Afford Anything - The Gap Between Knowing and Doing - with Dr. Stephen Wendel from Morningstar

Episode Date: July 23, 2018

#141: "I'll get around to rolling over my 401k ... next week." "Eventually I'll switch to a cheaper insurance plan." "I really should move my portfolio into lower-fee funds." "Yeah, yeah, I know I should create an estate plan. I'll do it later." ____ We know how to improve our financial lives. We know what steps we ought to take. I'm betting that everyone reading this can name at least one action, big or small, that you could take to improve your net worth. But we don't follow through. Why not? Why do we procrastinate? Why do we ignore the important, in favor of the urgent or the more-pleasant? Why do we act against our self-interests? Why is there a gap between our intentions and our actions? More importantly, how can we bridge this gap? How can we align our knowledge and intention with our behavior? Dr. Stephen Wendel is a behavioral economist and the head of behavioral science at Morningstar, an independent investment research firm. He joins us on the Afford Anything podcast to answer these questions. Here are a few tactics he shares: #1: Automate Set up systems that save you from yourself. #2: Create mental accounts Give every dollar a job. Earmark dollars for specific purposes, so that you don't view your money as commingled in a giant bucket that you can raid. Once you start thinking of piles of money as "my emergency fund" or "my kid's college fund," you'll be less likely to spend it on champagne and luxury hotels. #3: Imagine vivid scenes Our minds are predisposed to prioritize the vivid over the subtle, which is one reason why we suffer from "present bias" -- the tendency to only think about the present, often at the expense of the future. (For example, "I feel like sitting on the couch right now" takes priority over "If I workout, I'll feel better in the future.") In order to combat this, create vivid scenes in your mind that imagine the future in great detail. #4: Create artificial hindsight Imagine a future version of yourself, and from that perspective, look back in hindsight at yourself today. What will Future You regret doing, or regret not having done? This technique is called "prospective hindsight," and it allows you to anticipate the thoughts and emotions of your future self. #5: Simplify If you find yourself drowning in a sea of complex financial decisions, you might lose confidence in your ability to make choices, and therefore not take any action whatsoever. Reduce complexity by making moves that are 'good enough,' rather than perfect. Simplify in order to take action. Dr. Wendel shares more tactics and insights in this episode. Tune in for a deep-dive! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. Every decision that you make is a trade-off against something else. And that doesn't just apply to your money. It applies to your time, your energy, your focus, your attention, anything in your life that's a scarce or limited resource. And I am not saying this to promote a scarcity mindset. Of course I believe in abundance. But the fact is, there's an opportunity cost with everything. And that leads to two questions.

Number one, what's most important to you? What do you value above all else? And number two, how do you align your daily behaviors to reflect those values? In other words, how do your actions match your intentions? Answering these two questions is a lifetime practice. There are no shortcuts and no easy answers. That is what this podcast is here to explore in depth. My name is Paula Pamp.

I am the founder of Afford Anything.com and the host of the Afford Anything podcast. Joining me on today's show is Dr. Stephen Wendell. Dr. Wendell is a behavioral economist and the head of behavioral science at Morningstar, which is an investment research firm. In his work at Morningstar, he leads a team of behavioral scientists to ask and try to find the answers to questions like, why do we so often act against our own interests? And why do we so often shoot ourselves in the foot doing things that we, quote unquote, shouldn't? Doing things that we know will harm us in the long run. Why do we do these things and how can we solve it?

His job is to lead a team of people to try to find the answers to these questions. Questions that have really plagued humanity since the dawn of time. And so today we're going to talk about the latest research, when it comes to these questions, and specifically we're going to talk about these questions as they apply to your financial life, so that you can create habits and practices that allow you to take the actions that you know are wise, despite the fact that in the moment you might not feel like doing it. So how do you do that? How do you bridge that gap between intention and action?

That's what we're going to discuss right now. Here is Dr. Stephen Wendell. Hi, Steve. Hello there. How's it going? It is great. I am very excited to talk with you and afford anything podcast and many listeners. Awesome. Now, Steve, I think what you study is fascinating. You study the gap between intention and action. As you and I were just talking about off camera right before this, that is the central question that has plagued humanity since the dawn of existence. How do we actually, we know what we should do? How do we do it? Yes, this is, of course, a challenge that we all face in our lives, and it's really easy to see other people and not always easy to see in our own lives. There are so many reasons that when we want to do something, we don't follow through.

And we all know intuitively that this happens sometimes, but there's a great study I like that shows the severity of it. I'll just give it in brief. It was by James Choi at Yale. He took, let's say, 100 people and asked the first. them, are you saving enough for retirement? And a good two-thirds of them said, no, we're going to save more, right? That's really important to us. And then the follow-up question was, are you going to commit to do it? And they said, yes, absolutely, in the next two months, we're going to save more. And that was on the order of about a quarter of them. And he found,

using administrative data, that only 3% actually followed through. That is just a huge gap in our lives. And so what's really fascinating in there is it tells us why this doesn't happen. It's not because of motivation. It's not because we're not thinking about it. There's something else going on. And that's really what I study. I study the something else. At the risk of asking an impossibly broad question, what is that or what are those something else's?

In many cases, it's our basic humanity. It's the fact that we, well, we get distracted. It's the fact that we can't pay attention to all things. We have limited memory. We have limited willpower. Now, which of these particular just facts of human nature are the cause? It depends on the person. It depends on the circumstance. But we find that these things add up and they really block people from being able to take action. Willpower, distraction. Again, at the risk of asking too broad of a question, what do we do about this? I mean, we often, we know what we should do. Anyone listening to this podcast right now can name at least one step that they can take. that would be an improvement to their financial life. But they haven't taken that step.

Well, we have two main options on how to overcome this. The first option is you force your way through. You get all your willpower and you go fight it. And that one doesn't seem to work out very well for most folks, because there are only a few things that we can focus so intensely on. The other route, it's a bit more nuanced. First, we have to figure out what the obstacle is that's stopping us. This doesn't come necessarily from self-reflection.

This can come from just trying different things. So let's say you want to save more for the future, but you just don't quite do it. So one way is to say, okay, maybe it's a problem of inattention. Let me set some reminders that at the end of each month, I'm going to do it. For some people that I work for some people who won't. For others, wow, maybe it's, you know, when I think about saving for the future, it just doesn't seem real, right? It's too far away. I'm just focused on the present. Well, in that case, we've got a set of great tools that can help people think more about the future, right? For other people, it might be, well, I just don't know how. I know that savings alone isn't enough. I need to go invest, but wow, in order to invest, I need to go spend all this time researching, what are the right funds, etc. That's a self-efficacy or an ability problem. And we have a set of tools that can help people overcome that. So first we need to figure out what the, what it feels like the challenge is. Is it emotional, right? And you just turned off by it. You don't feel like you'd be able to succeed. Or is it, eh, you just keep on forgetting, which case, we have options for each case.

