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Afford Anything

Jean Chatzky: The 50% Off Fallacy & Other Ways You're Sabotaging Your Savings [GREATEST HITS]

Afford Anything

Paula Pant | Cumulus Podcast Network

Entrepreneurship, Business, Investing

4.63.4K Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2024

⏱️ 31 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today’s guest is Jean Chatzky, financial editor for the TODAY Show, host of the HerMoney podcast and a frequent guest on TV shows like Oprah, Regis & Kelly, and The View. We discuss six money rules to guide your spending, including: #1: The more time you spend looking, the less happy you’ll be with what you find. #2: Your retirement trumps their tuition. #3: Losing money hurts more than it should. #4: Big numbers make smart people do stupid things. #5: Don’t lend money to friends & relatives, and don’t co-sign for loans. #6: If it's 50% off, it’s still 50% on. This leads us into discussing tactics to prevent wasteful spending, such as: -- The 10/10/10 Rule: How will you feel about this purchase in 10 minutes? 10 months? 10 years? -- The 24 Hour Rule: Delay the purchase by 24 hours. Do you still want it? -- Only Pay Full Price: Paradoxically, avoiding sales – and ONLY buying items at full price – might help you save more money in the long run. Finally, we chat about how to balance financial priorities when you and your spouse want different things. What if you want to retire early, but your spouse doesn’t? How do you handle this? Jean shares her ideas on these topics in this episode, which we originally recorded and aired in 2016. We're sharing this as part of GREATEST HITS WEEK, a 5-day series in which we're sharing 5 episodes, across 5 days, that we produced during the earliest years of the Afford Anything podcast. You may have missed it then; enjoy it now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome. Next week we are airing episode 500. That episode is going to air on April 24th,

0:06.1

424. In honor of our celebration of 500 episodes, this week we are running a special five-day series. Each day this week we look back on the earliest days of the Afford Anything podcast and

0:20.0

rerun some of our favorite early days episodes, our greatest hits.

0:25.0

So five days, five episodes in honor of episode 500.

0:30.0

Today is day one of five.

0:32.0

We look back on an interview that I did with the former financial editor of the Today Show.

0:37.0

Jean Chatsky.

0:38.0

Jean is the author of many best-selling books about personal finance. In addition to her work on the Today Show,

0:45.2

she is a frequent personal finance commentator on shows like Oprah, Regis and Kelly, and The View.

0:52.1

In this interview, which originally aired in 2016, she shares timeless,

0:57.4

classic foundational principles of personal finance, which are as true today

1:02.2

as they were back then. Enjoy.

1:04.0

It's great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for coming on.

1:10.3

Oh, it's my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

1:12.4

Gene, I'd like to chat with you about some of the on The ones that I really enjoyed is this is on the section about shopping. The more time you spend looking the less happy you'll be with what you find. Can you talk about that a little?

1:29.0

Sure, so this rule actually comes from some research done by Barry Schwartz who's a professor at

1:37.5

Swarthmore College.

1:39.2

He talks about maximizers and satisficers and satisficers and those are his words but essentially when you go out and

1:47.5

you spend an inordinate amount of time searching for something whether that thing is a job or new tile for your bathroom or the perfect color for your walls.

2:02.0

And you can tell that I've been looking at painting the

2:05.8

interior of my house because this is where my examples are going these days

2:09.3

but if you spend so much time focused on getting perfection, you are, the research shows a lot less

...

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