Jean Chatzky: The 50% Off Fallacy & Other Ways You're Sabotaging Your Savings [GREATEST HITS WEEK]

Afford Anything

Today’s guest is Jean Chatzky, financial editor for the TODAY Show, host of the HerMoney podcast and a frequent guest on TV shows like Oprah, Regis & Kelly, and The View.

We discuss six money rules to guide your spending, including:

#1: The more time you spend looking, the less happy you’ll be with what you find.

#2: Your retirement trumps their tuition.

#3: Losing money hurts more than it should.

#4: Big numbers make smart people do stupid things.

#5: Don’t lend money to friends & relatives, and don’t co-sign for loans.

#6: If it's 50% off, it’s still 50% on.

This leads us into discussing tactics to prevent wasteful spending, such as:

-- The 10/10/10 Rule: How will you feel about this purchase in 10 minutes? 10 months? 10 years?

-- The 24 Hour Rule: Delay the purchase by 24 hours. Do you still want it?

-- Only Pay Full Price: Paradoxically, avoiding sales – and ONLY buying items at full price – might help you save more money in the long run.

Finally, we chat about how to balance financial priorities when you and your spouse want different things. What if you want to retire early, but your spouse doesn’t? How do you handle this?

Jean shares her ideas on these topics in this episode, which we originally recorded and aired in 2016.

We're sharing this as part of GREATEST HITS WEEK, a 5-day series in which we're sharing 5 episodes, across 5 days, that we produced during the earliest years of the Afford Anything podcast. You may have missed it then; enjoy it now.

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