Right. What if it's an issue of just lack of urgency? There are so many things that are important, but not urgent. Indeed. I think many of the things that are good for us in our lives are exactly that, Paul. They're, they might be important, but they're just not right there immediately. And so we have two big options. for lack of urgency. One is you, well, you make yourself a deadline, right? So it can seem hokey, but our minds do focus on specific deadlines, even if they're made up. The example I like to use is, okay, you know it's really important to save for retirement. Not very compelling. On Thursday night, sit down with your spouse, your family, your dog, your cat, whoever it might be in your household. and at 8 p.m. plan out what you have right now and what you're going to need and set up a new savings, set up your automatic withdrawal. The more specific it is, the more it has a time,

it has a date, it has details around it, the easier it is for us to get past that, well, I could do it any time problem, right? And the other way, of course, to get around this lack of urgency is to automate it, make it see you don't actually have to do the darn thing at all, so you don't have to deal with that. And so on the one time that you're, thinking about it, that's when you set up your automatic enrollment, your automatic deduction from your paycheck, et cetera. So that, yeah, in the future, it's not going to be urgent, but that's okay because you don't have to do anything. It seems like so much of this is based around how to trick ourselves into overcoming our own natural tendencies, right? So deadlines, for example,

deadlines might be, for some people, they may be a way to overcome our natural inclination for procrastination and deferring things that are not urgent. On the other hand, as every writer knows, deadlines are, you know, you enjoy the wish of them as they rush past. Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. That's really going to depend on the person and what they're facing. So behavioral science, what we do is we find tools that can help people and we test them rigorously. We run randomized control trials or experiments. But then what's going to help a particular person in particular moment, It has to be that combination of the tools we've developed, right, and people can develop on their own with their own problem and their own circumstance in that moment.

Can you tell me about some of the formal randomized experiments that you've done in order to study the behavior gap? Yeah, absolutely. So we've run lots of different experiments, one of which we ran a few years ago, which I think is really, really fun to talk about. It has to do with what's known as a peer comparison. So in this case, we had budgeting and personal financial management software. and people would report to us how they're doing financially. So what are their assets, what are their debts, etc. And we just took that data, compared it to others who were in a similar income, similar family status, et cetera, and just reported it back to them and just gave them a 1 to 100 scale

and said, hey, this is how you're doing, 1 to 100. This is how other people are doing, 1 to 100. and when people weren't doing as well as their peers, I found it tremendously motivating. So the combination of that, how you're doing and how other people were doing, it would, if you extrapolate from the study, it would about double the savings rate of individuals. It was a huge impact for people. Wow. And that's just by basically tell them what they knew and then packaging it up in a nice simple presentation that compared them to others.

Right. So playing on people's competitive nature. Yes. Well, I think about it as competitive and it shows you what's possible. So it's not only what you should do, but it also says, wow, okay, I think about my finances and I'm always stretched. But other people are somehow doing this. Let me give that another try. See what I can do. What if you're on the other side of that? What if, and this is, I think, true for a lot of people who are listening to this podcast, what if you save more than the majority of your friends and you just know anecdotally from your own. peer group that you're doing better than everyone around you, both in terms of income, in terms of savings, in terms of net worth, just in terms of overall financial planning. How do you keep from resting on your laurels when that happens? Sure. That's a great question. In fact, in the research, we see that that does happen, right? If people compare themselves to those who are doing just as well or not doing as well, then, yeah, we have a tendency to say, okay, great, that's taken care of. Let me go focus on something else

in my life. But there's another mechanism that only occurs when people compare themselves in a particular way, right? In the money sense only, right? Comparing down in terms of money. But for good or for ill, we have this tremendous ability to ignore most of the folks who aren't doing as well and just always compare up. Serenukum on our team has done some nice studies around this on social comparisons and how most people, even if they're earning far more than objectively what others are around them, still find those cases of the people who are doing even better than them and compare themselves to that person. So it's not as widespread as a problem you might think because of our selective attention. So I live in a nice suburb, right, and we've got a perfectly fine house.

And when I'm biking by, I bike over to the metro, look, I'm human. I know that I'm always looking at the houses that are bigger than mine, that have a fancier lawn, et cetera, right? Even though, objectively, we're doing okay. So a lot of time that happens. Now, there is also an additional technique that people can use, kind of that builds on this. And we use this actually in our pair comparison study is if you're above the median, right, if you're above the 50 percentile mark, then set a target of the 10%. If you're at 10%, set a target of the 5%. And so that's actually what we did in the study. We found that people who were above the meeting, we said, okay, you're doing great. Let's set a stretch comparison compared to the top 10% of people who are, in this case, we're doing financially well, not just income, but overall, how are you managing what you have? And we found that to be similarly quite effective. Tell me about some of the other experiments that you've run.

So you found that presenting people with data about how they're doing as compared with how other people in comparable situations are doing, you found that that is effective at changing behavior. What else that you found to be effective at changing behavior? Sure. We run a wide range of different studies. Let me give one, for example, in the investing arena, right, for those who are investing. So we recently ran a study with a nationally representative sample of Americans where we tried different. ways of presenting fees. So fees have a, they have a strange effect when people, and people are investing sometimes. Rationally and thoughtfully, if we look through at fees,

we see, okay, well, fees are basically negative performance. It's the only thing you know you're going to have and all else being equal, you probably want to minimize fees. Right. Now, that said, of course, there are tradeoffs and we want to look at the net picture, but that's not necessarily what people do. And so there have been a variety of studies in the past on how people chase performance, right? Forget the fees. I just want to see what had the greatest performance last year with the assumption that it continues, which is, of course, generally a very bad assumption.

So we wanted to see what would help people focus on fees when everything else was exactly the same. So we took three S&P index trackers, in this case there were ETFs, but just exactly following. the S&P 500, exactly the same in the details. And the only thing that was different were the fees. Now, these are actually from real funds. We just renamed them. And so we ran a randomized control trial of showing people the fees in different ways. And what we found is it's actually pretty hard to focus on that people really just want to look at performance. They want to look at the, look at all these details, even though they're exactly the same. And what we found is that About a quarter of the folks would invest in the highest cost fund.

