Finally, the explanation for why Americans aren’t saving enough: It’s not sexy. Now, spending: that’s sexy.

That’s one of the findings in Thinking Money: The Psychology Behind Our Best and Worst Financial Decisions, airing on public television stations beginning Thursday, Oct. 16; check local listings. It’s produced in association with the FINRA Investor Education Foundation (FINRA is the largest independent securities regulator in the U.S.).

In truth, the show is really about behavioral economics, but that’s not very sexy either.

So the program serves up key principles by interviewing experts from the likes of Princeton, Stanford and Yale  — as well as what we call in the journalism trade “real people” — to explain why our brains keep us from doing the right thing with our money and how to outsmart them. For instance, you’ll learn how to combat “the IKEA effect,” which makes you put more value on products you helped create than ones you don’t.

If this all still sounds a little wonky, it’s worth noting that the program has some pretty funny and weird experiments.

For instance, someone gets wine coursed through a vein while in an fMRI (a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine that measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow) to see how the brain reacts when it thinks the person is drinking a $90 bottle of pinot noir versus a $10 bottle. In another, the jokey host — comedian/actor Dave Coyne — wears Virtual Reality goggles to see what he’d look like “old.”

As Thinking Money’s producer and writer John Greco told me, the show offers ways “to fight your instinct to spend money now.”

Four lessons from the show:

1. Don’t let an overwhelming number of choices paralyze you from making smart investing decisions. In Thinking Money, the brilliant, blind Columbia University business professor Sheena Iyengar (author of The Art of Choosing) discusses her jam study. She let some people select among 24 flavors and others had a choice of six. They were more likely to buy a jam when given a smaller selection; choosing among 24 flavors was too confusing.

The jams, the show explains, are an excellent proxy for all those investment choices employees often have to pick through when deciding where to put their 401(k) money. As it turns out, the more 401(k) choices people have, the less likely they are to invest in the plan. “Iyengar found that so many people are so confused by their 401(k) choices that they invest in what they can understand, like money market funds. But those barely keep up with inflation,” said Greco.

2. A good “nudge” can help you achieve your financial goals — especially if the nudge has unpleasant consequences attached. “Behavioral economists like the nudge idea because they don’t have much faith in our ability to make the right decisions,” Walter Updegrave, of RealDealRetirement.com (and a Next Avenue contributor) noted at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW)/National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) Personal Finance Reporting Workshop I attended on Thursday.

Thinking Money describes the clever, free website, Stickk.com, where users sign up for “commitment contracts” to force them to reach their goal. (The genesis of the site came from Yale economists.) When setting your goal and a date, you can also tell Stikk which organization you detest that should receive money charged to your credit card if you fail.

On the show, grad student Graham Brown says he took out a commitment contract to force himself to make lunch three days a week and put the money he’d saved toward a road trip with a buddy. It worked.

3. Beware of confirmation bias. This is when you look for justifications for decisions you’ve made or are about to make by finding ones that support your view and ignoring ones that don’t. Thinking Money says the dot com bubble of the 1990s is an example of this. So was the 1630s tulip bubble in Holland, when, as Greco said, “bulbs were going for 10 times the salary of skilled craftsmen and were completely overvalued and a lot of fortunes went with them.”

How to avoid confirmation bias? Daylain Cain, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at Yale University, advises in the show that when you’re about to make an investment purchase, be a devil’s advocate and ask yourself: What could go wrong?

“Any of us can do that, we just have to be motivated,” said Greco.

4. Don’t hand over money to a crook because you fear you’ll miss out on a spectacular investment opportunity if you don’t. AARP’s Washington state director Doug Shadel, a financial fraud expert (“he has interviewed more con men than I have had hot meals,” said Greco), explains in the show how fraudsters and marketers prey on that behavior.

One secret of con artists, says Shadel: They look for people who’ve just lost a lot of money because those people are angry and upset. As a result, they aren’t thinking clearly.

“That makes them more susceptible to the con man’s pitch,” said Greco.

You can find other useful tips on saving, investing, controlling debt and protecting your future at FINRA’s Saveandinvest.org site.

After watching Thinking Money, maybe you’ll feel a nudge to trim back spending and save more for your impending retirement.

Greco told me that, since working on the show, that’s exactly what he’s done. “I work primarily at home and used to think nothing about buying lunch out. Now I find myself making lunch a lot more.”

He added: “It’s never too late to change spending habits that can hurt you.”

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At the recent Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, I had the pleasure of appearing on a panel, "Competitive Edge in Today's Sales World," led by sales guru Jill Konrath who is known for her innovative strategies and thinking.

