Idiot Money
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  • Whole-Brain Personal Finance
  • #1: The correlation between having money, managing it well, and living a good life
  • #2: Don’t know where to begin sorting out your finances? It’s not where you think it is
  • #3: Your relationship with money is complex. But it needn't be complicated.
  • #4: Spending £450k on being bad parents
  • #5: Idiot Profile: Private-Jet Guy
  • #6: What the bloody hell is a ‘relationship with money’ anyway?
  • #7: What fund managers can teach us about what really matters
  • #8: “I want money so I don’t have to think about money”
  • #9: Idiot Profile: An oligarch with a gun
  • #10: If Kanye West were a financial adviser
  • #11: If all the world's a stage, then what does it matter where you stand?
  • #12: Financial Independence: An (Actual) Idiot’s Guide
  • #13: Let’s talk about money, baby
  • #14: New Year's Non-Idiotic Financial Resolutions
  • #15: New year, old message
  • #16: "Just tell me what to do"
  • #17: How to choose better investments
  • #18: You cannot count. This leads you to make idiotic financial decisions.
  • #19: What's your number?
  • #20: 7 magnificent money lessons that have nothing to do with money
  • #21: The merits of money are negative
  • #22: The psychoanalysis of money, or How to screw up your children’s financial worldview
  • #23: The ghosts of money... and how to bust them
  • #24: My favourite way to think about investing, part 1
  • #25: The ABC of money, part 1: the three self-deceptive poisons
  • #26: Consider the pineapple: the perfect symbol of idiot money
  • #27: The ABC of money, part 2: financial nobility, an overview
  • #28: My favourite way to think about investing, part 2
  • #29: The ABC of money, part 3: financial nobility, step 1
  • #30: My favourite way to think about investing, part 3
  • #31: The ABC of money, part 4: financial nobility, step 2
  • #32: The idiocy of ignoring impermanence (the ABC of money, part 5)
  • #33: The six financial stress responses: what's yours?
  • #34: My favourite way to think about investing, part 4: betting beyond the basics
  • #35: The ABC of money, part 6: financial nobility, step 3
  • #36: My favourite way to think about investing, part 5: cost-benefit investing
  • #37: The ABC of money, part 7: financial nobility, step 4
  • #38: The best diet advice and the best financial advice are the same
  • #39: The ABC of money, part 8: The Eightfold Path and interdependence
  • #40: The dance of becoming wiser with money
  • #41: Building a better money brain (the ABC of money, part 9: neuroplasticity)
  • #42: The dumbest damn thing I’ve ever read in personal finance (part 1)
  • #43: The dumbest damn thing I’ve ever read in personal finance (part 2)
  • #44: A story of lions and loss
  • #45: The ABC of money, part 10: what meditation isn’t
  • #46: The ABC of money, part 11: what meditation is
  • #47: Idiot Profiles: Lord and Lady Jewellery Addiction, Teenage Ozymandias, and me
  • #48: Living mindfully with money (the ABC of money, part 12)
  • #49: Give, give, give, me more, more, more
  • #50: Our most costly money problems are the ones we don't see
  • #51: Align what you care for with what you care about
  • #52: Do what only you can do
  • #53: Money for many means happily ever after… but after what?
  • #54: The ABC of money, part 13: financial enlightenment
  • #55: Identifying your hidden money addictions
  • #56: Treating your hidden money addictions
  • #57: Idiot Money Maths #1: How much does it cost to keep you happy?
  • #58: The ABC of money, part 14: the secret shackles of financial freedom
  • #59: The ABC of money, part 15: freedom to, freedom from, freedom for
  • #60: If you go there blindfolded, you probably won’t like where you end up
  • #61: Idiot Money Maths #2: What is your default unit of spending?
  • #62: Balance isn’t stillness
  • #63: A problem shared
  • #64: How to live well, even in a palace (the ABC of money, part 16)
  • #65: Denunciation is still attachment (the ABC of money, part 17)
  • #66: “What do Blackheath people do?” (a story about how not to do financial planning)
  • #67: The ABC of money, part 18: Addicted to a dream
  • #68: What hot new financial knowledge are you likely to find in 2022?
  • #69: Red Pill Financial Planning: Escaping the Money Matrix
  • #70: The nasty narrowness of number-governed living
  • #71: Getting into Financial Flow
  • #72: The ABC of money, part 19: Denunciation bad, renunciation good
  • #73: I, Robot? Money and the misleading mechanisation of life choices
  • #74: Kondo your credit-card statements
  • #75: The rule of 72 (and its oft-overlooked implications)
  • #76: Forget about improving your decisions. Focus on improving your decision-making skills
  • #77: Seeing your financial world more clearly (the ABC of money, part 20)
  • #78: How to lose 2 1/2 stone in 6 months: an intro to the best non-fiction book I've ever read
  • #79: Your money worldview is (literally) half-brained
  • #80: Cost-consciousness beats cost-cutting
  • #81: Financial change that doesn’t start from your financial worldview is selling you short
  • #82: The overlooked truth of reality that is messing up how you live with money
  • #83: How money hijacks your hierarchy of attention
  • #84: The value of (almost) everything to you is nothing
  • #85: Financial philosophy > Financial psychology > Hot investment tips
  • #86: Five regrets of the rich
  • #87: Sum malfunction: a sure-fire way to spot if you’re being a financial idiot
  • #88: The Micawber Fallacy, or what your Dickensian maths misses about spending wisely
  • #89: The tell-tale signs of a poor financial worldview
  • #90: Wanting wisdom, craving financial fortune cookies
  • #91: You don’t need a scammer to be scammed: your desperation for an ‘answer’ will do almost as well
  • #92: Are you reading the wine list the wrong way around?
  • #93: Some personal finance puzzles and how not to solve them
  • #94: The main reason your relationship with money is so messed up
  • #95: The tyranny of the takeaway
  • #96: Deep wealth v shallow wealth
  • #97: What seeing your financial life more clearly looks like
  • #98: Making more of your money isn’t a maths problem
  • #99: Is what you’re doing for and with money working?
  • #100: Where to start, where to go, what to do about what’s stopping you
  • #101: The life cycle of a financial idiot
  • #102: I can read your financial mind
  • #103: Don’t worry about playing a game better when there’s a better game to play
  • #104: Reflections on two years of this newsletter, and why I’m taking a six-month break
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  • It’s okay to talk about important stuff – like your relationships with the important people in your life – with those same important people