In this case, we had at about 40, it's about 42, 43 basis points, nearly half a percent. And the cheapest one was like four. So it really 10 times difference, a huge difference. A quarter of folks put the money in the highest cost one, which is not sensible, right, from a strictly economic perspective. And so what we found is that people were naively diversifying. They said, look, well, okay, they tell me these things are the same. They look the same, but I don't really know. So I'm going to use a simple rule, invest a little bit of money and everything, and that's probably safer than going on all in one.

That pushed so many people to put money in places that didn't make sense. But when that wasn't an option, when we narrowed the choice and said, okay, put all your money in one of them, then a lot more went into the lowest cost funds. So that was one of our studies. There's actually a very similar study in the UK, the main regulatory body there, did a similar one where they did a pop-up one. warning that said, hey, have you thought about the fees? Reminder, pay attention to these. They found a very similar effect. So we found about a 7% swing in the number of people and how they invested. The UK folks found about the same for their study. So that's another example. A pop-up warning sounds brilliant. I'd never considered that. Yeah. There was a great one by Dan Egan at Betterment.

He popped up a warning box telling people about the tax consequences. Now, if there's one thing that We hate more than paying fees is taxes. It wasn't in this case for a fee study, but he was just building on the comment of a pop-up. He was doing this to help people not chase fads or not leave during a downturn, not to churn their portfolios too much. And so to avoid that, you just put up a pop-up and said, you're about to pay taxes. If you stay in your portfolio and you keep calm, you won't pay taxes. Wonderful impact. Wow.

And I think he's got an academic study about that coming out pretty soon as well. One thing that you've talked about that I thought was interesting is the planning fallacy that a lot of people have, our inability to anticipate how we are going to behave in the future. How do we, at the risk of asking a contradictory question, how do we plan around having a planning fallacy? That's great. Let me see. Well, there are a couple different approaches you can take. One is to avoid the planning fallacy altogether as much as you can by automation, right? So if there's a general role in behavioral science is that these challenges that we face, they're part of how our minds are wired.

And they're not going away. They're part of our humanity. So one of the way out of these problems is to avoid our humanity. So for example, if we're really bad at planning, say, yeah, when I get my tax refund, I think I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to save it all. Yeah, of course, that's what I'm going to do. That would be an example of not being able to forecast your own future behavior. Right. Well, one of the things you can do is pre-commit that. Set up a transfer from your checking account or wherever the tax refund is going to come into and have it automatically withdraw the money on the day, or let's give yourself a little fuzz, a few days after, when the money is going to hit. And you know that thing's going to go in. And that way you've already locked in your intention. So we're really bad at forecasting our own future behavior. But we can be really really good at tying our own hands. We can be really good at taking a moment of strength and using that to determine what we're going to do in the future. So if you'd like, this builds on the story of Ulysses on the mast. Wow, it does. Actually, for the listeners who aren't familiar with it, could you please describe that one? Sure, sure. So we call these Ulysses contracts or Odysseus contracts because of Roman and

Greek mythology. So Ulysses, as he was approaching the sirens, the mythical beast that we would lure sailors to their deaths with their songs, he knew that he would be tempted. And because of that fear of temptation and knowing that he would give into it, he had his sailors, he had his shipmates tie his hands to the mast so that he could not respond. And the other sailors put wax in their ears so they couldn't hear the sirens. And so what that is, is when you know that there will be a problem, you can close off your options. And that's why in American English at least, we have that phrase tying one's hands. It means making it difficult to do something that you might be tempted to do in the future.

Now, there are a variety of different ways to do this. If you realize that you're not very good at forecasting what you're going to do in the future, right? If you realize you have this planning fallacy, then great. That's one way. You can lock yourself in. Another way to do it, for example, is you know that when you get to raise, you're just going to bite. new furniture, you'll, you know, you'll spend it on stuff that you'll then later forget about. You can pre-commit with your employer to have half of that money go towards automatically into

your retirement savings. It's called a Save More Tomorrow Program. But there are lots of other ways we can do this as well, that we can tie our hands. So I literally put my credit cards on ice a while back. So look, we had a problem with our finances. It's so easy to spend on credit cards. We took the credit cards, put them in a plastic bag, poured water in it, put it in the freezer. Right. Because we knew we'd be tempted. We knew we'd just be forgetful. We knew it'd be human. And so the credit cards were there. If we absolutely needed them, we could spend the time defrosting them. Fine. Thankfully, we didn't have to do that. But then they weren't in our wallets. So we changed our environment. We tied our hands to make it hard to do this foolish thing we knew we'd probably do in the future.

That makes sense. I've heard of people sticking credit cards in jars of peanut butter for exactly the same reason. Wow. See, that might be a problem because you might like the peanut butter. I go for ice because really there's no, you can get water anytime. There's no benefit to the ice water. Yeah, I did that once a years ago with some savings that I wanted to tuck away and I wanted to make sure I didn't spend it. I put it in a savings account and then I purposely cut up the debit card. I tore up the checks and I purposely lost my password for it.

So the only way that I could retrieve that money is if I got in my car and physically drove to the brick and mortar bank. Good for you. Yes. That is behavioral science in its finest. That's beautiful. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. Do you want to work out more but going to the gym is kind of inconvenient? Check out Beachbody on demand, which is an easy to use. streaming service that gives you instant access to a wide variety of effective workouts that you can do from the comfort of your living room or if you're traveling, your Airbnb, your hotel room, wherever you are.

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maintenance fees, no minimum balance requirements, your first order of checks is free, mobile banking is free, you get free ATMs worldwide, so this is not a bank that's going to nickel and dime you. If you want to open an account, go to radiusbank.com slash paula. That's R-A-D-I-U-S-Bank.com Slash-Pala. Radiusbank.com slash Paula. You've also talked about mental accounts, the benefit of earmarking money for specific purposes. Can you talk about that? Yeah, of course. So this is a great example of how we can use the funny ways that our minds are wired to our advantage. Mental accounting is this. Theoretically, money is fungible. A dollar for one purpose is the same for another purpose. But in our minds it isn't. In our minds, we often tag money for a particular purpose. I have

kids. So I have money for set aside for my kids education. And it would feel really, really wrong to take that money and buy a really cool scooter, which I know I want. I would love to have a scooter. But that would just feel wrong. But however, if I got a bonus, that money, it doesn't have a specific purpose yet. I'd feel perfectly okay using that for a scooter. And by the way, I think I should because I deserve that scooter. It's going to be fun. That's mental accounting, is that every dollar in our minds we can tag and often do for a particular purpose. This is my rent money. This is my mortgage money. This is my kids' education money. This is my retirement money. And it creates a certain mental friction for us from using it for other purposes. And so we can use this to our advantage, right?

