Money Blind
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  • Welcome
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  • The Book
    • Introduction
      • Revolutionising your relationship with money
      • Better money decisions, step by step
      • The slow suicide of monetary self-deception
    • 1: Towards Financial Enlightenment
      • 1.1: Becoming Wiser with Money
        • 1.1.1: Becoming a better investor
        • 1.1.2: Financial philosophy: what is it and why is it necessary?
        • 1.1.3: The two types of financial errors
        • 1.1.4: What unites every money decision?
      • 1.2: The Root of All Deception
        • 1.2.1: Where does the path to good investing begin?
        • 1.2.2: Why focus on money?
        • 1.2.3: What other investment books miss
        • 1.2.4: Money Blind
      • 1.3: Money and the Good Life
        • 1.3.1: You are a brain surgeon
        • 1.3.2: The four types of knowing
        • 1.3.3: Putting knowledge to use: becoming practically wise
        • 1.3.4: What is the Good Life?
      • 1.4: Is the Good Life for Sale?
        • 1.4.1: Money. Huh. What is it good for?
        • 1.4.2: Is success for sale?
        • 1.4.3: Editing your life story
        • 1.4.4: From having a mind full of money to being mindful with money
      • 1.5: Money Maxims
        • 1.5.1: Resetting your relationship with money
        • 1.5.2: Principles
        • 1.5.3: Rules
        • 1.5.4: Triggers
      • Storytime: The most valuable knowledge in the world
    • 2: How to Have a Healthy Relationship with Money
      • 2.1: The Inner Game of Investing
        • Storytime: It. Never. Works.
        • 2.1.1: First per cent problems
        • 2.1.2: The only way to solve money problems
        • 2.1.3: Does financial advice help or hinder?
        • 2.1.4: How to stop financial rumination
      • 2.2: Misunderstandings and Lethargy
        • Storytime: Doubling down
        • 2.2.1: Expenditure is more important than income
          • 2.2.1.1: Universal basic instincts
          • 2.2.1.2: How to spend it, and not spend it
          • 2.2.1.3: The unexamined dollar is not worth a dime
          • 2.2.1.4: Adviser or enabler?
          • 2.2.1.5: The game of life is not a numbers game
        • 2.2.2: Enough is more important than more
          • 2.2.2.1 Give, give, give, me more, more, more
          • 2.2.2.2 If less is more, then more is also less
          • 2.2.2.3 Enough is enough
          • 2.2.2.4 Right place, wrong mime
          • 2.2.2.5 Enough is more than enough
        • 2.2.3: Value is more important than price
          • 2.2.3.1: Is it better to look rich, or be rich?
          • 2.2.3.2: Is it better to own or to rent?
          • 2.2.3.3: There is always an underlying emotional reward
          • 2.2.3.4: Selling style over substance
          • 2.2.3.5: Putting a price on real value
        • ↓ Coming Soon ↓
        • 2.2.4: All purchases are investments
      • 2.3: How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything
        • Storytime: What do Blackheath people do?
        • 2.3.1: Beware the Arrival Fallacy
        • 2.3.2: Beyond needs and wants
        • 2.3.3: Denunciation is still attachment
        • 2.3.4: Take control
      • 2.4: All Success Is Subjective
        • Storytime: Hollywood Hero
        • 2.4.1: No human is an island
        • 2.4.2: What are you worth?
        • 2.4.3: Write your own success story
        • 2.4.4: Be your own hero
      • 2.5: Inspired by Love and Guided by Knowledge
    • 3: How to Invest Like a Non-idiot
      • 3.1: All Investments are Gambles
      • 3.2: Your Life in Your Money and Your Money in Your Life
      • 3.3: The Investment Universe in a Grain of Sand
      • 3.4: There Is No Best Investment
      • 3.5: No Investment is an Island
    • 4: How to Get Help That's Actually Helpful
      • 4.1: Help!
      • 4.2: (Almost) All Financial Advisers are Crooks or Idiots
      • 4.3: Know your Enemy, and Your Friends
      • 4.4: Should You Hire Help or Go It Alone?
      • 4.5: The Future of Financial Advice
    • 5: How to Buy a Better Life
      • 5.1: Be a Financial Philosopher
      • 5.2: The At-Least-I-Know-I'm-Doing-Something-Right Investing Checklist
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    • Enlighten me!
  • Other
    • What this book is about
    • What this book isn't about
    • This book's logical flow
    • If... Then...
    • Stories
    • Maxims
    • Contact and comments
    • Editing guidance
    • Endnotes
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  1. The Book
  2. 1: Towards Financial Enlightenment
  3. 1.1: Becoming Wiser with Money