Jill's latest book, Agile Selling, is a must-read for sales people looking to succeed in today's competitive landscape. She talks about how it took more than basic sales skills to be successful, and tells how she dealt with fear, mastered a "never-fail mind-set" and learned to see things from her customers' perspectives. She realized how important these traits were to her "agility" -- her ability to rapidly acquire knowledge and develop new strategies.

The panel discussion was lively and informative, and it struck a chord with me because I've long adhered to many of Jill's beliefs. We were each asked four questions on the panel, and I'll share my answers in the hope they'll help people understand how crucial agility is in today's market.

Question #1: How are you staying agile? What are you focused on learning right now?

My husband likes to joke that I can't keep a job. I have had a number of roles in my career and I like to think it's because I have demonstrated the ability to be an agile learner. Whenever a new task or project is at hand, I work to come up to speed quickly and swiftly execute a plan.

As Chief Content Officer at Thomson Reuters, I seek to learn everything I can about our vast content operation, which is at the core of what we do as a business. It sometimes feel like I'm drinking from a fire hose when it comes to understanding important trends such as big data.

Whenever I take on a new role I immerse myself in a 30-day deep dive of interviews with key stakeholders, including employees across the business, customers, partners, and thought leaders. I ask lots of questions: What are our strengths? Our biggest challenges? What are the key factors affecting our customers? And perhaps the most important question (because the answer can be so informative): What would someone else focus on if they were in my role? All of this helps me learn--and respond with agility to any challenge.

Question #2: What do you view as the number one competitive edge?

We live and work in a data economy where the key to success is information and knowledge. Competitive advantage rests with companies that know how to unlock data to drive their businesses.

But taking the idea of data down to an individual level, the most important skill--one that truly unlocks the power of knowledge -- is curiosity. Curiosity about your own company's products and businesses motivates you to see resources, product briefings, information days, etc. not as a task but as a tool.

Curiosity about your customers can transform a meeting with them from a pitch session to a listening session. I believe 80 percent of the first meeting with any customer should consist of the customer talking about their business -- and what they need. I prefer to leave our product pitches for later meetings, where they are more likely to be successful because we're more prepared to respond to what the customer wants. Curiosity is at the heart of this process.

Question #3: What would you recommend individual companies do to help their learning agility?

In the world of information overload, the key to learning agility is determining how to increase the signal-to-noise ratio and focus on data that counts. That's what we do at Thomson Reuters, but it's really what all successful sales people do.

I meet with customers all the time, and our sales teams expect me to be helpful in opening doors to senior client executives. The challenge arises from the fact our clients are all over the world, and in a diverse range of businesses. Remaining credible as one tries to meet the needs of an Australian bank, the Chief Risk Officer of a London investment firm, and the Head of Oil Trading at an Asian commodities house can be a challenge.

I use what I call a 3x3 planning tool for my meetings. I provide the client with three pieces of insight about what we see across the industry and at their peers; I ask three questions about their business and their industry; and I create three opportunities for follow-up engagements. I prep for each meeting this way, then treat it like a conversation. It rarely fails to be worthwhile for everybody involved.

Question #4: What piece of advice would you give women to help them in their careers?

As I've said before, the key is to conquer the "imposter syndrome." This is the insecure feeling that you are out of your depth, too "far over your skis," that you will be seen as a fraud. I've felt this at times throughout my career, and most other women have as well. The surprising thing is that many men also experience it. The difference is that women seem to have less risk tolerance than men. We let imposter syndrome overpower us and stop us from taking on the kind of challenging assignments and roles that might advance our career. Here again agility comes into play, since the key to not being overwhelmed by fear is to embrace the learning and curiosity skills that are the hallmark of agile sales people.

I want every woman and man to embrace the feeling of "Can I really do this?" and know that it is normal -- and a sign you are stretching your potential, taking it to new heights. Keep at it.

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Unlike Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men, we trust that you can handle the truth. No matter your age, securing a comfortable retirement is a huge concern. Folks want the whole truth about their financial outlook, but straight answers are hard to come by.

Both sides of the mainstream media habitually present opinion-tainted partial facts. Case in point: the unemployment numbers announced earlier this month. One side is cheering because unemployment dropped to a six-year low, while the other side is calling it pure fraud.