You can say, all right, I'm putting aside money for my vacation. I'm putting aside money for my vacation. I'm putting aside money for my retirement account. If possible, put them in actually separate accounts, retirement accounts, obviously, but even other expenses. Give it a name. Give that account a name. Make that account aligned to its purpose, something that we will remember, okay, that's my big fun vacation fund. That's my kids education fund, whatever it might be. And that makes it harder mentally for us to use the money for a different purpose. It's something our minds naturally do that we can use to our advantage. If it is the case that we're pretty good at earmarking money, we're pretty good at having those mental accounts, why is it that so many people end up tapping their retirement account too early? For example, when a person leaves a job, they often cash out their retirement account. That's money that's been earmarked for a purpose and then gets completely derailed.

That is a great question, right? So why do we have so much money flowing out with the plans? And we did some sort of. research on this a number of years ago. The answer isn't simple, but I think we can break it up into a couple different pieces that can make sense. One of which is we can never deny that sometimes people really struggle. An emergency comes up and they've got no other option. And so I never want my research behavioral science to be seen as judging people and saying that, wow, it's your fault for being in this bad state. That's not the case, right? So one of the reasons that people use their retirement funds for other purposes is they really need to. But that's not always the case. There are other cases, for example, where mental accounting actually is not relevant

at all. It didn't come into a play because people don't even know the money is there until they get this check or they get the option that says, hey, you're leaving your job at Home Depot, whatever it might be, right? And you were automatically enrolled into a 401K. you've got this money saved. Would you like, you know, think about this in your own life? So you're leaving your job from, let's say, there's a good reason you're leaving your job. And you can either keep the money with us or you can receive a check. Which one would you like?

Right. So, I mean, it's like, yeah, people, given the option of having money now or keeping with an employer that they may not like, or perhaps doing some arcane process they're not familiar with to roll it over into an IRS. They're not sure about the fees. They're not sure about the process. Or they could just get a check. Which one of those seems easiest and most rational? You get a check. That's an area where I think there's a lot more work to be done in behavioral science.

To help with that moment of transfer. We have some active research projects in that myself and our team. To better understand what happens on job change and how we can help people tag it mentally, as you talked about, and then put it to its continued use, right? help people keep that for retirement. Again, in the cases where it's not just absolute need. And for other folks, it may just be they're really present focused versus future focused. A lot of us are. I myself actually rate pretty much on the near focus side. And it's just the present use of that money is just much more real and vivid. And so, again, there are tools we can use to help people in that moment,

to help the future be more vivid and help help weigh the present, just a little bit, way the future a little bit more than we do right now. And what are some of those tools? There's so much fun research in this area. One of the tools is to make the future more vivid by making yourself more vivid. This is work by How Herschfield, Dan Goldstein, and others, where they took people's faces and the age progressed them. They actually showed them what they would look like when they were 60, when they were 70.

I did this myself. Let me tell you, when I saw my face, I was like, wow, yeah, I'm going to need a whole. a lot more money on medical expenses. I did that myself as well. There's a couple of apps that you can use for that. So yeah, I did that with an app. And the initial picture, I was like, oh, it's a terrible picture of me. I don't like it at all. Then I aged myself another 40 years. And suddenly the initial picture looked all right. Oh, wow. Nice. Yeah, by comparison. Yep. It's all based on how Hirshfield and his co-authors work. It's great stuff. So that's one technique. Another technique is to visualize the future in your head and just make it more real. So as I mentioned, I'm one of the

people for whom, look, I work in behavioral finance, right? I study this stuff, but my mind is just wired to not plan too far ahead financially. So I always, we have this, we have a questionnaire, for example, that we give people how far in the future do you tend to plan for your finances? and your listeners are probably going to be on the way end of, I'm planning 10 years, I'm planning 20, 30 years ahead. I'm good if I'm like, you know, 10 weeks ahead, to be honest. But there's a technique that research reviews and I use myself, which is to make that future plan more real. And it goes like this. When you're retired or whatever this date is that you're trying to plan for, what are you doing then?

Pick a day. Let's say Thursday, October 27th of this particular year that you're trying to plan for. planning for. What's your house look like? No, no, no, no. What does your kitchen look like? What are the pots? What do you see outside in the window? What are you doing at noon? Okay, after you're done with that, what do you do next? And visualize all of this in your head. And that makes it more vivid and real. Again, it's something I do myself to help overcome just how my mind is wired. And what we find is that the mind is naturally focused on the vivid. And so this is a way of fighting vivid with vivid. You're giving the world around us is vivid and real. And so if you can give yourself another

vivid image to hold on to, this is what I'm working towards. I'm playing with my grandkids. I'm working at the charity to give back. This is how I'm doing it. It can become tremendously powerful. Provide a counterbalance for those of us like me who are so focused on the present normally. that's another technique we can use. Wow. What if in trying to do that, you have no idea what that might be? I'm thinking particularly the people in this audience who are, whose immediate lives are not yet, they might not know if they're going to go to grad school. They might not know what state they're going to live in. They might not know whether or not they're going to get married. How do you imagine that when the next five or ten years could bring dramatic changes to your life? Well, I think that's the key is your creating that vision. So the fact that someone doesn't have that, that's why you would want this. Now, it's not to say that, okay, you've got to plan out how many kids you're going to have, who you're going to marry, where you're going to let all that stuff, right? But rather,

use your imagination, your time to fill in just a moment of that time. It can be one possible future, but make it a real and vivid one. That's what it means. Wow. Yeah. So sure, you don't know whether you're going to go to grad school or not. But maybe when you create that vision, you'll say, okay, well, these are the things that are really important to me and these are the things that aren't. In fact, there's a technique. Perspective hindsight. It's a lot of fun. It's not, best of my knowledge, it hasn't been used in this particular area, but I think it's relevant for what you just raised. Perspective hindsight is a technique where you imagine a future point and you have yourself look back. What did you really enjoy? What did you regret?

So it's a matter of getting out of the current moment and seeing what really matters to you. So I actually did this exercise in my own retirement planning. I wrote it all out and said, okay, so I'm 30 years out. If things go really well for me, what will I be happy about? If things go really poorly, what will I be sad about? Well, will I be the mix of that picture and what will I really regret? And oddly, never in that picture did it come down as, wow, I wish that I'd spend another five hours each night in the office. That wasn't one of them.

