Richard Thaler Quotes

There's a popular image of people who don't save for the future as lacking in self-control. But the reason saving is so hard has less to do with self-control and more to do with a scarcity of attention.

If you can't pay for a thing, don't buy it. If you can't get paid for it, don't sell it. Do this, and you will have calm and drowsy nights, with all of the good business you have now and none of the bad. If you have time, don't wait for time.

Positive defaults align our short-term decisions with our long-term interests. And we don't always do that.

I actually was able to give up shopping in February '99.

Retirement savings is probably behavioral economists' greatest success story. It is a prototypical behavioral-economics problem because saving for retirement is cognitively hard - figuring out how much to save - and requires self-control.

Everyone's lost a lot of money on their 401k plans. I've heard some people calling them 201k plans. So it's even more important to get people to be saving more for retirement. Behavioral economics has helped us learn a lot about how to do that.

In money, and in life, you are very often your own worst enemy. You promise yourself you're going to diet, then eat not one or two French fries but a whole plate. You decide to really commit to saving for retirement, only to wind up with a new pair of shoes in your closet.

By definition, saving - for anything - requires us to not get things now so that we can get bigger ones later. That's hard. Our brains are hard wired to prefer the here and now.

A budget tells us what we can't afford, but it doesn't keep us from buying it.

My Mum brought me up to believe that if you look after the pennies then the pounds look after themselves, and I could never do it.

I don't know how to overcome this perception that I'm extravagant.

The first rule of personal finance is that it's not personal and it's not financial. It's about your ability to make ten changes and not get too depressed over it.

January is always a good month for behavioral economics: Few things illustrate self-control as vividly as New Year's resolutions. February is even better, though, because it lets us study why so many of those resolutions are broken.

Positive defaults protect you from yourself - and that helps you to make decisions in the moment that are better for your long-term interests.

I was upset about getting $40 haircuts, like, every month. That's a lot of money, and so, man, that's a lot of food. That's a waste. No more. So I'm, like, letting it go so I have more food. My budget's good for food now.

I'm not making millions here, and because I'm a Capricorn I save up. You have to save for winter.

I think about willpower almost never. I realize for myself, trying to be more disciplined is pretty nebulous and it's often a slippery target. For me, I've just thought about incentives.

There is a growing sentiment in America that regular saving should be ignored-that the government will take care of people and give them security when they get beyond a certain age or become old and unable to work, but it must be borne in mind that the people who earn and do save, take care of the government! Were it not for the thrifty and the willing workers, the government would be in a bad way.

The definition of investment is the deferring ofpresent consumption for future consumption. So, you dohave to be willing to defer. And there are a couple of tricks that you can use to save money. One of them is simply to pay yourself first.

You have to be courageous to not spend money, ... and we don't have many people who have that courage.

As people strengthened their willpower muscles in one part of their lives—in the gym, or a money management program—that strength spilled over into what they ate or how hard they worked. Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything.

Start saving your pennies now. People spend $300 on crazy things all the time, things like handbags. So work all year, scrape the money together, and come to my show. I’m worth it.

Postponing doing the really interesting things in life for later, when you don't have the energy.

To help [people] understand that what you shortcut today, cannot be made up tomorrow. So it's like, I'm not going to do anything today, and I'm going to do the wrong thing today and somehow tomorrow it will get a lot better."

Older people do a better job of managing their impulses, and so they're better able to put off putting off.