The Psychology of Money

Most people assume the gap between where they are financially and where they want to be is a knowledge problem. They need to learn more about investing, or budgeting, or tax strategy. But the research points somewhere else. The people who build lasting financial security aren't necessarily the ones who know the most. They're the ones who make fewer behavioral mistakes over a long period of time. That's a different problem, and it requires a different kind of course. This course draws on the work of Morgan Housel, Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and behavioral finance researcher Brad Klontz to map out why money decisions go wrong and how to build habits that hold up. You'll start by examining your own beliefs about money, the ones formed in childhood and reinforced by everything around you, before those beliefs become invisible. Then you'll work through the specific cognitive and emotional biases that distort financial decisions: loss aversion, anchoring, overconfidence, herd behavior, hedonic adaptation. Not as abstract concepts, but as patterns you'll recognize in yourself. The course ends with a practical playbook: compounding, automation, pre-commitment, building slack into your plans, and defining what 'enough' actually means before hedonic adaptation moves the target on you. No financial product recommendations, no market predictions. Just a clear-eyed look at why people make the money decisions they do and a small set of moves that work because they account for how humans actually behave.