10 simple money tricks that actually work

One of the best financial decisions I’ve made this year was making it significantly more annoying to spend my own money.

I deleted every saved credit card from my browser and the accounts where I’m most likely to impulse buy (here’s looking at you, Amazon). Then I went one step further and deleted Apple Pay from my phone. Now, if I want to buy something, I have to actually have my wallet on me (which I almost never do) or rummage through my bag, find my physical credit card and manually type in all 16 digits.

This is unbelievably, unquestioningly annoying. And unfortunately, it works.

Do I enjoy making myself miserable? Perhaps, but something needed to change. My spending had been creeping up, I have some bigger expenses coming up, and telling myself to “just be more disciplined” clearly wasn’t cutting it. One of the more humbling parts of studying behavioral finance: knowing why your brain does stupid things does not stop your brain from doing stupid things. I am exhibit A.

So I stopped relying on myself to make the right decision every time.

Willpower is a myth, sorry

You’re a smart person. You know all the things you should be doing with your money. Save more, stop impulse buying, invest every month, blah blah blah.

The harder part is doing the sensible thing over and over again while you’re tired, bored, stressed, distracted, slightly tipsy, insecure, influenced by somebody hotter than us on Instagram or simply having a bad day. We’re only human.

Meanwhile, you’re competing against an economy that has spent billions making consumption as easy as possible. Amazon and Apple Pay aren’t saving my card info out of the goodness of their hearts — they know that the more friction there is, the less likely I am to buy something, so the less money they’ll make. Our passivity and inattention are literally someone’s business model.

So I am much less interested these days in becoming a more disciplined consumer. Instead, I stick to one rule: add friction to the things you want to do less of; remove friction from the things you want to do more of.

Behavioral economists have nicer words for this: choice architecture, defaults, mental accounting, commitment devices. You can just think of it as arranging your life so you have fewer opportunities to make a decision you’re going to regret.

Below the paywall: 10 simple ways I trick my own brain into spending less and saving more … including the screenshot rule, the subscription trick, and why I intentionally made my phone worse.