But, oh, I wish that I'd spent more time with my family. I wish that I had accomplished this big thing at work. Sure, that's important. I wish that I'd made this contribution in my research. That can be important. It's not about not work. It's just sorting out what parts of your life, what parts of your work, what parts of your family really matter. And that can be a powerful tool for helping develop your plan of what you need and what you're working towards.

Can you tell us more about frameworks that we can use around problems that we have, problems with our humanity? You talked earlier about how to avoid our basic humanity. So what are other problems with the way that humans are wired and what techniques can we use to solve that? So I think about it like this. when we wonder why we don't do something, we so often either beat ourselves up about it and say, my God, why didn't I have the willpower, or why didn't I have the energy to do this?

Or maybe I just didn't care about it enough, right? Right. And we tend to do it in general. We tend to do it in the generic. Why didn't I save more when I was, you know, last year, younger, whatever it might be, right? But the gap between intention and action is not in general. It occurs in the collection of so many small moments in which we fail to act.

And in those moments, we have some great tools to both understand what's happening and what to do about it. But it all happens when you focus on an exact moment. So let me give one that I have struggled with throughout my life, going to the gym. So I was born. Skinny as a bean pole, fine. but I've got lots of physical problems because of lack of exercise, back problems, neck problems, etc. So let's say that you or I or anybody is sitting on a couch watching TV, right? Watching Netflix, watching whatever it might be.

We don't usually think about it this way, but why in that very specific moment, in that exact time, would you get up and go to the gym? Right? So the first major obstacle is attention. we're not thinking about it even though yes in theory in general it might be important we know it we're paying attention to something else and for us to take action

something needs to cue us or grab our attention and then once it has our attention then we have an emotional reaction that reaction is before conscious deliberative thought it's faster in the brain and the reaction could be

oh god I look ugly in sweatpants and done forget the cost benefits that idea is already out the window. You can get past that emotion. Let's say it's in a retirement context. It might be, oh, man, I'm so hosed.

There's no point am I even thinking about that. That's an emotional reaction. That's not a conscious deliberative thought, but it can lead us astray already. But let's say you get past that. Once you get past that emotional reaction, then your mind does evaluate the cost and benefits. And the challenge there is that we're just,

we're not great at doing cost and benefits in our head. We're not great because we don't think of all the factors. We don't have a detailed mathematical model of going to the gym and the long-term benefit of this exact moment, this particular exercise we're going to do. Nor do we have it in our heads for, what if I were to buy the slightly lower cost option and I save that right now.

We don't do that. We take shortcuts. And so we need tools that help us with that evaluation process. Then when it comes to taking action, thinking about actually doing it, whether it's going to the gym or saving more, then we get into these problems of ability or self-efficacy, where for somebody who is an expert in the field, it might seem perfectly reasonable and obvious. Yeah, okay, great. So you go to this calculator, you figure out what your long-term medical expenses are going to be. You figure out your chance of taking care of your family. You figure out whether Social Security is going to be there. And you factor in that probability. And then you do this over time and you take an inflation and what the stock market is going to do. Right? Right. Expert in the field is like, oh, yeah. This is obvious. You just go do that for everybody else. It is like flying an airplane with no training. We don't do those things. And so how do we get over that lack of self-

confidence and see that it's in fact not actually that complex. In our minds, it gets so more complex. So those are some of the obstacles. And these come together in an acronym, create, I'll give you all of them. Q, first question is attention. Then immediately afterwards, it's a reaction. That's your emotion that can lead you astray. Then it's E, evaluation, your conscious cost-benefit analysis of it. Then it's a question of ability. Do I feel I can succeed? And of course, do I have the resources? can I have what I need. The final two are your timing and experience. Timing is our wonderful human ability to procrastinate. Is it the right time to do this now? It gets back to your question before about the important versus the urgent. And then finally experience.

All of these are general lessons from behavioral science. But in the end, your own personal experience guides, well, whether it feels right to you or it doesn't, whether you've been burned in the past or not, experience trumps anything else. those are the compendium of human frailties, if you like. The different ways in which we can fail to take action, even if we want to create Q reaction evaluation ability, timing, and experience. And the solution to these, well, when you think about it this way, okay, let's say you have a problem of attention. What are the ways that you solve a problem of attention? I'm sure your listeners, you, everybody, we can come up with obvious answers.

Well, you go where the attention already is, right? So you wear a fitness tracker, for example, on your wrist that reminds you that you see it, you say, oh, yeah, I need to exercise. Or you put a calendar item to go do your budgeting, right? You get attention. What about that emotional reaction? Well, you try to avoid it, if possible. You say, well, it's not actually like this thing that I feel so badly about. Or, okay, well, I don't like how I look in sweatpants.

So you get a gym at home. You don't force yourself. You don't make yourself do something that isn't human. You realize, you recognize your humanity, and you just work around it. This is actually something that I did in my own life. I went to a local gym where, my lord, those people were fit, they were on it, they were not me. And it just didn't feel right going there. I felt, Judge, fine, I know it's even stupid, but these are the things that get in our way.

I just didn't want to go there and feel comfortable there. So I got a gym at home and I found another gym. I got some equipment at home, which I use. And I found another gym where people just didn't take it so seriously. Cool. Problem solved. In each of these areas, once you have that framework, Q, reaction, evaluation, ability, timing, etc., the answers are usually pretty obvious. Now, yes, as behavioral scientists, we have some really cool techniques, right? I talked about tying one's hands in Ulysses' contracts.

Sure, that's just another technique. That's a way of handling the evaluation, where you know that you, right now you see it's clearly, but you know you're going to have a very different set of costs and benefits in the future, so you tie your hands. They all just fit into this framework. And more generally, we can all come up with ways to do this that aren't about beating ourselves up. All of the solutions to these obstacles, they're often about using human nature, just avoiding it, right, rather than changing it. We're never going to be, we're never going to be people who never procrastinate. We're never going to be people who don't have strange emotional reactions to things that turn us off from doing things we know are important. We're just never going to be those perfect automatons.

We are humans. We have emotions. And so what do we do? Well, we come up with creative ways to externalize. If the problem is inside our heads, then often the solution is outside of our heads. and almost all the examples that we've talked about today are basically about externalizing. Putting your credit cards on ice, that is changing your environment and doing something physical that makes it harder to do something bad that's mental.

