When you’re faced with a financial decision, like “Am I saving enough?” … or when to sell a stock, when to take social security, how aggressive to be when investing. … How do you decide?
These questions are deceptively complicated. It’s not enough to simply understand how your finances work; you also need to understand how your hard-wired behavior affects those decisions.
I’m Mark Riepe, head of the Schwab Center for Financial Research, and this is Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab.
The interplay between psychology and economics has fascinated me for 30 years—ever since I took a class called Behavioral Decision Making in graduate school. Back then this subject was a bit player in the field of economics, but times have changed.
Little did I know then that I would end up working for over 20 years at Charles Schwab & Company, where I’ve been able to view up-close how cognitive and emotional biases influence individual investors.
I’ve also had the good fortune to work with leaders in the field of behavioral finance, such as Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, on projects that help investors fight the biases that lead to bad decisions.
If you’ve listened to Schwab’s Choiceology podcast, you know that human beings are full of biases. We’re prone to confirmation bias, overconfidence, loss aversion, the sunk-cost fallacy and dozens of other psychological traps. And sometimes those traps can prevent you from making the best decisions.
On Financial Decoder we’ll take a look at how these behavioral biases affect specific financial decisions. My guests and I will give you practical tips and strategies designed to improve the way you make choices about your money.
The first episode arrives November 5th.
Find out more about the show at schwab.com/financialdecoder, or search for Financial Decoder wherever you get your podcasts.
For important disclosures, see the show notes and schwab.com/financialdecoder.