The Art of Spending Money

The Morgan Housel Podcast

Morgan Housel

Business

4.9 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2023

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The first episode -- who knows where this will go?

There is a science to spending money – how to find a bargain, how to make a budget, things like that.

But there’s also an art to spending. A part that can’t be quantified and varies person to person.

In my book I called money “the greatest show on earth” because of its ability to reveal things about people’s character and values. How people invest their money tends to be hidden from view. But how they spend is far more visible, so what it shows about who you are can be even more insightful.

Everyone’s different, which is part of what makes this topic fascinating. There are no black-and-white rules.

But here are a few things I’ve noticed about the art of spending money.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey this is Morgan Housel, I'm the author of The Psychology of Money and I guess I have a podcast now.
0:08.0	I don't know how long this is going to last or whether this is the only one I'll do or if there'll be many more or how many I'll do but I've always wanted to do something like this and I'm just gonna give it a shot and see what happens so thanks for being a listener to the very first one.
0:22.0	I want to talk about the art of spending money.
0:26.1	It's a topic I've thought a lot about and I'm going to be writing a lot about in the future.
0:30.0	Let me start this with a little story I heard recently that I think was so fascinating.
0:35.2	It's about Jack Welch, who is the former CEO of General Electric.
0:38.7	He was a big iconic CEO back in the 80s and 90s. And back in the 1990s when he was kind of at his
0:44.5	heyday he had a heart attack and he almost died. It was a very serious heart attack
0:48.9	he made it through of course but many years later he was asked what was going through his mind when he was in the
0:54.9	ambulance on the way to the hospital in what easily could have been his last
0:58.6	moments alive on earth and his comment was what was going through his mind was, God damn it, I didn't spend enough money.
1:06.5	That's what was going through his mind in what could have been his last moments alive,
1:10.9	which is a fascinating thing and he was asked why that was the case.
1:14.5	Why would he possibly be thinking about the not spending enough money as like his life
1:18.9	might be flashing before his eyes?
1:20.3	And he said, quote, we are all products of our background he said I didn't have two
1:25.6	nickels to rub together when I was young so I've always been cheap and I've
1:29.7	always bought cheap wine and after the heart attack I swore to God that I would never buy a
1:35.1	bottle of wine for less than a hundred dollars. He said that was absolutely one of the
1:40.0	takeaways from that experience.
1:43.2	Which to me, it's just so fascinating that you have somebody who was in their 70s, who's
1:47.7	lived an amazing life, and as you're looking back on what may have been the last
	...

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