Automating, automating your retirement contributions, changing your environment so that you don't have to do something that's unlikely for you to do. Remember to go at the end of the month and go transfer the money, et cetera, right? or getting a gym at your house. It's changing your environment. So you have that cue and you can avoid that emotional reaction rather than telling yourself, my God, I'm a terrible person. I just need to be able to get over this. Maybe you are, maybe you aren't. But mostly you're probably just human.

That is, I think, the core lessons of helping people take action. There's a framework. There's some common things that we all struggle with. And the solution is usually pretty obvious. Once we see what the obstacle is and once we look outside. of ourselves and stop beating ourselves up. We'll come back to the show in just a second, but first, how often do you change the AC filters in your home? Yeah, probably not as often as you should. No shame in that. That's totally

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Let's talk about that first step cue, because when you talk about cue, reaction, and then everything that follows, it reminds me quite a bit of Charles Duhiggin what he writes about habit formation. Of course. Q, reaction, and then some sort of immediate reward. How do we put the proper cues in place? First, we have to know what type of behavior we're dealing with. If we're trying to start something new and you know it might be hard to continue, then you want to repeat it often enough that your mind can basically outsource it. That's what a habit is. It's your mind outsourcing conscious thought to this hardwired habit and your environment that cues it. And so there, in that case, the cues you look for are something that is structural in your environment will always be there in the same context.

If it's a habit cue, that's what's needed. However, if it's something that's just kind of a one-off, like, hey, you know you got to do this thing. Say it's a tax refund, right? The tax refund's coming. You know, you want to handle that money well, or it's a bonus at work, whatever it might be. You're not going to be doing this 10 times a month. It's just one time in a year. Habit won't help.

So the type of cue you need isn't really relevant. Instead, for that, you want a big, hunking, loud one. You want one that's going to be really hard to ignore. and we'll get you at that moment. Set the alarm, right? Set the calendar. Have your, you know, tell your friends. So they'll remind you.

Again, it's all about externalizing, but the type of cue you need is different. Okay? If you're trying to avoid something, then it's also a different type of cue there. The example I often use is, as a person who has an alcohol problem. And as they drive home,

they always see the particular bar. So there the cue is working against them because they already have the habit. stop the car, going to the bar, have a few drinks, and then have a few more and then have a few more, right? And we've all either faced this ourselves or we've known other people who have. Right. Just a human condition. So what do you do?

Do you yell at someone who is drinking in a way that they don't want? No, they know it, but they just still do it. Instead, you map out a new driving path that doesn't get anywhere near that bar, and so you don't see it. You short-circuit the queue. And the way they make that real is work out all the deal. details beforehand. Okay, here's the path. Here's the, here's what you do if it's blocked, right, so that you avoid that cue altogether. So it really depends on the type of behavior. Do Higgs book is awesome and it's about habits. But there are many other types of behaviors that we

face in our daily lives. Such as? Well, like the one-off, right? Where you just want to do this thing and you set a big reminder. Or you do what's known as implementation intentions. This is for something that's in the future. It's usually a one-time, action, and it's difficult for you to set big reminders in that moment. You use implementation intentions. That's basically, it's setting up a script in your mind. So the original research was Katie Milken, John Bashir's, and others around flu shots. And so what they did is, they said, okay, flu shots are going to be available at this time. Do you want to do it? Certain number of people said yes, and a subset of them actually followed through. Another group, they had right out,

when are you going to go? What time, what date? No follow-through, no reminders, nothing. But the simple act of planning out the details of an event makes you more likely to do it. It ties back to that example I gave before of setting a specific time you're going to sit down with your family and your spouse, etc. to plan out your retirement savings. It's the same thing. So you're setting up a mental script. And it's even better if you say, okay, well, what if I'm sick that day? Well, I'm going to go do it this day. If you set up all the if then all of the obstacles you might face and you think them through beforehand. Right. And then in your mind, that date, all those specific things, they become cues. You're setting up environmental cues without having an alarm clock. Right. So I'd like to create an estate plan, and I'm going to do it on this day and on this time. And what if I don't remember my password to a particular account? Exactly. Right. Right. What if I'm reading through the documents and

I come across a word that I don't know. Exactly, right. And to build in that cue even more, you can say, and I'm going to do it, once I get home and I see X, right? Once I walk in the door and I see this thing and then put that image in your head and there. You've just made a connection between that moment and an action you want to take. Kind of preloading an action is how you can think about it. Final question. You mentioned earlier in this conversation about present bias, the tendency that many people

have to be focused on the present at the expense of the future. What do you do if you have the opposite problem? If you are grappling with the tendency to live in the future and neglect your current needs? That is a great question. And as a researcher, I have to say, I don't think it's been studied enough. Now, I think we have some clues of what might help. But I think as a strong research-driven answer, we don't have enough yet. some of the things I would look at are they're very much quite similar to that create funnel.

When we think about spending money in the present, right? So if we have this intention, so first of all, I should say, if people really like living in the future and planning for that and they really don't want to spend or live in the present, then we shouldn't probably change that. And if people are enjoying something, great, right? And it's adaptive and it's a good, you know, it helps them succeed for the future. No problem. So present gratification comes from living in the future in that model. Yeah, if they do. If folks do, awesome.

I wish I would like that. Awesome. Because behavioral science starts with the understanding that we want to help people do something they want to do. So if they're happy and it helps them, right, happy now and happy in the future, right? So we can plan for the good of the individual for the short term and the long term. I don't want to mess with that. Now, if people actually have this intention action gap, they're like, oh, I'm always focused on the future and I'm not spending the time. I don't feel like I can relax right now. Okay, that's a problem for behavioral science. That's an intention action gap. And I would use the same tools, right? What brings our attention to the moment? There's actually great research on mindfulness training, for example, and how it can help people change their spending and change many aspects of their lives, but finance. is being one. So that's one technique. Another would be to say, okay, so maybe I've got my attention

on it, but whenever I think about it, I have this horrendous fear of running out of money when I'm older. So how do we address that fear? We're humans. We will have emotions. So we can't just say, I shouldn't be feeling that. Instead, that's a reaction. What do we do? Do we use a pure comparison to see that other people are okay, right? Do we look at the stories of those who, for example, we're the worried wealthy and they got to their older years and they never were willing to spend and they feel really terrible about that, right? And so how do we address that emotion rather than squash it? I would use that same create funnel if it is an intention action gap because that's what it's for. A problem like that is so easy to think in general, God, why don't I?

