Mental accounting is a term that describes how people categorize and treat money differently based on their own mental or emotional factors. It means that people tend to view and handle money in separate compartments or accounts, rather than considering it as a single pool of funds. This can lead to biased or irrational financial decisions, such as overspending in one area while neglecting other important expenses.
Full definition
Having just read nearly an entire article
on mental accounting, you no doubt realize that each scenario has the same outcome: a loss of $ 10.
A caveat: Sometimes it can be helpful to perform
mental accounting tricks involving separate consideration of different pieces of your portfolio («buckets methods» of asset allocation, for instance).
I'd fallen prey to a cognitive bias
called mental accounting, which causes us to treat money differently depending on its source.
Just remember that these are
only mental accounting, and there's no need to use such tricks, especially if doing so would force you to take on unnecessary costs.
Given the tendency toward
terrible mental accounting, I assume that these two people actually lost money excluding price appreciation.
An investing example
of mental accounting is best illustrated by the hesitation to sell an investment that once had monstrous gains and now has a modest gain.
«Hard - earned» money consumers use to pay for staples, food, and restaurants is placed into a
different mental account that carries a higher value to consumers.
At an October 9 news conference at the University of Chicago, Thaler referenced
mental accounting in describing what he would do with the roughly $ 1.1 million award.
For that matter plastic money (credit cards) is the scariest exhibit of
mental accounting for messing up your personal finances.
At the heart of this is an issue known as
mental accounting bias, segmenting your assets and then treating them like they were somehow different from one another.
If you're part of the majority who actually spend incrementally more on rewards cards, under - estimating your actual spending and getting caught short by faulty
mental accounting when the due date comes around... well, there's your answer.
Rationally, the benefits of paying down debt greatly outweigh the advantages of
mental accounting money into categories where it is «supposed» to be spent.
Namely, they're both «found» money, which inflicts this interesting psychological effect on you known
as mental accounting.
Another bias is
mental accounting where an investor divides wealth into arbitrary categories and makes irrational decisions based on the category, such as a stock purchase or sale tied to an emotional attachment to the company.
Richard Thaler
introduced mental accounting in his 1999 paper «Mental Accounting Matters,» which appeared in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.
So mental accounting posits that you'd treat $ 100 from an ang bao very differently from $ 100 you've worked hard to earn.
By being aware of how we treat our money differently
through mental accounting — whether it's a job bonus, birthday money, or our weekly income — and by tying money to time, you get a more valuable, more personal idea of an item's true cost.
It
seems mental accounting (irrational behavior described in behavioral economics) is impacting consumers spending behavior.
Although mental accounting can distort your thinking process and lead you to make erroneous decisions, with proper awareness it can also be used for our benefit.
If I were to
summarise mental accounting in one sentence, it would be — Reimbursements send people on trips to the bank, and bonuses send people on trips to the Bahamas.
In my previous article
on mental accounting, I wrote about a version of this thinking that plagues investors: «money you can afford to lose.»
Here is an example of how Dustin Hoffman
used mental accounting when he was struggling to make a career in Hollywood.
The theoretical bases of this study are the principle of resource exchange, the principle
of mental accounting and prospect theory.
«We do tend to look at it as different money with
our mental accounting,» said financial psychologist Brad Klontz, co-author of «Mind Over Money.»
It's just a form of
mental accounting to assume that you'll be able to ignore short - term losses in individual bonds with the knowledge that the principle value will be there at maturity.
Our mental accounting leads us to a conclusion that may not be correct since we can rest assured that the billion dollar casinos are not built to give money away.
Common biases plaguing investors include: representative bias, cognitive dissonance, home country bias, familiarity bias, mood and optimism, overconfidence bias, endowment effects, status quo bias, reference point and anchoring, law of small numbers,
mental accounting, disposition effects, attachment bias, changing risk preference, media bias and internet information bias.
Then you can play
a mental accounting game.
If the costs outweigh the benefits, the extra costs incurred (inconvenience, time or even money) are held in a different
mental account than the one associated with the ticket transaction (Thaler, 1999).