Level 3 of 5
Psychology
How your mind helps and hurts your money. Behavioural biases, mental models, and building better money habits.
What this level covers
Loss aversion, mental accounting, present bias, overconfidence, framing and anchoring, herd behaviour, narrative economics, money scripts, anti-bias systems.
Written for any country: where a lesson depends on local rules for tax, accounts or benefits, it says what to check where you live. How lessons are written
Read left to right, then down.
You can know the math perfectly and still panic-sell at the bottom. Your brain runs two systems, and the fast one takes charge when money is on the line.
Loss aversion: a 1,000 euro loss tends to hurt roughly twice as much as an equal gain feels good. It helps explain panic-selling and holding on to losers.
Mental accounting: why a tax refund gets spent freely while salary gets guarded. Your brain files money into folders, and sometimes that costs you.
Present bias makes your future self feel like a stranger you owe nothing. That is why saving loses to spending now, and why willpower is the wrong fix.
Overconfidence: most people rate themselves above average, which cannot be true of most people at once. It makes us trade too much and underestimate every plan.
Saving 200 euros a month sounds modest; 72,000 euros over thirty years sounds huge. Same decision, new frame. How framing and anchoring steer your choices.
The urge to follow the crowd kept our ancestors alive. In markets, herd behaviour and FOMO build bubbles on the way up and crashes on the way down.
Narrative economics: every bubble runs on a plausible story, rising prices that seem to prove it, and four dangerous words. This time is different.
Money scripts are the beliefs about money you absorbed as a child from the adults around you. They can shape your decisions as much as any spreadsheet.
Knowing about your biases helps less than you'd hope. Why many people lean on automation, defaults and checklists rather than willpower to manage money.