Talks to Watch

RR #128 - Morgan Housel: The Psychology of Money

35K views · Dec 10, 2020 · 54:17 · 1 HN recommender · 4 mentions · discussed 2021–2025

Rational Reminder podcast episode with Morgan Housel, author of The Psychology of Money. They discuss how investing success depends more on behavior than knowledge, the role of luck and the dangers of emulating top investors.

Why Hacker News points people here: HN points to it as an interview with Housel and as the source of his quote that financial decisions happen at the dinner table, not on a spreadsheet.

“Interview with the author”HN comment, 2021

What Hacker News said 4

Recommendsthrow0101aOct 2021

“Interview with the author”

Interview with Morgan Housel on money as a tool

Full comment

Besides learning about "investing", I would also recommend you take a step back and look at your relationship with money generally. I recommend The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel as a good start: > Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. How to manage money, invest it, and make business decisions are typically considered to involve a lot of mathematical calculations, where data and formulae tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world, people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together. In the psychology of money, the author shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important matters. * link Money is a 'tool' that you should use in your life to accomplish particular goals. Interview with the author: * this video * link Another good book on "non-financial investing": > From why we should place more value on social and human capital, we look into why financial planning has a profound impact on how you manage your investments. We touch on direct indexing, the relationship between money and happiness, and the unexpected yet incredible pers

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Cites itthrow0101dMay 2024

“people don't make financial decisions on a spreadsheet.”

Source of Housel's quote on paying down his mortgage

Full comment

The author of the article, Morgan Housel, is also the author of the book The Psychology of Money . This thoughts on, e.g., paying down his mortgage: > It just increased our independence, even if it made no sense on paper. So that's another element of debt that I think goes misunderstood. And a lot of that for both of those points is this idea that people don't make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They don't make them in Excel. They make financial decisions at the dinner table. That's where they're talking about their goals and their own different personalities and their own unique fears and their own unique skills and whatnot. So that's why I kind of push people to say like, it's okay to make financial decisions that don't make any sense on paper if they work for you, if they check the boxes of your psychology and your goals that makes sense for you. And for me, extreme aversion, what looks like an irrational aversion today, and I would say is an irrational aversion to debt, is what works for me and what makes me happy, so that's why I've done it. * link * this video

Cites itthrow0101dMay 2024

“The author on paying down his mortgage”

Source of Housel's quote on paying down his mortgage

Full comment

> I have a 30 year mortgage on my house with a 2.75% interest rate. The author on paying down his mortgage: > It just increased our independence, even if it made no sense on paper. So that's another element of debt that I think goes misunderstood. And a lot of that for both of those points is this idea that people don't make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They don't make them in Excel. They make financial decisions at the dinner table. That's where they're talking about their goals and their own different personalities and their own unique fears and their own unique skills and whatnot. So that's why I kind of push people to say like, it's okay to make financial decisions that don't make any sense on paper if they work for you, if they check the boxes of your psychology and your goals that makes sense for you. And for me, extreme aversion, what looks like an irrational aversion today, and I would say is an irrational aversion to debt, is what works for me and what makes me happy, so that's why I've done it. * link * this video

Cites itthrow0101cOct 2025

“But I like to bring up what Morgan Housel, author of the book The Psychology of Money , said on paying down his mortgage”

Source of Housel's quote on paying off a mortgage

Full comment

I participate in a personal finance sub-reddit, and there is often a question of whether someone should pay off their mortgage (completely, or make some lump sum payments). The mathematical answer is that if your interest rate is lower than the expected returns of some kind of portfolio you have, than you'll make more money investing. But I like to bring up what Morgan Housel, author of the book The Psychology of Money , said on paying down his mortgage: > It just increased our independence, even if it made no sense on paper. So that's another element of debt that I think goes misunderstood. And a lot of that for both of those points is this idea that people don't make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They don't make them in Excel. They make financial decisions at the dinner table. That's where they're talking about their goals and their own different personalities and their own unique fears and their own unique skills and whatnot. So that's why I kind of push people to say like, it's okay to make financial decisions that don't make any sense on paper if they work for you, if they check the boxes of your psychology and your goals that makes sense for you. And for me, extreme aversion, what looks like an irrational aversion today, and I would say is an irrational aversion to debt, is what works for me and what makes me happy, so that's why I've done it. * link * this video