In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy turns from the map of your personal economy to the thing that moves money across it — decisions.

He explains why good and bad decisions never arrive in the same size, and why one large mistake can undo a decade of quiet good ones.

The centerpiece is present bias, the mental shortcut that treats anything happening right now as far more important than the same thing months from now, illustrated by a study of 7,752 health club members who left roughly six hundred of every fourteen hundred dollars on the table.

Andy also revisits four biases from March 2025 that turn up constantly in money decisions, and hands listeners a question to carry through the rest of the series: what bias is this product designed to exploit?

As we continue our journey to build financial literacy skills, you may be wondering where all the formulas and numbers are? Well, this is a big misconception of financial literacy—that it is more about numbers than it is about behaviors. How we feel about money & investing and how we behave with the resources we have via the decisions we make are as, or more, important than our ability to work with numbers. Hence, this is where we’re going to place most of our initial emphasis.