LOADED Quotes

“Years back, when I was first learning about Marshall Rosenberg’s work, I attended a workshop where we learned to differentiate between needs and strategies. At the time, I was having a lot of conflict with a family member, and I asked the facilitator for help in understanding what this person’s needs might be when we get into arguments. “It seems to me that they feel a need to be right,” I said. “But everyone can’t be right,” the instructor explained. “Being right is a strategy . . . what might the need be?” After thinking more, I saw that maybe being right was this person’s way of feeling important, knowing that they matter, or feeling capable. Immediately, I felt more compassion toward them because I understood those needs. I have them, too. That experience was a powerful one for healing my family relationship, and I have seen similar changes happen when people use this way of thinking to understand and resolve financial conflicts.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“Rule of Thumb If everyone cannot have it at once, it’s a strategy, not a need. Dig deeper to find the real need.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“Every moment each human being is doing the best we know at that moment to meet our needs. We never do anything that is not in the service of a need. There is no conflict on our planet at the level of needs. We all have the same needs. The problem is in strategies for meeting the needs. —Marshall Rosenberg”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“We feel restricted when we fear that some of our needs won’t be met. If we are mindful in our planning, we can create a life where all of our needs, physical, emotional, and intellectual, are met without draining all of our financial resources. That type of a plan does not feel restrictive, but deeply satisfying. The key to making this kind of plan is to remember that cash flow is just a part of the story. The real task we all have is to figure out how we can use our personal resources to meet all of our needs. When you become adept at this type of planning, you will find that many of your nonphysical needs are better served by nonfinancial strategies. This frees up your money to do what it is best at: meeting your physical needs.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“The problem with meeting emotional needs with financial strategies is that we can quickly exhaust our resources.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“The other categories of needs are largely intangible, but many of us are in the habit of using financial strategies to meet them nonetheless. Look around and you will see countless examples of people using material objects to meet their needs for esteem and respect from others. Clothing can meet our physical need for protection from the elements, but for many of us clothes are also a form of self-expression. One’s chosen style sends signals to others about lifestyle, values, and personality. Many people dress to impress, and that can quickly become a very expensive strategy for meeting one’s need for respect or status. We can also find ourselves using financial strategies to meet needs for love and belonging.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“On one day, you may feel a powerful need for intimacy. The next, you may desperately seek solitude. This theory fits more accurately with what I have personally experienced, and what I have observed in others. Beyond this, Rosenberg believed that conflict emerges when the strategy we employ to meet a need conflicts with another need. Finding peace in our financial life comes from creating better strategies, not from depriving ourselves of what we need.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“It is quite true that man lives by bread alone—when there is no bread. But what happens to man’s desires when there is plenty of bread and when his belly is chronically filled? At once other (and “higher”) needs emerge and these, rather than physiological hungers, dominate the organism. And when these in turn are satisfied, again new (and still “higher”) needs emerge and so on. This is what we mean by saying that the basic human needs are organized into a hierarchy of relative prepotency. —Maslow, 1943, p. 375”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“You will find that while old habits die hard, they do, with perseverance, die. This is also true for habits of thinking.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“The left cluster shows that on average, everyone whose mental picture of the future was vague and without detail had mostly negative emotional experiences with money. This was true no matter how much money they were making.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“Specifically, when the future self shares similarities with the present self, when it is viewed in vivid and realistic terms, and when it is seen in a positive light, people are more willing to make choices today that may benefit them at some point in the years to come. —Hal Hershfield52”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“One of the most fascinating pieces of research, in my opinion, that has come out in recent years with regards to saving behavior was published in the Journal of Marketing Research in 2011. The researchers had a large group of undergraduates think about something they planned to save for within a month’s time. They asked half of them to set a specific dollar amount (low-level goal), and the other half to set a more general goal to save as much as they could (high-level goal). The researchers also had everyone take a test to find out what their chronic construal level was. This resulted in four groups (see Figure 3.1). Figure 3.1 Saving Study: Four Groups Then, the students came back a month later and reported on how much they had actually saved for their goal. Can you guess which people saved the most? When I first read the study, I assumed that everyone who set a specific dollar amount would save more than those who kept their goal vague and nonspecific. The actual results were far more interesting. As it turned out, the people who set a goal that was in contrast to their normal way of thinking were the ones who saved the most. High-level thinkers who set a specific dollar amount and low-level thinkers who kept their goal nonspecific saved far more on average than the people who kept their goal consistent with their chronic construal level (see Figure 3.2).51”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“The idea here is that we have only a limited amount of self-control or willpower to draw on, and when our reserves are drained we have a harder time resisting temptation. Fatigue, mental strain, stress, and hunger can all work as drains on our self-control resources.48 Research shows that stigma or the threat of rejection can also reduce self-control through ego depletion,49 so stereotype threat can be a trigger for overspending if you use retail therapy. However our egos get worn down, the effect is the same: We have less self-control. So, when we are ego depleted, just trying harder to resist temptation will only work against us, making us more tired and more ego depleted. Instead, if we want to resist the temptation to shop when our egos are drained, the solution is not to be hard on ourselves, but to focus on replenishing our resources. This is where affirmations come in.