rich requires the opposite. It’s paranoia, and pessimism having room for error and safety. So like, and to do well over a long period of time, you need both skills. It’s like this barbell approach where you need to have both. So I’ve used, I used a couple of examples from the great depression of two people who got very rich, in different ways, but people who got extremely rich were very good at what they were doing for getting rich, uh, both of whom during different times of the great depression, went broke and both of whom killed themselves over it.

Mr. Housel

One was a very famous trader who was almost a household name named Jesse Livermore who shorted, which means you’re betting against the stock market in 1929. And during the great crash of 1929, where the market fell 90% and ushered in the great depression, Jesse Livermore became of the richest men in the world from that crash because he was betting against stocks. So he made money during the crash he became in one day, he made the equivalent adjusted for inflation of $3 billion in one day. There’s another guy who I profile in the book named Abraham, who was not a household name, but he was a very successful real estate developer in New York city in 1920s. And after the crash of 1929, uh, you know, leading up to that and he had put a bunch of money in the stock market. Like a lot of people did after that. And after the crash of 1929, the last we heard of him is, uh, this blurb that I found in the New York times in October of 1929, where it says the last anyone saw of him, he was walking down wall street, tearing up a ticker tape crying, and no one saw him again. So you can kind of piece together what may have happened after that we’re speculating, but you can kind of tie the story. So it’s an interesting thing. Jesse Livermore and Abraham Jermanski were very successful at getting rich. Jesse Livermore got rich during the crash. Whereas Abraham Jermanski got wealthy during the runup, but neither of them were good at staying rich. It’s a very different scale. It’s really interesting. It’s so important for us to realize that we need both skills.

Mr. Housel

So for me, let me tell you how this applies to me personally. I also have kind of a barbell approach to my personal finances and I have more of my assets, more of my net worth in cash and bonds than I think most people would recommend someone of my age and income would have. It’s not, it’s not crazy, but it’s a ok so I’m 36 and my portfolio probably looks like the average portfolio of like, like a 60 year old. Like it’s not crazy, but I have a fair amount in cash and bonds. And the reason I do that is because I want to make sure and be as close to certain as possible that the money that I do have invested in stocks, I can leave there forever and I never have to interrupt it. I never have to touch, I never have to sell them to finance something in my life. I want to have so much cash that, whenever adversity happens, whatever it is, I lose my job. There’s a medical emergency. You get sued, knock on wood, whatever it is like there’s the banana peels of life that we all come across. I want to make sure that I never have to touch my stocks. And therefore that’s the barbell approach. I’m very optimistic. I’m an optimistic investor, but I have a lot of cash which looks pessimistic looks, it looks like a degree of paranoia and that’s not those two things are not mutually exclusive. They actually work together. I want to make sure that I am paranoid enough so that the optimism that I have can run wild for years and decades. And it’s hard for people to put those together. And most people think you are either an optimist or, or you’re paranoid. You’re a pessimist, black or white. And having the cognitive dissonance of being able to say no, like I’m both. And there’s like this Jekyll and Hyde personality for your finances, I think is not only good. It’s mandatory if you want to do well over time. Because back to the Buffet example, what matters is not necessarily the investments that I make, what stocks I happen to buy it’s can I let those stocks compound for 30 or 40 or 50 years? That’s what’s going to make the difference. So how can I be paranoid in part of my finances so that I could be maximum, you know, have maximum optimism in the other part of my finances.

Dr. Cooper

Yeah. And I’m shaking my head. That’s just resonates so well. I’ve never heard that perspective before and it makes perfect sense. All right. So in the finance, you’ve kind of become our financial advisor temporarily here. In the financial advisory profession, I know not officially disclaimer for everybody. What do you see happening over the next 10 years? Next 30 years, we’ve got all these robo advisors, the digital portfolios. It makes it pretty easy for a lot of people to do the self directed investment and have a little more confidence in it. Do you think advisors will continue to be a valuable resource because of the psychological aspects or kind of play that out for us a little bit?

