At some point in their lives, most people have thought about what they would do if they had a sudden positive change in their finances – maybe quit their job, travel the world, buy a house or pay off their mortgage. I certainly have played the game with my husband, dreaming about what we would do if we inherited or won a million dollars! Neither of these has happened and both are probably a LONGSHOT. If it does happen, boy, do I have plans for those dollars….
As featured in Bernews.com.
I think I speak for most people when I say that at some point in our life we put something on our credit card and didn’t pay it off in full, leading to a vicious circle of recurring payments and mounting interest on the balance! Most of us get “stung” once and learn the lesson of how to use a credit card sensibly, but unfortunately some of us don’t learn and we begin to develop an unhealthy relationship with our credit card.
One thing I have learned during the course of my eighteen years in the financial industry is that a person’s view on money is like a fingerprint; no two views are exactly the same. They may have 
similar values, they may invest using similar methods but everyone treats money slightly differently from the next person. The question to ask is “What is your Behavioral Finance?”
Here are some of the typical behavioral traits people exhibit when it comes to finances:
a] Mental Accounting
The majority of people prepare a monthly budget and allocate certain parts of their pay cheque to certain bills. This “preparation” is slightly different with mental accounting. Mental accounting is the tendency for people to designate particular money for a specific purpose, without consideration for the big picture in terms of practicality. For example, a person can split their money and treat each portion differently, depending on which “account” it’s in. So, money in a savings account is treated differently than money meant for debt repayment. That is, even if a savings account is paying 1% pa in interest and their car loan is costing 7.5% pa in interest, the money they allocate to each “pot” they deem as equal because each “pot” of money has been designated for a purpose.