I, why don't I just relax? It's because there is no answer to generally relaxing. It's in a specific moment, at a specific time, what is it that you want to do? And with those specifics, then we can bring to bear the tools of behavioral science, and we can bring the bear the tools that often people can solve the problem themselves. I find the first challenge, and the most important thing, is how we attack the problem. It's not actually the tricks and techniques of behavioral science that matter so much. It's the approach we use, thinking about the specific moment.

moment, thinking about all the ways that we might struggle, even if we want to do something. That's what I find to be so powerful in my own life and in my research. Excellent. Typically, I end these interviews by saying, hey, how can people find you if they want to learn more about you? But I also want to add to that, if a person wanted to learn more about bridging the intention action gap, what resources would you recommend? We have a variety of new research papers that touch on various of these challenges,

and specifically to finance. and people can find it at morningstar.com slash company slash investor dash success. So this is our research specifically on financial behavior. And for example, we have a paper on the social comparisons on how for some people really comparing themselves up to others and they make themselves unhappy. And what you can do about that, how you can be both happy in the present and save what you need for the future. We have papers, the fee paper I mentioned. We have a paper on what's most impactful as one saves for retirement or saves for long-term expenses. We've got a paper on that, et cetera.

And as we come out with new ones, you'll also find it on this site. If people were interested in looking for this research, I would first check on the website or LinkedIn. I say Wendell on Twitter and LinkedIn and often engage with people there. I have a book about how you design products, software products, with this in mind called Designing for Behavior Change. those are some resources that one can draw from. Thank you, Stephen, for spending this time with us. What are some of the key takeaways from this conversation? Well, here are six.

Number one, many people often feel as though you first need to identify the problem before you find the solution. But Stephen turns this conventional wisdom on its head. First, we have to figure out what the obstacle is that's stopping us. This doesn't come necessarily from self-reflection. This can come from just trying different things. So let's say you want to save more for the future, but you just don't quite do it. So one way is to say, okay, maybe it's a problem of inattention.

Let me set some reminders that at the end of each month, I'm going to do it. For some people that I work, for some people who won't. For others, wow, maybe it's, you know, when I think about saving for the future, it just doesn't seem real, right? It's too far away. I'm just focused on the present. Well, in that case, we've got a set of great tools that can help people think more about the future, right? Right. For other people, it might be, well, I just don't know how.

I know that savings alone isn't enough. I need to go invest, but wow, in order to invest, I need to go spend all this time researching, what are the right funds, etc. That's a self-efficacy or an ability problem. And we have a set of tools that can help people overcome that. Here he makes the point that in order to figure out the obstacle, you could try solving it, and by virtue of solving it, you will know what the obstacle is. The idea is that you don't know what you don't know, and perhaps you can't get through to the answer by pontificating alone. Perhaps the solution is retrospective. Try different tactics and see if something works.

And if the answer is yes, it works, then the solution identifies the problem, treatment first, then diagnosis, in a sense. And so, for the remainder of the interview, we cycle through a wide range of possible solutions, possible tactics that you can use in order to help bridge that gap between knowing and doing. Regardless of whether the problem is a lack of confidence or some deep-rooted fear or anxiety, regardless of what is underlying the problem, let's try some of these solutions. So let's go over five of the many solutions that we talked about in today's episode. Number one, in no particular order, is that one of the most effective strategies for bridging that gap between knowing what you should do and then actually doing it is automation. If there's a general role in behavioral science is that these challenges that we face, they're part of how our minds are wired. And they're not going away. They're part of our humanity.

So one of the way out of these problems is to avoid our humanity. So, for example, if we're really bad at planning, say, yeah, when I get my tax refund, I think I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to save it all. Yeah, of course, that's what I'm going to do. That would be an example of not being able to forecast your own future behavior. Right. Well, one of the things you can do is pre-commit that. Set up a transfer from your checking account or wherever the tax refund is going to come into and have it automatically withdraw the money on the day or, let's be. Let's give yourself a little fuzz a few days after when the money is going to hit.

And you know that thing's going to go in. And that way you've already locked in your intention. Automation is effective because it saves you from yourself. Automation is one of the tactics that we talked about. Another tactic is to create mental accounts by which we refer to the process of earmarking dollars for specific purposes. This is a great example of how we can use the funny ways that our minds are wired. to our advantage. Mental accounting is this.

Theoretically, money is fungible. A dollar for one purpose is the same for another purpose. But in our minds it isn't. In our minds, we often tag money for a particular purpose. I have kids. So I have money set aside for my kids' education. And it would feel really, really wrong to take that money and buy a really cool scooter, which I know I want.

I would love to have a scooter. But that would just feel wrong. But however, if I got a bonus, that money, it doesn't have a specific purpose yet. I'd feel perfectly okay using that for a scooter. The benefit of creating these mental accounts is that every dollar has a purpose. Every dollar has a job or has meaning ascribe to it. And ultimately, that is mentally the way that we handle money. I mean, we give meaning to money.

We ascribe meaning to money. And I mean that in every sense of the word, both in terms of the jobs that we give to our dollars, as well as the status symbols that we as as ascribed to meaning. I mean, money is essentially a tool that allows us to survive, but layered on top of that are all of these layers of emotional and psychological meaning and symbolic meaning that we give to it. And so given that the natural tendency is to ascribe meaning to money, why not use that natural tendency to our advantage? At the end of the end of the end of the fact that, we're not, of the day, a dollar is a dollar is a dollar. If your net worth is X, then your net worth is

X and you have that entire bucket to deploy in whichever way you choose. But the reality of humanity is that if we have already mentally earmarked a particular batch of those dollars for your child's college or for retirement or for an emergency fund, we are less likely to use that money at high-end sushi restaurants. After all, that's our emergency fund. So, That is tactic number two that we talked about creating mental accounts. Now, tactic number three is the use of vivid imagining. I'm one of the people for whom, look, I work in behavioral finance, right? I study this stuff, but my mind is just wired to not plan too far ahead financially.

So I always, we have this, we have a questionnaire, for example, that we give people, how far in the future do you tend to plan for your finances? and your listeners are probably going to be on the way end of, I'm planning 10 years, I'm planning 20, 30 years ahead. I'm good if I'm like 10 weeks ahead, to be honest. But there's a technique that research reviews, and I use myself, which is to make that future plan more real. And it goes like this.

When you're retired or whatever this date is that you're trying to plan for, what are you doing then? Pick a day. Let's say Thursday, October 27th of this particular year. that you're planning for. What's your house look like? No, no, no. What does your kitchen look like?

What are the pots? What do you see outside in the window? What are you doing at noon? Okay. After you're done with that, what do you do next? As Stephen talks about, fight vivid with vivid. The brain is naturally inclined to respond to stimuli that is vivid.

