Dollars and sense : how we misthink money and how to spend smarter / Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler ; with illustrations by Matt Trower.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

New York Times bestselling author, Dan Ariely, teams up with financial comedian and writer Jeff Kreisler, to delve into the truly irrational world of personal finance, blending humor and behavioral economics to help people understand the psychology behind their financial decisions and show them how they can make better ones. He entertains critical questions such as these:

Why is paying for things painful? Why are we comfortable overpaying for something in the present just because we've overpaid for it in the past? Why is it easy to pay $4 for a soda on vacation, when we wouldn't spend more than $1 on that same soda at our local grocery store?

We think of money as numbers, values, and amounts, but when it comes down to it, when we actually use our money, we engage our hearts more than our heads. Emotions play a powerful role in shaping our financial behavior, often making us our own worst enemies as we try to save, access value, and spend responsibly. In Dollars and Sense, bestselling author and behavioral economist Dan Ariely teams up with financial comedian and writer Jeff Kreisler to challenge many of our most basic assumptions about the precarious relationship between our brains and our money. In doing so, they undermine many of personal finance's most sacred beliefs and explain how we can override some of our own instincts to make better financial choices.

Exploring a wide range of everyday topics--from the lure of pain-free spending with credit cards to the pitfalls of household budgeting to the seduction of holiday sales--Ariely and Kreisler demonstrate how our misplaced confidence in our spending habits frequently leads us astray, costing us more than we realize, whether it's the real value of the time we spend driving forty-five minutes to save $10 or our inability to properly assess what the things we buy are actually worth.

The result not only reveals the rationale behind our most head-scratching financial choices but also offers clear guidance for navigating the treacherous financial landscape of the brain. Fascinating, engaging, funny, and essential, Dollars and Sense provides the practical tools we need to understand and improve our financial choices, save and spend smarter, and ultimately live better.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

In this engaging guide to decision-making about money, author and behavioral economist Ariely (James B. Duke Professor of Psychology & Behavioral Economics, Duke Univ.; Predictably Irrational) and writer and comedian Kreisler (Get Rich Cheating) lay bare the ways monetary value is misunderstood and incorrectly assessed, noting the tendency to "overemphasize irrelevant factors, forget about important ones, and allow insignificant value cues to lead us astray." Through stories, scenarios, and descriptions of experiments conducted by Ariely and others, the authors show the mental "forces at play" in financial psychology, such as why prepaying for a honeymoon may promise a more joyful experience. They also highlight how companies and marketers use these same strategies to induce spending and consider how to design "environments to turn our mental shortcomings into tools that work in the service of our financial success." As the work comes to a close, its attention shifts toward the future, considering suggestions for retirement plans and HR departments and how to "start a conversation" about the "duty of saving," offering a good first step in that direction. VERDICT Highly recommended.-Doug Diesenhaus, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Ariely (Payoff), a psychology professor, and Kreisler (Get Rich Cheating), a comedian, zero in on the average person's relationship to money in this valuable guide. Part one, "What Is Money," and part two, "How We Assess Value in Ways That Have Little to Do with Value," describe ways people "misthink money," even when these ways seem to be rational. Part three, "Put Your Money where Your Mind Is," offers strategies for coping with our irrationality. Where money is concerned, "what should matter are opportunity costs, the true benefit a purchase provides, and the real pleasure we receive from it compared to other ways we could spend our money." The authors assert that people "don't handle [money] in a way that makes sense" but rather "in a way that feels good." The authors also address the issue of paying on credit, which they say takes away the pain of having to hand over cash and can lead to overspending. Engaging and funny, rife with anecdotes and advice, the book defangs a difficult topic while teaching a lot. Agent: James Levine, Levine Greenberg Literary Agency. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Book Review

A lively look at how even the wisest among us are too often fools eager to part with our money.Most of us think about money at least some portion of each dayhow to get more of it, how to spend less of it. However, cautions Ariely (Psychology and Behavioral Economics/Duke Univ.; Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations, 2016, etc.), working with comedian and writer Kreisler (Get Rich Cheating, 2009), "when we bring money into the equation, we make the decisions much more difficult and we open ourselves to mistakes." The better course, they urge, is to consider money not for its own sakeindeed, not to acknowledge its existence at allbut instead to consider the concept of opportunity cost: what do we give up when we make one choice over another? Is the forgone acquisition really the correct one? What if, instead of buying a big-screen TV or new clothes, we thought of what we might do with the hours we don't have to work in order to procure them or of the other things we might buy in their place? Such counsel comes after consideration of other economic notions, such as the endowment effect, whereby we give more significance to things simply because we own them, and our generally risk-averse economic behavior, whereby the pleasure taken in gaining something is vastly overshadowed by the pain caused by losing it. Ariely and Kreisler, writing breezily but meaningfully, allow that money has its uses as a symbolic system of fungible, storable, accessible value. However, the real consideration should always be that "spending money now on one thing is a trade-off for spending it on something else," a calculation that is not often reckoned simply because it's more difficult than fishing out a credit card or some other means of delaying the recognition that spending money now has future, downstream effects. A user-friendly and often entertaining treatise on how to be a more discerning, vastly more aware handler of money. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Dan Ariely was born in 1968 in New York, but he grew up in Israel. He was a physics and mathematics major at Tel Aviv University but later switched to philosophy. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Ph.D. in business from Duke University.

He has taught at numerous universities including MIT Sloan School of Management, MIT's Media Lab, and Duke University. He is considered one of the leading behavioral economists. His work has been featured in several scholarly journals in the areas of psychology, economics, neuroscience, medicine and business. He has also been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and Scientific American. He is a regular commentator on National Public Radio and has appeared on CNN and CNBC. He is the author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home, and The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves.

(Bowker Author Biography)