Clueless, No Cushion, Not Enough Self-Control: Challenges In Managing Personal Finances

On Friday, PBS Newshour aired a fascinating piece called “‘Sesame Street’ Tells You How to Get to Sunnier Days Financially.” The title is quite deceptive given the valuable and revealing information and research described in this piece. Newshour provides background by citing some earlier studies on the limited financial education of Americans, our extremely low rate of retirement savings, and the financial destruction that can be caused by a lack of self-control, a characteristic that seems to fundamentally drive and determine our future financial success. While we wring our hands about the way our governments handle finances, an on-going crisis in personal finances seems ready to undermine our future economic health.

CLUELESS

“Americans 50 or older were asked, suppose you had $100 in a savings account, and the interest rate was 2 percent per year. After five years, would you have more than $102, exactly $102, or less than $102? Two percent interest, five years. What portion of the country didn’t know that more was the blindingly right answer? Half.”

NO CUSHION

• 29% of Americans save no money for retirement
• More than a third of Americans have $1,000 or less in total savings

NOT ENOUGH SELF-CONTROL
An ongoing study of 1,000 random New Zealanders from birth to now their 30s – the 1,000 most studied people in the world – has demonstrated “…their self-control, or lack of it, by age 3, has almost perfectly predicted their future prosperity.” In fact:

“Self-control is clearly more important than the socioeconomic status of one’s family, the amount of money that one had growing up, and it’s more important than school grades, academic achievement, and it’s more important than scores on intelligence tests…

…the children who are of very little self-control are in deep financial trouble by their 30s. Those who are very high self-control are doing really well. They’re entrepreneurs. They have got retirement accounts. They own their own homes. And those who are average self-control are right in the middle.”

Dan Ariely, a professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics and author of “The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home,” demonstrates the difficulty of exercising self-control in his own children. His 8-year old son is willing to do homework now in exchange for watching two television shows later, rather than one show now and homework later. His younger child SAYS she prefers to play for twenty minutes over ten minutes of play, but she is unwilling to earn the extra time by going to clean her room right now.

Given the most important patterns of self-control appear to be set by age three, it is not clear to me whether we can hope to modify this behavior…or how. In the Sesame Street episode, Elmo seems to get it. But after saving his money to buy a “stupendous ball,” Elmo gives up one his critical dollars to feed the voracious and insistent appetite of cookie monster. It seems we have a long road ahead, a road that only gets more challenging in the future. As Ariely puts it:

“There’s really kind of a very strong imbalance about how much we can tempt people and how much people can actually resist temptation…as technology develops, what is technology going to do? Technology is going to help them delay gratification or have more things to spend their money on now?”