I found author and libertarian-about-town Wayne Root’s remarks in a recent article for The Blaze particularly telling:

The middle class isn’t getting richer, it’s getting poorer…

The only people being hired are your grandparents. 230,000 of the new jobs went to those in the 55-to-69-year-old age group. In the prime working age group of 24 to 54 years old, 10,000 jobs were lost…

It means grandma and grandpa are desperate and willing to take grandson’s low wage job to survive until Social Security kicks in. The US workforce is now the oldest in history. And if grandpa has to work (out of desperation) until the day he dies, there will never be any decent jobs for the grandkids.

Here’s the part Root gets wrong: Baby boomers are not working until Social Security kicks in. They’re working well past that point, because they feel they must. Smart boomers know they can’t afford to wait until robust interest rates return; they’re taking action to protect themselves now, lest their circumstances become truly dire.

You’re 65—Now What?

The Employee Benefit Research Institute surveys workers each year concerning their retirement confidence. Despite an uptrend, the latest report shows that 82% of workers feel less than “very confident” about having enough money to retire comfortably.

With that statistic in mind, we looked at three different 40-year retirement scenarios. Note that the numbers and charts in this overview are meant to illustrate several scenarios, not provide individual guidance. Every person’s situation differs in terms of taxes, time horizons, and other parameters, and we encourage you to work with a financial planner to manage your savings.

The data exclude other sources of retirement income you may have, such as Social Security or a pension. All of the amounts, including annuity incomes, are pre-tax.

Scenario 1. Scenario 1: He Who Takes It All Is Not the Winner

- At age 65, you decide to retire with $500,000 in personal savings. You anticipate your expenses will rise approximately 3% annually. Thus, with each subsequent year, you will need to withdraw 3% more than the previous year. You estimate that your savings will grow by 5% annually. You are planning for a 40-year retirement, meaning your savings must last until age 105.

How much money can you withdraw each year, using those assumptions?

Scenario 2. Scenario 2: Spreading Out Risk

- At age 65 you have the same $500,000 in personal savings that you did in Scenario 1; however, you take $100,000 from your account and buy an annuity. Our go-to source for annuity information, Stan The Annuity Man, says that currently, this annuity would pay $527 for the rest of your life. You use the remaining $400,000 as principal for the next 40 years in the same fashion as in the first case: assuming the same 5% rate of return and an annual 3% withdrawal increase.

Scenario 3. Scenario 3: Delayed Gratification

- Instead of retiring at age 65, you work for five extra years and buy a 100,000 annuity at age 70. We will assume you did not add to your savings during that time (though it did earn interest).

Many boomers use extra working years to eliminate any lingering debt, so they can retire 100% debt-free. (However, note that we encourage a different approach: using extra working years to save as much as possible, including maximizing catch-up contributions to your 401(k) or IRA.)

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Newly established businesses can run into a lot of mistakes particularly in accounting which can be expensive for the company. Avoiding them by learning from professional accountants can give business-owners a head-start.

According to expert accountants from the FreshBooks Accountant Network, the most common accounting mistakes committed by small enterprises are the following:

1. Fumbling with Receivables

Getting money into your business is definitely good. However, it Is not enough that you receive payment; you have to reconcile your invoices (records of who owes you how much) with your customer deposits or payments. Leaving them unreconciled will result in so much waste of manpower hours. A regular monthly process to avoid this mistake will save any company time and money in the long run.

A good way of easing up your accounting work is to receive payments online. You can also use cloud accounting software to automate and facilitate your work.

2. Failing to keep Expenses Receipts

Not keeping copies of business expense receipts can produce problems in tax, accounting and cash flow computations. Not knowing specific expenses in your bank account statement can result in high tax payments and other problems if ever you are audited.

The solution is easy: Keep your receipts. How do you do it?

- Use your business or credit card for business expenses
- Collect all your receipts in a bag or a box.
- Do a weekly or monthly filing of the receipts in your tax folder or keep digital copies.

The best tip, of course, is to add all those expenses as you incur them. You can use accounting software to make the task faster and simpler with the use of a smartphone.

3. Failing to Keep Cash Expense Records

Accounting is all about knowing what goes in and what goes out. Hence, not keeping records of your expenses is like going to war without counting your troops, not to mention those of the enemies. This holds true especially to cash expenses since other payments, such as those made through credit cards, debit cards or checks, are reflected somewhere in your bank account. Again, there are apps the business-owner can use with their smartphone so that they can keep track of those cash payments. But it all starts with asking for a receipt each time you make a cash-payment.

4. Failing to Connect with Your Account

Often accountants use jargon or technical terms the ordinary small-business owner cannot understand or does not have any idea how they affect the business. It is assumed that hiring an accountant means getting information or advice that is translatable into layman’s terms so that any business-owner can make the necessary steps to translate the technical knowledge into practicable measures.