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#92: Are you reading the wine list the wrong way around?

20th June, 2022

Previous#91: You don’t need a scammer to be scammed: your desperation for an ‘answer’ will do almost as wellNext#93: Some personal finance puzzles and how not to solve them

Last updated 2 years ago

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Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter. This week, becoming wiser with money by understanding that the price of something should be a final check on the sense of a spending decision, not the starting point, including:

  • How most people read wine lists the wrong way around.

  • How this same tendency expresses itself even more egregiously when buying houses.

  • And uncovering the coalitions of rewards in every trade.

Your enjoyment of an experience relies on the story you tell yourself about it; high expense is an unnecessary, even foolish, ingredient of such stories.

You’re in a restaurant, and you’ve just been handed the wine list. After getting over the initial hurdle of red, white, rosé, or orange (or perhaps something bubbly) where do you look?

Is it to the left – guided, perhaps, by matching the tasting notes to your meal? Or perhaps by a nostalgic yearning for a much-loved holiday in southern France? Or maybe you’re drawn towards a vineyard with a funny name? Starting on the left, you make your choice, and then see if you can afford it.

Or do you start on the right – looking at the prices and working back from there?

If you’re like most people, you start at the right more often than not. And if you ask for help, the first question a standard-brand sommelier – just like someone selling you a house, a car, or just about anything else – will invariably ask is: ‘what’s your budget?’

Yet does this work?

At one end, you could miss getting exactly what you want for a fraction of your budget. And at the other, is discovering that what you wanted you don’t want enough to pay what it costs a disappointment or a lesson?

(There is of course a ‘snob’ value to wine, but it can easily backfire. I once had a drink with a particularly egregious oaf in Qatar, who took one sip of whatever was open and proudly declared ‘I can’t drink this’ before making a show of ordering the most expensive bottle on the list. He made an impression, but I’m not sure it was the one he was going for. Being guided by something other than price makes you instantly less of a twat.)

