accounting

WHY SMART PEOPLE MAKE BIG MONEY MISTAKES is full of examples of decisions you might have to make. You get to choose an option, and then the authors tell you what you should have chosen. This is a great learning technique to bring home the lessons of this superb book. The authors point out several biases that most people have about money (such as it's okay to blow certain money, but not other money -- all money is really the same), themselves (people always overrate their abilities and get taken as a result), and circumstances (even people who got an A in statistics will usually misanalyze the risks they take). Since money is ultimately about math, a lot of your lifetime income and earning potential is lost in the process of following these biases. This book could make or save you a million dollars. You cannot afford not to read it. I was reminded of a parallel book on the same sorts of problems about bad thinking habits as they apply to work situations called "The 2,000 Percent Solution" which you should also read. If you use the lessons of both books, you will be enormously better off financially in your lifetime. It'll be like owning the casino, instead of losing money in it. Good luck!

I have a Ph.D. in economics and a bachelor's degree in psychology. I've always found the fields of behavioral economics and experimental economics rather fascinating and wished to know more about the results of their research. So when I was shopping for a retirement investment guide recently I saw this book in the personal finance section and purchased it as well.

As a primer on the basic findings of behavioral economics, this book is great -- interesting, well-explained, and much more fun to read than pouring through academic journals. It's quite interesting to see that how we make money decisions is based as much on psychological principles (namely loss aversion, sunk costs and framing of the gain or loss) as on a rational calculation of cost and benefits. Also explained somewhat here are money mistakes that people make not because of emotional tainting of financial decisions but simply because they draw incorrect conclusions from incomplete calculations, such as not correcting for inflation in the housing market, not calculating total interest payments over the terms of different loans, not realizing the power of compound interest.

While it's a great book to explain certain irrational behaviors of your own and to explain a few financial chestnuts such as ignoring the financial pages, this book is not really an investment guide and is thin on suggestions for changing irrational behavior (other than realizing what you are doing will make you less likely to repeat the same mistakes).

I would disagree with some reviewers who suggested that the book is insulting to their financial acumen. While it's true that there are people who have been able to 'beat the market', the authors merely report studies suggesting that most people who choose their own investments under-perform the market, and why this happens (framing of investment decisions, emotional investing, loss aversion, sunk costs, etc.). I think that's important information to have as an investor. If you choose your own investments, you will make smarter decisions by understanding understanding this research.

Belsky does a very good job introducing many of the crazy things people do with their money, a good beginning to explain why markets are not efficient and an important fact to understand.