Financial professionals can communicate with their own kind, but not with the rest of humanity. Make sure your accountant understands this problem.

These actually seem like easy problems to recognize in the daily operations of any business venture; but, as with so many other things, the easy tasks are the most neglected or taken for granted. If you wish to succeed in your business and keep your shirt on your back, you cannot afford to leave these areas unattended. more »

Possessing basic money-handling and income-generating skills is important, especially with the economic crunch affecting big and small countries all over the world. The proverbial though blasphemous adage has never been truer than today: Money makes the world go round. And for thousands, it is a literal reality, as their hope of seeing another day becomes dimmer with each meal they miss.

But for the ordinary worker who gets a regular pay check each week or each month, having enough knowledge about money and how to make it work and multiply can spell the difference between a world one wants to keep going around or to make it stop so one can jump out.

Despair no more! It is never too late to learn new skills and techniques on money matters. Financial advisers are a-plenty nowadays what with Google making it a mere click away. Here are a few tips we can share here:

1. What you do not have, you can always find somewhere

Banks are not the only places to get loans from. Friends may have surplus cash they are willing to lend to someone who has the ability and diligence to make it grow. Or, cooperative groups that provide assistance to its members for a small business loan or for a multi-purpose loan. Taking the first step to look for capital for investing can produce great changes in one’s attitude and life.

2. Show your business plan

The trick to convincing people to part with their money so you can use it for your ideas is to present a simple and understandable business plan. It may not even be a written one. A verbal description of a project may already convince a relative or friend to lend you money for a venture. Of course, some may require a written contract. Your confidence in your idea should lead you to abide by their terms if that is the only way you can get capital.

3. Creativity always gives results

A friend once leased out a vacant lot and sub-leased it as a parking lot for a trucking company. He put a guard round-the-clock and provided minimal improvement and made more than forty times what he paid for it monthly. Not a bad deal for a creative guy who had a simple idea and worked his idea into reality. And anyone can do that with enough imagination and courage. The seed money may not even have to be there because if one really believes in a project, it will pay for itself. The down-payment for a lease will be enough to cover a loan you initially took out.

Keep cranking that brain of yours and you will eventually come upon an idea worth selling something valuable that you own in order to raise the capital and start rolling.

4. Get dirty

Starting a business or keeping one running will always require getting your hands dirty. Cleaning bottles for a peanut butter business or feeding pigs on a daily basis in your small piggery farm can seem menial but a necessary part in teaching you the fundamentals of running a business. Eventually, when you have other people doing the dirty work, you will have a better insight as to how the business runs and what makes for a successful operation.

Investing is not all about handling or making money; it is about thinking creatively, using your imagination, treating people compassionately and returning the fruits of your ventures back to your business and the people who keep the business growing and sustainable.

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Are retail investors’ expectations upside down–high when conditions are bad for investing, low when conditions are good? Is there a better way to anticipate what’s going to happen to your retirement savings?

Our answers: yes and yes.

There is ample evidence that popular expectations for investment returns are just about the opposite of what would come from a sober analysis of the fundamental data. In 2000, when the market was trading at absurdly high multiples of corporate earnings, funds holding U.S. stocks hauled in $288 billion. In 2002, when stocks were cheap, the inflow slowed to a $13 billion trickle.

The inflow into stock funds dried up once again after the crash of 2007-09 and stayed low for most of the next five years. Now, with stock prices at abnormally high multiples of earnings, the investing masses are putting big money into stock funds.

It’s the same with junk bonds. A rational investor would be most likely to buy risky corporate debt when the reward–the yield–is highest and least likely when it is meager. The public is doing just the opposite.

In tumultuous 2008, when junk bond prices were depressed, their yields averaged a 10% premium over safe Treasury paper. That was a good time to be buying. But retail investors were doing more selling than buying. That year junk funds saw $6 billion of net redemptions, not counting reinvestment of dividends, according to data from the Investment Company Institute.

Six years later the prices of risky bonds have recovered, and their yields are correspondingly lower. What are investors doing? They should be selling, but they are not. In 2013, when the yield premium on average was only half that of 2008, investors poured a net $54 billion into junk funds. The money is still coming in ($10 billion in the first four months of this year).

The pattern: If an asset class has done well recently, making its price high, fund buyers want it. If it has done poorly, making it a bargain, they want to sell.

The phenomenon described above anecdotally has been studied statistically. Two Harvard professors, Andrei Shleifer and Robin Greenwood, published a paper last year demonstrating that investor expectations are highest when objective models would say that expected asset returns are lowest, and vice versa.

