Personal finance – Page 5 – Toshl Finance Blog

I know, the title sounds silly. You’re probably thinking: “Of course I’m smarter than monkeys, I have a savings account and abstract currencies and Apple Pay on my watch and….” That’s all true, these are all things that monkeys don’t use. At least the ones I know. But in some ways we still default to our basic and dreadfully wrong primate instincts when dealing with money. It’s vital that we acknowledge those predispositions and learn to overcome them.

Laurie Santos is a cognitive psychologist that set out to discover where our predispositions about finance come from. At the heart of the problem is the ever-present question of environment versus genetics. In other words, when we’re dealing with personal finances, which parts of our behaviour are defined by our mostly human-created environment and which behaviours are genetically hard-wired into our brains.

Here are the surprising results she discovered.

It turns out that the economic and behavioural principle of loss aversion which has been proven in humans also happens with monkeys. In practical terms, this means that we are much more prone to take big risks when there is a threat of losing money, than we are when there is an opportunity to gain additional money.

Understanding this principle and being aware of it can matter a great deal when making investments. People tend to be conservative with their decisions when a stock is doing well, but are usually much slower to sell if the stock is doing badly compared the when they first purchased it. We more often take the risker road of holding on to the stock, even-though there might not be a rational reason to think it will do better soon.

But it’s useful to keep this principle in mind in daily situations as well, since it’s commonly used in marketing as well. Getting a 10 € discount or avoiding a 10 € surcharge has a different ring to our ears, even though they are the same thing from a financial point of view.

So let’s all keep in mind that in some ways we’re no better than monkeys when it comes to money. If we’re aware of our irrational predispositions we can overcome them and become rational about personal finance. Otherwise we don’t really deserve to be called homo sapiens sapiens.

The 2014th ellipsis of Earth around the Sun since we decided to keep track of those laps, is slowly but inevitably coming around. Not quite so incidentally, this is also the time to take stock of what happened with your finances during the year. The more we know this year went, the better we’ll know how to start afresh in the new one.

With that in mind, here’s a few quick and easy tips how to do yearly financial overview in Toshl.

1. Set the time span to entire year

Seeing your finances month-to-month is just dandy most of the time, but for a year end review, it’s better to sum it all up.

On the web (toshl.com):

Click on the big red month link (e.g. December 2014), the click on the Custom time span tab and set the time from Jan 1st 2014 to Jan 1st 2015. Click Save and you’re done.

Mobile apps

Tap the time span button, then custom time span and set the time from Jan 1st 2014 to Jan 1st 2015.

Can’t find the time span button?

Android: First tap the menu button, which can be either the hardware menu button or the … button on the top right, then you’ll see the time span clock button.

iOS: The clock button on the top left.

Windows Phone: The clock button in the action bar on the bottom.

2. Check out the tag sums

Now that you have the whole year selected, it’s time to look around a bit, as the numbers will be quite different than before. On the web, check out the Expenses graph next to the timeline. For a more graphical display, switch to the tags section to play around with the bubble graph (Pro only).

What’s most important is that you get a sense of the numbers and how much to you spend on certain areas of your life during the year. While some spending on food and lodging is a quite necessary evil for us all, be on the lookout for any numbers that jump out. Can you optimise your transport costs? Quit smoking? Stop your penguin buying addiction?

3. See which months are the critical ones

Another important look at your spending is to see how it moves through the months. If you have Toshl Pro, you can check out the “Expenses, Incomes, Balance” graph and see how your financial flows moved through the months.

With many people, the same yearly patterns repeat every year. So keep in mind when you spend the most and be extra vigilant then. If you have yearly bills that you can predict, enter them as yearly repeating expenses. Car insurance, magazine subscriptions, major birthdays etc. are good candidates. Even if you don’t know the exact amount yet, you can enter an approximate one and adjust the expense later. It’s more important that you don’t get caught by surprise by the expense.

Don’t forget to put some money on the side for the 2015 vacations!

4. Make yearly budgets

Especially shocked or intrigued by some of the tag sums that came up? Set up a yearly budget for the specific tag or tags. That way you can keep track of spending on your personal vices throughout the year with little effort.

The green progress bar shows how much you have left in your budget, while the dotted date line shows how far we’ve come in the year. If you’ve made a good prediction and are spending in your desired pattern, those two should be on roughly the same place. If the green bar’s disappearance is way ahead of the date, you might be in trouble. Keep an eye out. Well, not literally. You know what I mean. Kids, don’t try putting your eyes out at home. Or… ever. You know what, perhaps just make an ophthalmologist budget as well.

All in all, don’t forget to have fun too. It’s the merry December after all! Hopefully you still have some leeway in your yearly booze budget. ;)

2015 will be a year of renaissance for Toshl too, so we’re already looking forward to how much more fun the yearly overview will be in 2015.

Category: Personal finance

How To Be Smarter Than Monkeys About Personal Finance

Make Your Yearly Financial Overview of 2014

1. Set the time span to entire year

2. Check out the tag sums

3. See which months are the critical ones

4. Make yearly budgets