Mr. Housel

Yeah. I think in short, yes, advisors are always going to be very valuable, but it’s shifted over time. And the way to summarize how they’ve shifted is just what financial advisors call themselves. They used to be called stockbrokers, not even that long ago, 1990s, very few people said, I’m a financial advisor. You said I’m a stockbroker. And that was what, that was what they were. And then they became, you know, I think next was like wealth consultant is what like the term was. And then financial advisor, private banker was in there for awhile. But because I think it has shifted over time in the 1990s and before, for most of the 20th century, you are a stockbroker because that was a service that you provided because you needed someone, you needed a professional. And some of them were great. Some of them were scammers, but you needed someone to tell you what stocks should I buy? What mutual funds should I buy? And by and large, that problem has been solved. People can do that on their own. You couldn’t do it before the 1990s, because there was not resources online where you could go do this yourself. Like what’s the best index fund for me to buy? If you can’t go online and learn that you have no other choice than to book an appointment with the guy at Merrill Lynch. And he’ll tell you what to do. But now that that’s gone, what it became was, you know, most of the portfolio construction for most financial advisors is now kind of at the index fund level. There’s not a lot of differentiation between financial advisors. It’s roughly the same asset allocations into roughly the same funds. But the value that they provide is the psychological aspect of it. Can you keep, can you contextualize greed and fear and risk within the context of someone’s goals in a way that’s going to keep them on course forever.

Mr. Housel

One analogy to this is what’s happened in medicine. Look in the last 20 years, a lot of medical knowledge has found its way online. A lot of it’s bogus, but a lot of it’s good. There are apps out there that anyone can download, that have basically all of Western medical knowledge within them. And these are apps that virtually every doctor uses. The names are escaping me right now, but they’ll, they’ll hit me in a sec. One’s called pub med. One is called epocrities. And these are apps that doctors use that have basically all medical knowledge in them. Anyone can get those. So medical knowledge is not necessarily a value add for doctors anymore, but of course, obviously doctors are still valuable because outside of needing a procedure, a lot of what people want from their primary care doctor is someone who’s wearing a white coat and has a diploma hanging on their wall to look them in the eyes and say, you’re going to be okay.

Mr. Housel

That’s what people want from a doctor, within the context of like primary care without getting a procedure. That’s what people want. Same for financial advisors, even though a lot of the knowledge that we have now in, in the financial sphere, in the financial planning sphere is available for free online to anybody, people are still gonna want a qualified person to look them in the eye and say, you’re going to be okay. You’re on the right path. That is hugely valuable. It’s not even a little value, that’s like, it’s one of the most valuable things that you can do for someone’s life. So it’s like that value is always going to be there. If there’s a change that I see taking place, it’s this. For my parents’ generation, the baby boom generation and generations that preceded them trust among professionals was gained face to face. So you met your financial advisor in his office. You sat across from his desk. He asked you how your family is doing and where you’re going to take a summer vacation this morning and how the kids are going to do. You want to see pictures of my kids? It was a very personal face to face relationship. That’s how you acquired trust. You had to meet someone and look them in the eye and shake their hands. Millennials were the first generation that because of how they grew up and the technologies that they grew up with were totally comfortable acquiring trust digitally. They didn’t, they didn’t need to, and they don’t want to sit across the table from someone and shake their hand. They are much more comfortable acquiring trust and giving their life savings to someone or some product that they’ve never met in a way that baby boomers and the generations that preceded them.

