Are you disinterested, bored and frustrated when it comes to paying bills, balancing your checkbook and reviewing credit card statements? Do you feel like the day-in, day-out basics of 
money management are chores to be avoided? If so, you’re not alone. You’re human!
According to behavioral economists, many assumptions about how we should manage money come from an unrealistic view of human nature. Instead of being rational automatons guided by pure logic and objective reasoning, we’re influenced by emotion, personal preferences and social cues. Traditional approaches to personal finance make cents from the dollar perspective but not a lot of sense from the human perspective.
For my fellow Star Trek® fans out there, traditional finance is for Mr. Spock—the personification of logic in the original series—as opposed to Captain Kirk, who was often influenced by the illogical, emotional and unscientific.
For Real People
Like Kirk, we’re emotional, thoughtful, social human beings who act in complex ways while attempting to balance feelings and reason. Obviously personal finance can’t be all about
numbers and facts. If there were a financial fitness program that worked for people instead of robots, what would it do?
Inspire us: We need inspiring goals and the motivation to achieve them. Traditional methods involve budgets, scrimping, controlling our spending and denying ourselves. For example, we get a sense of failure and guilt if we don’t meet our goal of spending less in restaurants. Humans do better with a positive focus. We’re motivated by goals that mean something to us, like, “If I spend less on eating out, I’ll be able to save more money faster for my trip to New Zealand.”
Improve us: An effective program will tell us how we’re doing with our goals. We need to see progress and mastery because of our drive to grow and learn. The best feedback is positive and corrective, bolstering our confidence and showing us what to do differently.
Negative feedback tears us down, and vague feedback doesn’t tell us what we’re doing wrong, or how to improve. For example, feedback on retirement savings is characteristically poor. Most people know they should build a nest egg. However, “How much do I need and when?” and “How am I doing so far?” are usually unknowns.
Inform us: A human approach to personal finance would provide the information we need without overloading us. Technology gives average people more knowledge at their fingertips than Captain Kirk, but we can only process limited amounts of information. Excess data and choices tend to degrade rather than improve the quality of our decisions. Some Web and mobile apps automatically compile and categorize your spending, and some even track your investments so you can watch them react to market gyrations all day. This can potentially amount to noise rather than information, evoking feelings (fear, greed, guilt, pleasure and so on) but distracting us from real goals.
Connect us: A financial fitness program shouldn’t isolate us. Personal finance is often a solitary pursuit, but because we’re social by nature we want to connect with other people. Today’s wildfire spread of social media demonstrates this. Though talking about your money with others is often viewed as taboo or rude, common sense and research tell us that others can help us commit to and stick with goals—and achieve them—whether they’re financial or not. People can also be role models for success.
Entertain us: To make a difference, personal finance ought to be fun. Psychologists who study motivation recognize how play has power to engage us. There’s even a recent trend
toward “gamification,” which is applying game mechanics to non-game tasks so they’re more enjoyable and interesting. There are already money games to teach kids how to manage finances. Why can’t adults learn personal finance the fun way instead of the hard way?
Beyond our Galaxy
People are catching on to the idea that they don’t have to think like Spock to manage money successfully. In fact, our goal at Moneymentals is to provide a personal finance program for humans! If you’d like information about how to participate, please let us know.
Mr. Spock was consistently sensible and efficient—commendable traits. However, with his very human qualities and struggles, Captain Kirk became the inspiring hero who took us “where no man has gone before.” The conventional way of handling personal finance has brought us a sensible distance, but a more human approach can help everyone “live long and prosper”!