We adopt the same attitude with most purchases. Nowhere more obviously than with the biggest purchase most of us will ever make: buying a home.

The common approach is to work out what is the most expensive house we can afford – and not even that, the most expensive house we can afford with the most borrowing the bank will give us – and work backwards from there. Even if we could have had all our needs met for a much smaller sacrifice of current and future resources.

And, perhaps more to the point, regardless of if we could get everything we want or not, for any size of sacrifice, if you don’t think there’s inherent value in questioning what it is you want before someone incentivised to upsell you gets involved, then please reply and explain this to me.

We do this despite being well aware that the most emotionally salient features of house-buying (e.g. the once-a-year garden party) that play the starring role in our purchase decision play a miniscule role in the quality of our lives compared to duller daily things like a commute or a living environment that encourages us to do the stuff we most want to do.

Reductio ad poor life choices

We’ve trained ourselves to unthinkingly reduce everything to a number, so we instinctively collapse inescapably complex decisions into simplistic shortcuts to mistaken conclusions.

That this is understandable – complexity inspires just the sort of discomfort and highlights just the sort of lack of confidence we run from at any cost – doesn’t stop it being really, really, stupid.

When we’re uncomfortable and unconfident thinking about money, higher stakes don’t inspire greater reflection, they inspire bigger mistakes. Failures to think things through wouldn’t be too bad if they were restricted to the realms of coffee and cat food. Unfortunately, as the size of the spend increases, so does our tendency to bugger it up.

Houses are especially complex because a single object is used to meet myriad needs. Houses are palaces of self-deception. Primarily (one hopes) they provide shelter and somewhere to store sustenance. They are a place to recharge, and a canvas for creative expression. They are an environment that enables and encourages us to fulfil our potential.

But such intrinsic values are often dwarfed by extrinsic ones. Every house is bought partly for ourselves, and partly for our perceptions of other people’s perceptions of us. Partly to house what is integrally valuable to us, and partly to showcase what is incidentally valuable to the world, that we may bask in its reflected glorification.

There’s often a fine line between stuff that says something important about oneself and stuff that says, crudely, ‘look at what I can afford’. We attach ourselves so enthusiastically to the latter that we’re prepared to not only spend all our resources on it, but to borrow some more and make a leveraged all-in bet on it too.

It’s okay to talk about important stuff – like your relationships with the important people in your life – with those same important people

It turned out that this friend wanted to get away from his wife and children. In a nice way. Everyone needs their personal space, and no one needs to be co-dependent.

I suggested that before he committed to the extra couple of decades of work that a bigger place would necessitate, he told his wife what he’d told me. Having been party to many years of husbands and wives surprising each other during financial-planning meetings when they let slip long-simmering wants of which the other was oblivious, I suspected that if he’d like more time to himself, then his wife probably did as well.

She did.

They now treat the study as a time-share. Hundreds of thousands of pounds – and goodness knows what knock-on physical and mental costs – saved by two easy interrogations of what was actually wanted.

Wine or houses, this isn’t about spending specifics.

(The closest I’ll get to advice on that score is borrowing from pioneering designer William Morris: ‘If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.’)

It’s rather an explanation of why, if you get the fundamentals right, you don’t need such advice, any more than you need to be told crisps are not what your body wants when you’ve gone without them for a few weeks. You already know what you want to spend your money on. You just don't know how to know you know. That is, or at least should be, the role of advice.

Again, if this worked, no one could argue with it. But it often doesn’t work at all, or when it ‘does’, it does so at unimaginable and unnecessary cost – which, if you view your life choices in the context of your life, as you really probably should () is just another form of ‘not working’.

One day, a good friend of mine asked for my advice because he was thinking of moving to a bigger house. Intrigued, knowing both the existing spaciousness of his existing abode and that his children were settled in both size and number, I dug into what he really wanted. For no one who says they want a bigger house actually wants a bigger house. They maybe want to put some distance between their children, or put a cricket net in the garden (or ).

despite your left hemisphere insisting that you needn’t bother
perhaps give psychoanalysts something to theorise about