The Psychology of Sales, Discounts and Deals [GREATEST HITS VAULT]

Afford Anything

Paula Pant | Cumulus Podcast Network

Investing, Business, Entrepreneurship

4.6 • 3.4K Ratings

🗓️ 28 November 2025

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

#664: Have any of these thoughts ever crossed your mind? If I had more willpower, I’d achieve my financial goals. I’m doomed to fail with money. Budgets suck. They only show me what I did wrong and make me feel horrible. If so, you’re not alone. It’s not that you lack willpower. It’s not that you’re doomed to fail with money. It’s not that you’re a horrible person for blowing your budget. It’s that you’re human. And humans make emotional decisions all the time. Decisions that often defy logic. But making emotional decisions doesn’t have to be a financial death sentence. Money management is a skill, which means we can improve. When we understand the “why” behind our decisions, coupled with the marketing tactics that retailers use, we can guard ourselves against cognitive biases and sales strategies. That’s what today’s guest is here to discuss. Jeff Kreisler, co-author of Dollars and Sense and Editor-in-Chief of PeopleScience.com, joins us to talk about common money mistakes people make and how to avoid them. Jeff attended Princeton University and practiced as a lawyer before he became an author and a speaker. He co-authored Dollars and Sense with Dr. Dan Ariely, a bestselling book that explores behavioral economics and asks why we make faulty financial decisions. In this interview, Jeff names five common money mistakes and offers four solutions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The easy example is sale prices. You would buy a shirt that was $100, but it's marked down to $60
0:06.5	more frequently than you would just buy a $60 shirt because you have that easy comparison.
0:11.8	You have that easy, good feeling of saying, oh, I'm saving $40.
0:15.7	Today is Black Friday, so it's a perfect day to replay an episode from the greatest hits vault on the psychology
0:22.2	of discounts, deals, and sales. Because right now, millions of people, including me, are shopping
0:29.1	discounts. We're bargain hunting. But there's a whole science behind why we feel compelled to shop
0:34.4	during sales events. So in today's episode, which originally aired in January
0:39.3	2020, I chat with behavioral economist Jeff Chrysler about how to make smarter financial decisions.
0:45.4	Enjoy and happy Black Friday Cyber Monday. You can afford anything, just not everything. Every
0:50.5	decision that you make is a trade-off against something else, and that doesn't just apply to your
0:53.9	money. That applies to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention, anything in your life that's a scarce or limited resource. And that leads to two questions. Number one, what matters most to you? And number two, how do you align your day-to-day decisions in a way that reflects that? Answering these two questions is a lifetime practice, and that is what this podcast is here to explore.
1:13.0	My name is Paula Pant.
1:14.1	I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast, and today, Jeff Chrysler joins us to talk about how to stop making so many money mistakes.
1:24.0	Jeff is the editor-in-chief of PeopleScience.com, a website that explores the ways in which we trip ourselves up when it comes to how we handle money.
1:32.2	He's also the co-author of the book Dollars and Sense, along with Dan Ariely.
1:36.6	Both his website and his book explore how and why we often get in our own way.
1:41.1	We often are our own worst enemies when it comes to how we misthink money
1:45.5	and spend in ways that often don't make sense. Jeff attended Princeton and used to be a lawyer
1:51.7	before switching gears to become an author and speaker. We're going to spend the first half of today's
1:56.6	conversation talking about the ways in which we trip ourselves up and we'll spend the second
2:01.4	half of the conversation talking about how we can save ourselves from ourselves.
2:06.3	Here he is, Jeff Christley.
	...

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