Hat tip to Jen Wu, who let me know about this excellent one-hour documentary from Maryland Public Television titled:   “Thinking Money: The Psychology Behind Our Best and Worst Financial Decisions,”

Here is a description:

Host Dave Coyne leads the audience through an exploration of what behavioral economics has to tell us about how and why we spend, save (or don’t) and think about money.  We travel the country meeting some of the innovative thinkers who mix economics with psychology. Their experiments and insights into our financial behavior will enlighten and often amuse us as we learn to recognize how both our brains and the marketplace can trick us into spending money we shouldn’t.

Coyne is a wisecracking everyman who stands in for us as we are intrigued and excited by a whole raft of techniques, apps, websites and ways of thinking that help us to save for the types of things that make our lives more secure: emergency funds, our kids’ education, and ultimately our comfortable retirements. He will see a horizontal winetasting in California that makes us re-think how we look at price tags, and will get to meet the person whose retirement he is saving for: an age-morphed version of himself in a Stanford virtual reality lab. A mix of fascinating theory and practical takeaways, Thinking Money is designed to decrease the stress and increase the bandwidth in our lives.

About the Author

Tim Ranzetta

Tim's saving habits started at seven when a neighbor with a broken hip gave him a dog walking job. Her recovery, which took almost a year, resulted in Tim getting to know the bank tellers quite well (and accumulating a savings account balance of over $300!). His recent entrepreneurial adventures have included driving a shredding truck, analyzing executive compensation packages for Fortune 500 companies and helping families make better college financing decisions. After volunteering in 2010 to create and teach a personal finance program at Eastside College Prep in East Palo Alto, Tim saw firsthand the impact of an engaging and activity-based curriculum, which inspired him to start a new non-profit, Next Gen Personal Finance.

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