Jack Wang, a former social worker, argues that managing money is about behavior, not math. He breaks habits into "money behaving" (actions that align with your goals) and "money misbehaving" (mindless spending). Small repeated actions determine financial outcomes more than knowledge alone.
But you know, you have two terms I find really, really fascinating. I've never really encountered before. You talk about sort of money behaving or misbehaving, right? Which I think is just hilarious because, you know, it's like a little kid. You think about behaving or misbehaving. So share with us a little bit about those terms and what you mean and can give some examples of each. Sure.
Well, my background is in social work, and that's probably why I think of it like that, because I think that we are about behavior, and I believe money management is more about behavior with your money than it is math, right? If— I mean, probably the vast majority of us know the math. It's getting getting our behavior to follow what we know we should do or what's going to move the needle in the right direction, whether it is to increase savings or reduce debt. And so little actions over time with your behavior is what helps you win the race. And so I think coming from the standpoint that I don't have all the education you have as far as the investing and the high-level finance. To me, it's about the day-to-day behavior in life and around money that helps us really get to the place where we have some margin in our life to invest and to do some greater things for retirement planning or college investing. But if we don't take control of the basic day-to-day behavior, we're not going to have any left because you can spend every dime you make. No matter what.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that makes total sense. I can tell you that people often talk about the whole notion of trying to get a handle on their finances by not buying lunch, by not buying coffee. I can tell you that— I mean, I primarily work from home, so buying lunch isn't really a big deal for me. But there's a chain of gas stations/convenience stores around here where I used to always stop and get a drink. And it would literally be like my car would be pre-programmed to go there on the way out, right? Anywhere I was going, it would sort of have to go by there first. To the point, by the way, I have to admit that there'd be times where I would go there knowing I would have to get gas, but then just because it was so— like, it was so ingrained in me that I would just pull into the parking lot as if I was going in to get a drink, and then I would have to remind myself Oh, yeah, I'm actually here to get gas. And I would have to literally back out of the parking spot to go pull to the pump to go get— of course, then I would go get a drink. So it's a grain of habit. So talk to us a little bit about this. So give us some examples of what you mean by money behaving as opposed to money misbehaving.
Well, and obviously, money is just a tool. And we are the masters of that. The money itself cannot misbehave, but we can misbehave with it. And if it's not doing what we intended it to do, then I guess I would consider that to be misbehaving because we have expectations of what we want out of that money and what our dreams are, what our why is, what we want to do with money, whether it's to travel or to eventually quit work, put our kids through college, or give it to the you know, poor, you know, whatever charity, right? So we probably all have some ideas of what we'd like to do with our money. But if we're not telling it where to go, I mean, my favorite phrase is tell your money where to go instead of wonder where it went. And there's some real truth to that, that if you don't slow down and have a plan, it's just going to run through your fingers. And so money is not evil. And it's, it's, I don't prescribe any kind of judgment about money. It's just We, we have to sort of be the parent and decide what the boundaries are, what the rules are around that, and what our expectation is of that.
