Jumia Books The Art of Spending Money - Simple Choices for a Richer Life Brand By Morgan Housel (New Book 2025 October)

The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life Brand New Book By Morgan Housel (2026)

All Behavior Makes Sense with Enough Information

Most debates about what's worth spending money on are actually just people with different life experiences talking over each other.

An important question I love is: What have you experienced that I haven't that makes you believe what you do? And would I believe the same if I experienced what you have?

It applies to so many things in life. Including money.

The most important topic in spending money, one that's the cause of so much financial frustration and disappointment, is that there is no "right" way to do it. There are no universal laws of what kind of spending will make everyone happy and fulfilled.

What I like spending money on might make no sense to you. My fears might be your joys. Your goal might be the thing I most want to avoid.

There's a saying: Never make fun of someone for mispronouncing a word, because it means they learned it from reading. As a corollary: Never make fun of how someone spends their money, because they learned it from living.

Everyone is a product of their own unique past. To understand why people spend the way they do, you have to dig deep into their life experiences.

My brother-in-law is a social worker. He works with kids from the lowest levels of abject poverty and broken homes who are pushed in and out of the foster system.

A lot of these kids struggle at school. Their behavior is poor. They skip class. They don't pay attention. They get into fights on the playground. They can't focus on the future.

It is easy for people to not only criticize these kids' behavior but shake their head in confusion.

"Why are you acting this way?" "Why can't you understand that if you behave better, you'll have a better future?" "How could you possibly think that's an OK thing to do?"

But there's a saying inside the foster care system: All behavior makes sense with enough information.

Once you understand what some of these kids have dealt with at home-the uncertainty, the lack of security, love, and attention-their behavior begins to make sense. They're in constant survival mode and never learned some of the basic social skills other kids take for granted.

You don't want to encourage or even justify their behavior. But once you see the world through their eyes, you quickly understand why someone would make decisions that seem foreign to you and me.

All behavior makes sense with enough information-including behavior about the different ways we spend our money.

By the late 1920s, America was at the tail end of a full social and economic cycle. The devastation of World War I was followed by a crippling recession. And then, after a decade of misery-finally-people got to relish an economic boom that gave name to the Roaring ‘20s.

Roaring doesn't do it justice-it was an absolute party. For a good five years in the mid 1920s the economy was fueled by cheap debt, a stock market bubble, and bootlegged liquor.

In June of 1928, syndicated columnist Robert Quillen wrote a newspaper headline that in fourteen words describes something so simple and important:

That's it. So much of the late-1920s desire to show off wealth with new cars, new clothes, new toys, was driven by a reaction to the poverty and uncertainty that preceded it.