“People react to salience,” says professor Greenwood. “Recent performance is salient.” That’s a polite way of saying that naive investors navigate with a rearview mirror.

You don’t have to make that mistake. There are better ways to come up with a forecast of future returns than to extrapolate the recent past. We’ll explore some formulas for stocks, bonds and the funds that own these things.

Experts can differ about how to come up with an expected return from an asset. But one thing they would agree on is that recent performance is a bad indicator of future results. You shouldn’t be buying an asset class because it has been going up.

The place to start is with the yield. For a bond, it’s the interest yield. For a stock, it’s the earnings yield, which is the net income divided by the stock price.

Next, investing costs have to be figured in–both the management fees and the cost impact of turning over a portfolio. If you are buying bonds, you have to allow for inflation. (Shares of stock, in contrast, are not impacted the same way because corporate earnings tend to keep up with inflation.) It’s just possible that 401(k) savers don’t pay much attention to these things.

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When they were newlyweds 23 years ago Jeff Maggioncalda’s wife, Anne, challenged him to a Monopoly battle. Determined to gain the upper hand, Jeff secretly created a program, known as a simulation engine, to model the results of 1 million Monopoly games and used it to generate a list of probabilities and payoffs for all the game’s properties. “We played until she realized I had this little cheat sheet, and then she thought I was a total jerk,” he laughs. (Actually, Anne, whose Ph.D. dissertation was on the reproductive strategies of male orangutans, was amused by his creative adaptation.)

Maggioncalda, 45, has used his knack for simulations (and for landing on the corporate equivalent of Boardwalk) to win at a real-life game, too: the financial advice business. As chief executive of Financial Engines FNGN -0.48% he has built the nation’s largest registered investment advisor, with (as of Mar. 31) $92 billion in 401(k) assets under management for nearly 800,000 workers of 553 big employers, including Alcoa AA +0.88%, Dow Corning GLW +1.01%, Ford, IBM IBM +0.99% and Microsoft MSFT +0.14%.

Savers pay Financial Engines from 0.2% to 0.6% of their 401(k) assets annually to manage their nest eggs based on modern portfolio theory, which aims to maximize the return for a given level of risk. Its computers run thousands of scenarios (known as a Monte Carlo simulation) to give each worker a picture of how much retirement income he or she is likely to have, and use an “optimization engine” to determine the best portfolio given the costs, quality and styles of the mutual funds available in each 401(k), with a preference for low-cost index funds. Clients can consult with humans manning call centers, but the advice they’ll get comes from the computer models. (For two examples of Financial Engines’ portfolio makeovers, see below.)

Now, with its baby boomer clients edging toward and past 60, Financial Engines is angling to grab a piece of another potentially big business: managing assets and income payouts for retirees.

“Retirement income … it’s a really hard problem. You’re looking at a 30-dimension probability distribution,” observes Nobel-winning economist William F. Sharpe, a cofounder of Financial Engines. While Maggioncalda’s entrepreneurial energy has built Financial Engines, the 80-year-old Sharpe, who won the Nobel in 1990 for his work on the pricing of financial assets and the relationship between risk and return, is at its intellectual core.

Back in 1996 Sharpe was offering asset allocation software he’d developed on his website for free–to, as he puts it, “give ordinary people the tools to think probabilistically about their investments.” But during a long lunch at Stanford University’s student union, Joseph Grundfest, a Stanford Law professor and former member of the Securities & Exchange Commission, persuaded him that he’d make a bigger impact with a for-profit business. “If we’re serious about changing how people behave in the real world, we’re going to need to start a company,” Grundfest told Sharpe over a second cup of coffee.

The two academics, along with the late Craig W. Johnson, an attorney who took equity positions in startups, seeded Financial Engines, and Grundfest went hunting for someone to run it. “You needed a candidate who could have an intelligent conversation about modern portfolio theory with Bill Sharpe. Right away your pool of candidates gets cut down by 99%,” he says. Grundfest settled on Maggioncalda, then a 27-year-old newly minted Stanford M.B.A. who had written a prescient case study about how the Internet could disrupt the stock brokerage business for a class taught by Intel founder Andy Grove. The three older men hired Maggioncalda to write a business plan and promised to eventually make him CEO–if he could raise the venture capital to build the business. “At that time the idea of a 27-year-old CEO in Silicon Valley wasn’t broadly accepted. Today, at 27, you’re washed up,” muses Grundfest, now 62. Continue reading…

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