So, given the fact that the present moment is quite vivid because we're living in it, We can address that by fighting vivid with vivid and making the future, if not as vivid as the present, at least vivid enough that it may inspire action. A fourth tactic that we talked about is to project yourself into the future and then look back in hindsight. This is a practice that is referred to as prospective hindsight. perspective hindsight is a technique where you imagine a future point and you have yourself look back. What did you really enjoy? What did you regret? So it's a matter of getting out of the current moment and seeing what really matters to you. So I actually did this exercise in my own retirement planning. I wrote it all out and said, okay, so I'm 30 years out. if things go really well for me, what will I be happy about? If things go really poorly, what will I be sad about?

What will I be happy about, right? Well, we'll be the mix of that picture and what will I really regret? And oddly, never in that picture did it come down as, wow, I wish that I'd spend another five hours each night in the office. That wasn't one of them. But, oh, I wish that I'd spent more time with my family. I wish that I had, I wish I had accomplished. this big thing at work, sure, that's important. I wish that I'd made this contribution in my research. That can be important. It's not about not work. It's just sorting out what parts of your life, what parts of your work, what parts of your

family, like really matter. If you make decisions by asking yourself, what will future me regret not having done now, or conversely, what will future me regret having done now, you can use the benefit of hindsight to make decisions about what to do in the moment. To an extent, this is kind of where FOMO comes from, right? Like the fear of missing out is the fear of what if 20 years from now I look back on today and it turns out that I missed out on all of this stuff. And that FOMO, sure, it can apply to partying. It can apply to travel, but it can also apply to not saving enough for retirement and therefore not having enough. It can apply to the way that you treated your health because you are currently 20 years younger than you will be 20 years from now. Assuming that you survive through the next two decades, that statement is true no matter how old you are. And sure, there are some regrets that we can never anticipate because we don't know what our priorities will be in the future. Maybe 20 years from now you'll really regret not having learned how to scuba dive or not having learned how to juggle.

Because 20 years from now you'll be in a position in your life where juggling is really important. I don't know. I mean, anything is possible. We don't know what we're going to value in a couple of decades. Maybe you'll regret that you didn't start learning Japanese at this age, whatever age it is that you are right now. Any of that is true. And there's no way that we can reasonably predict that. But we can reasonably predict regrets that we may have around not taking care of our future self.

And I think that is the message of prospective hindsight. Care for your future self. Honor this person as an individual. and view part of your job right now as taking care, being the caregiver of this future version of you. So that is another possible tactic. Now, Stephen and I also talked about the create acronym, but because we talked about that fairly recently, we talked about that in the tail end of our conversation. I'm not going to go back through that.

But to summarize that tactic, that essentially involved recognizing cues and responding to them, and that applies both to habit formation as well as to one-offs. But the final tactic that I do want to cover is, well, a bit of a counterintuitive tactic, actually, because it does not require you to do more. In fact, it asks you to maybe embrace a little bit of less. For somebody who's an expert in the field, it might seem perfectly reasonable and obvious.

Yeah, okay, great. So you go to this calculator, you figure out what your long-term medical expenses are going to be, you figure out your chance of taking care of your family, you figure out whether Social Security is going to be there, and you factor in that probability. And then you do this over time, and you take an inflation,

and what the stock market is going to do. Right? So the expert in the field is like, oh, yeah, this is obvious. You just go do that. For everybody else, it is like flying an airplane with no training. We don't do those things. And so how do we get over that lack of self-confidence

and see that it's in fact not actually that complex. And those are the operative words. You'll see that it's not actually that complex, which means that the final tactic and perhaps the final takeaway to all of this is to simplify. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Approach your finances in a way that is simple, manageable, actionable, and good enough. And then leave good enough alone. Those are some of the key takeaways that we got from this conversation with Dr. Stephen Wendell, who is the head of behavioral science at Morningstar.

You can read the show notes at Affordanithing.com slash episode 141. That's episode 141. By the way, we have decided to start uploading these interviews to YouTube. For a while, we were uploading a lot of our podcast content to YouTube, and then later we decided to stop doing that. And we've noticed that of the archived material that was on our YouTube channel, the interviews with guests were still getting a lot of views of the stuff that we uploaded to YouTube, the Ask Paul episodes, not so much, but the interviews with guests, totally. So we are going back to uploading audio versions of these interviews, these podcast episodes,

to YouTube. So if you or somebody that you know prefers to listen to audio via YouTube or via YouTube read, you can now start listening to guest interviews on our YouTube channel again. And that is available at YouTube.com slash afford anything. That's our show for today. Thank you so much for tuning in coming up on future episodes of the Afford Anything podcast. Well, I make a rule to not announce the names of guests before I actually record the interview because that has come back to bite me in the past. But what I will tell you, even though this is kind of far off, is that Laura Vandercam,

a time management expert is going to be joining us in August. And I can tell you this because I just recorded the interview earlier today. She'll be joining us in an episode that we're going to air in August to talk about how to improve your relationship with time and get a better sense of time abundance. So that is coming up in the future. Also, of course, every other week I answer questions that come from you, the audience. And if you have a question, head to Afford Anything.com slash questions where you can leave a voicemail with whatever is on your mind.

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So we have 616 ratings. Thank you so much to everybody who left us a rating. I appreciate it so much. and I'm going to read a couple of the most recent ones. So Golabi 14 said, I'm so glad I came across this podcast in my search for podcasts on financial independence. Paula is entertaining, offers real talk about finance, brings in compelling guests, and I leave every podcast with at least one aha and action item. Thank you. And Jennifer E.D. says, I started listening to the podcast about over a year ago. I really enjoy the guests and advice. Recently, I listened to the episode about the firefighter and authenticity. Amazing.

Thank you. And then Black Lumet says, it's 2 a.m. and I can't stop listening. I absolutely love this podcast. I've never heard anyone twirl this deeply into all things money and life. It's 2 a.m. and I cannot stop listening. I can't afford to lose any beauty sleep. But what the heck? This is great stuff. I'm semi-retired. But I still have a lot to learn from this. Paula, thank you. And your voice is lovely, by the way. Thank you. Awesome. So thank you so much. Please, if you have not left a review yet, please do so. And while you're there, upvote any other reviews that you find helpful. Finally, the third thing that I would love to ask you to do is just share this with your family and friends. Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Paula Pant. You can follow me on Instagram at Paula P-A-U-L-A-N-T. I appreciate you. I appreciate it. All of you, thank you so much for being part of the Afford Anything community, and I'll catch you next week.