Mr. Housel

So therefore I think if you are a financial advisor with no digital presence and that digital presence can be as simple as a social media account, where you’re posting, some of your thoughts, it’s going to be hard, not impossible, but it’s going to be much harder to transition to the millennial and gen Z audience in the coming years and decades. Much harder than it was for the baby boomers who probably by and large make up the majority of current clients. And look, I am a millennial, but I’m 36. And I have, I have two kids. I found this thing that’s interesting that people will always think that millennials are like 21 years old. And it’s like, no, the oldest cohort of millennials are approaching their forties. They’re in their peak earning years. And they, a lot of them have substantial net worth. They are becoming the main target for financial advisors and 10 years from now, it’s going to be that many fold once the baby boomers in a large degree, pass on their wealth to their children. So it’s really important for advisors to think about like, how do the people who are going to become your prime customers acquire trust. This is also true for a lot of industries, medicine and other industries law. Like how do they acquire a trust? It’s very different from their parents because millennials and gen Z grew up with these technologies that baby boomers had to learn later in their life. And it’s an important distinction because when you grew up with a technology it’s not new, it’s just how the world works. Whereas for a baby boomer who learned how to use the internet in their thirties or forties, it’s always going to be this new kind of, you know, not gimmicky thing, but this new kind of a learning thing. Whereas for the younger generations, this is how we do everything. This is not, this is not a tool that we use to make our life better. This is like buying things online is just how we do life, period.

Dr. Cooper

Just how it is. Yeah. So if someone’s listening to you right now and they thought they were going to hear a podcast on our typical health wellness performance stuff, and they’re like, I gotta get my butt moving with this stuff. Like, I haven’t done anything with investing again, you’re not giving us advice, but is there some general guidance you could provide that person on ways to get started, maybe general mixes of stocks and bonds adjustments with age. Is there any general stuff you can give that newbie that saying, Oh man, where do I even start? Or maybe a coach is working with somebody, and a coach does not give advice. So is there somewhere they could point somebody to do some research, to get the ball rolling, to get things moving in that direction?

Mr. Housel

I would say a few things. The first thing I would say, I think it’s great that health is addressed so much on this podcast because there are two topics in life that everyone has to learn about whether they like them or not. And that is health and money. Whether you are interested in those topics or not, those topics are interested in you in your life, whether you like it or not, you have to learn about them. You don’t have to learn about calculus or military history. You have to learn about health and money. And then, so I think for people who are really realized, like you said, got to get their butts in gear, got to start learning about it. Of course it’s different for everyone. So I can’t give good advice, but you know what we talked about earlier of just living below your means, investing in a diversified way, which if you’re not familiar with finance by and large means a low cost index fund that you can purchase from Vanguard or fidelity or Charles Schwab, where you’re not trying to beat the market, you’re not trying to become the next Warren buffet. You’re investing in the most diversified way that you can to basically own a slice of global capitalism. So that the progress that takes place in businesses throughout the world, you’re just owning a little slice of that in a passive way. If you can do that into the long-term mindset, which in investing means you’re investing for at least five or 10 years, the longer you invest for the less likely, the less you are relying on luck to fuel your returns. If you’re investing for the next six months or even the next year, you might do well, but you are relying on a greater degree of luck. Whereas if you can invest for five or 10 or 20, then that’s not necessarily luck. That is you are, you are putting the odds of success in your favor in a way that is very likely to accrue success to you.

Mr. Housel

If you can do that. And if you can accept volatility. And by that, I mean that it is completely normal and it was guaranteed that the stock market is going through decline on average, at least 10%, once per year, it’s going to lose at least 30% of its value, twice per decade. It’s going to lose at least 30% or more of its value, you know, once per decade, and maybe a couple of times during your life, it’s going to fall 50% and that’s normal. That’s the normal thing that takes place. You gotta realize that volatility in the stock market is the cost of admission to earning good long term returns. That’s what the stock market demands out of you. And therefore, when it happens, it’s easy to say, and it’s often intuitive to say this doesn’t feel right. I’m not supposed to lose 30% of my money. Something feels broken. And so I want to sell. I want to get out, if you realize that that is actually the normal path of how a healthy stock market works over the long run, then when it happens, it doesn’t feel as scary or as broken to you. And you can endure that volatility rather than trying to avoid it or just selling out when it happens. You can do those three basic things at levels that are different for everyone, depending on their income and their age and their goals. But those three basic things are not just a foundation of finance. That’s the majority of finance. That’s most of what you need. If you can actually do those things, you already have a black belt in finance. That’s what you need to know.