1.1.1: Becoming a better investor

A better money mindset leads to better money behaviours leads to a better relationship with money leads to a better life

Previous1.1: Becoming Wiser with MoneyNext1.1.2: Financial philosophy: what is it and why is it necessary?

Last updated 4 years ago

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This is a book about the philosophy and psychology of personal finance. Ultimately, it’s a book about behaviour change, or rather an ongoing participatory process of behaviour changing. If this book doesn’t change how you think about and act with money, it’s just another distraction; fuel for the false belief that being able to better describe and explain behaviour is the same as actually behaving better, in a sustained, transformative way.

‘Just as medicine confers no benefit if it does not drive away physical illness,’ said Epicurus, ‘so philosophy is useless if it does not drive away the suffering of the mind.’ Few things incite suffering of the mind more than money. No one thinks they have enough of the stuff, even those that have the most. No one knows what to do with the stuff they do have: what to spend it on; how much of it to save; when, where, and how to invest it… even those that spend, save, and invest with a confident, sometimes triumphant, air.

Money makes us believe it is the solution to the very problems it has caused. It causes a nightmare of insecurity, and sells us a dream of synthetic security to offset it. It promises freedom for those willing to sell themselves to it as slaves. It magnifies our mind’s suffering, but tells us not to worry, because there is a heaven of instant healing just over the horizon.

Maybe, I’ve heard, we don’t need to worry. Our dealings with money may be awkward, but we can dodge them with denunciation or delegation. Yet denunciation leads not to detachment, but to a surreptitious strengthening of attachment. And those to whom we would delegate are incentivised to change neither our beliefs nor our behaviours.

Most financial advice isn’t about providing convincing answers; it’s about providing persuasive reassurance. Why we’re spending or investing, and what we’re spending or investing on or in isn’t nearly as important as doing enough to stop the nagging feeling we need to do something. We pay advisers not to think up a suitable solution, but to avoid having to think of one ourselves.

However, this reassurance illusion doesn’t change unhelpful behaviours. It enables them. Buying a blindfold stops you seeing, not the things seen.

We are moving, slowly, into a new world. A world that admits that investors are humans, and that all personal finance is behavioural finance. That seeks to help people become better investors, not to cajole them into becoming better buyers of investments.

Describing systematically silly behaviours and ‘nudging’ people away from them does help people buy better investments. This is a good thing. But the point of nudges is that their prescriptions are followed without the follower noticing. Unhelpful tendencies are to be side-stepped, rather than explained, understood, engaged with, and consciously changed. This again is a good thing… in most circumstances. Not only because through the new actions, one may become a new person (rendering the old problems redundant), but also because most things aren’t worth the extra effort engaged choice demands. When it comes to increasing the efficiency of collecting taxes, or reducing the inefficiency of washing hotel towels, it is better to be blindly led along society’s preferred path.

Your relationship with money is different. Because blindly following society’s preferred path is precisely most people’s main money problem. And save perhaps for a few dozen people living in anarcho-syndicalist collectives in hippie communes, whether you want to or not you engage with money every damn day, even when – especially when – you’re deliberately trying not to. Mental suppression is subconscious superglue.

Our daily money engagements are central to determining who we are and the goodness or otherwise of our life. There is nothing more crucial to do consciously. Engaged, conscious choices come from the way we relate with the world. This is the job not of investment analytics, but of philosophy. A better life requires better behaviours, which requires better thinking, which requires better philosophy.

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1.1.2: Financial philosophy: what is it and why is it necessary?
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