Ep. 234: Dr. Scott Rick — How Tightwads and Spendthrifts Can Build Better Spending Habits

My guest this week is Dr. Scott Rick, an associate professor of marketing and author of a great book called Tightwads and Spendthrifts: Navigating the Money Minefield in Real Relationships (affiliate link). 

Topics we discussed included:

• Why our relationship with money is often complicated, no matter how much we have
• Where our attitudes toward money and spending come from
• Mental and emotional tendencies that predispose a person to being a tightwad
• The tendency to act more like one’s parents as one moves through adulthood
• My own tightwad tendencies, on the tightwad-spendthrift scale
• The daily suffering that tightwads experience from not spending money
• The lack of distress that spendthrifts feel about spending money
• The tendency to unfairly criticize spendthrifts more than tightwads
• Spendthrifts shopping for things they might need
• The extent to which being a spendthrift or tightwad may be domain specific
• Possible generational or situational effects on spending attitudes and habits
• The experiences that tightwads often miss out on
• Feeling like we have more money when we’re willing to spend it
• The tendency to treat a raise and higher cost of living differently, especially for spendthrifts
• Shopping momentum and what-the-hell behavior among spendthrifts
• Why spendthrifts tend not to learn from their overspending
• Why spending regret tends to be different for material things vs. experiences
• Personality correlates of spendthrifts and tightwads
• Why tightwads and spendthrifts often wind up together in romantic relationships
• Whether it’s better for couples to have joint or separate bank accounts
• The degree of financial transparency that is ideal for couples

Scott Rick, PhD, is an associate professor of marketing at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

Scott received his PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon in 2007, and he then spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at Wharton.

His research focuses on understanding the emotional causes and consequences of consumer financial decision-making, with a particular interest in the behavior of tightwads and spendthrifts.

The overarching goal of his work is to understand when and why consumers behave differently than they should behave (defined by an economically rational benchmark, a happiness-maximizing benchmark, or by how people think they should behave), and to develop marketing and policy interventions to improve consumers’ decision making and well-being.

Find Scott online at his website where you can learn more about his work.