Dr. Cooper

That’s really good. Alright. Is there anything, and maybe this won’t be true of you, but is there anything you’re doing different with your personal financial decisions since writing the book or in the process of writing it that you weren’t doing a decade ago?

Mr. Housel

Not necessarily. I I’ve been pretty stable in my, in my finances over time. And, and maybe that’s, that’s not good. Maybe there’s there’s room for improvement. I don’t want to pretend like I’m like, I’m doing everything right. It’s not that at all, but I like things to stay simple and I like things to stay the same. So just because of that philosophy, I don’t change a lot of things. In the last, so I have two kids, a four year old son and a one year old daughter, I would say my view of money has changed since they came into our lives. I don’t think I’m doing things different with our money, but I think it was natural before I had kids to view the money that we had saved as a pot of money that was going to help me. This is, this is mine. And of course it’s natural. I think every parent can relate to this, the moment that your first child is born, it’s not about you anymore. And so now when I open up my brokerage account and I look at the money, it’s just, it’s instant feeling of that’s for my kids. This is for them. This is going to give them a better life. And this is going to give them opportunities. This is going to give them options. And I’m like not part of the picture anymore in terms of, in a way that I love, I love that. It’s like I was able to use the hard work for my wife and that I’ve done through the savings that we’ve built to be able to use that for something other than us, I think is a great, like, I think I’m happier with our money because of that. It has so much more purpose now than pre kids of just being like, Oh, I got the savings that I can use for a new car someday. Now when you shift it to like, Oh, I can send my kids to college. It’s so much more meaningful. So that’s just, even though it’s not a shift in what we do with our money, it’s a shift in how we view it.

Dr. Cooper

Beautiful. This is so much fun. Last question. Any final words of wisdom, anything we haven’t addressed that you say, Oh, I want to get this out there to help folks make better decisions with their finances.

Mr. Housel

Maybe this is kind of a little bit off topic, but one thing that I think has really stuck out to me in 2020 is the lesson from 2020 in the economy and health and overall is that we don’t know what’s going to happen next. That has to be the takeaway from 2020. No one knows what’s going to happen next, the biggest risk in our lives, whether it is in the economy or health or politics are the things that no one sees coming, because they are impossible to see coming. That’s been the lesson of 2020. If you went back to January 1st, no one was saying, we’re going to get hit with a once in a century pandemic, that’s going to shut down the global company. No one was saying that. Um, and the reason it’s been so impactful to people’s finances is because people weren’t prepared for it. They weren’t prepared for it because they could not see it coming. So if you accept that that’s been true this year and that’s going to be true in the future, I think it becomes, you become a little bit more hands off with trying to predict what’s going to happen next. And rather than trying to predict what’s going to happen next. You just kind of say, I’m just going to prepare for anything that might happen next with a greater degree of room for error and safety net in my personal finances, that makes me more robust for the future, whatever the future holds, because I don’t know what’s going to happen next.

Dr. Cooper

Beautiful, great way to wrap it up. Everyone, again, the name of the book is the Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel. And again, follow him on Twitter, a great follow, a lot of insights there. Thank you so much. I knew this was going to be good. We’ve been working on trying to get you on for a long time and it was well worth the wait. So fantastic job.

Mr. Housel

This was a lot of fun. Thank you for having me on.

Dr. Cooper

The psychology of money is always such a fascinating topic. It’s pretty cool to literally have the guy who wrote the book on the topic join us, isn’t it? Thank you for tuning into the number one podcast for health and wellness coaching. I’ve got a little favor to ask if you don’t mind. This is our 177th episode and we depend 100% on you to allow it to continue to grow. If you are enjoying the podcast, or maybe you just discovered it and you’ve got a moment. Would you share it with a couple of friends? It really makes a difference. Now it’s time to be a catalyst. Putting one foot in front of the other and sometimes even trying a side step in there but always continuing to move forward. This is Dr. Bradford Cooper of the Catalyst Coaching Institute, make it a great rest of your week. And I’ll speak with you soon on the next episode of the Catalyst Health, Wellness, and Performance Coaching podcast, or maybe over on the YouTube coaching channel.