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“When our egos are depleted through fatigue, rejection, identity threat, or loss, our sense of self is diminished. Naturally, we will want to restore ourselves to the previous sense of fullness, and buying an object that represents who we want to be is a simple way to fill in the lost part of our identity.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“Shopping can be a form of play, an act of celebration, or a way to soothe a damaged ego, but we need to remember the cost we pay is permanent, while the emotional benefit is not.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“The fact that we incorporate material objects into our sense of self opens new doors for understanding our relationship with money and the things we own. When I first learned about the possession–self link, it immediately helped me to see why we can so easily attach our personal value to our material success. It also helped me understand why shopping can feel so comforting, especially after a rejection or a loss. This simple concept can illuminate many of the underlying motivations we have for our financial behaviors, and I encourage you to think about how your possessions, especially those that most represent the parts of yourself you care about, are actually extensions of your identity. How do your personal items like your home, car, clothes, hobby gear, pictures, electronics, and your thousands of other things reflect who you are?”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“Stereotypes are similar to core beliefs in that they are the one-sentence version of a larger narrative or story. “The poor are lazy” is the “moral” of a story we are telling ourselves based on limited experiences and our particular environment. “The rich are greedy” is another simplification of a much larger narrative. Just as we talked about challenging your core beliefs about money in your own life, you can challenge your core beliefs about how money affects other people. The two techniques mentioned earlier, changing the narrative and finding a counterexample, are effective here as well.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“Stereotypes are similar to core beliefs in that they are the one-sentence version of a larger narrative or story.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“If you were raised in an interdependent group, then family and community are more likely to hold a high priority for you and your peers. If you were raised in a group that valued independence, then leadership, self-reliance, and achievement are likely to be more important to you and to the people who you care about. In one group, a person gains respect and friendship by helping others. In the other, a person gains respect and friendship by helping themselves and not relying on others. It is not hard to see, then, how people from one social orientation or the other could view the other group in a negative light. To the independent-minded, those with interdependent beliefs appear to lack ambition, vision, and work ethic, and care too much about what other people think and feel. From the interdependent view, self-reliant people lack in compassion, empathy, and helpfulness, and are overly concerned with status and power.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“A growing body of evidence has shown that compassion can be increased intentionally and that this is associated with significant reduction in negative affect, increase in positive affect, reduced chronic pain, and increased feelings of social connection and positivity toward strangers. —Dr. Thomas Plante44”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“It is far easier on our psyches to trust that the system is fundamentally fair so we don’t have to feel guilty for our lot in life. Many faith traditions teach that there is an underlying order and justice to the world around us, which can contribute to this tendency to justify unfair systems. I do not believe this makes us “mean.” This is all very human and not indicative of cruelty at all. In fact, the very reason we engage in system justification is because we want to believe that the world is fair. The more we believe in an innately just world, the more difficult it is to reconcile extreme inequality with our worldview, unless we conclude that, somehow, inequality is deserved. It’s a coping strategy, not a personal failure.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“I think privilege is blind because it’s usually experienced as a lack of barriers rather than the presence of favoritism. We make an effort, and we aren’t blocked, so we feel that our effort led to success, when this is only part of the story.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“The greatest turning point in my financial life came when I discovered my core beliefs about money. By writing about my experiences with money from early childhood up to that point (in my late twenties), I found that the two most influential money messages that I was holding on to at the time had sort of merged themselves into one core belief: “I am not supposed to have money because it is evil.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“Mental shortcuts like the availability heuristic and confirmation bias take hold of our personal narratives, and help to turn them into core beliefs. The decisions we make are heavily influenced by what we believe, so if we want to make changes in our financial behavior, we have to examine our core beliefs.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“Another shortcut we use a lot is called confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is our tendency to pay more attention to information that supports what we already believe. We don’t like to go through the hassle of rewriting our personal narratives. It can be aggravating and takes mental and emotional effort. We strongly prefer to be reassured that the conclusions we have already drawn are correct, and go on our merry way. This can disrupt our financial lives by making us feel very sure that our views of money are not just opinions based on our limited experiences, but deeply and profoundly true.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“Behavioral economists call these rules of thumb heuristics, and they can be wonderful things. They make our lives simpler by reducing the cognitive load that we have to bear when we make a decision or enter into new, uncharted situations. One of these shortcuts is known as the availability heuristic, and it is meant to help us make predictions about which outcomes are likely to happen and which are not.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“It is clear from the preceding stories that each person has a very emotionally charged relationship with money. Yet when I asked these same people how they would explain money to a child, they immediately removed all emotion and started using phrases like, “Money is useful for meeting your needs” and “Money is a means of trade.” In reality, we experience money in complex and highly emotional ways, yet when it comes to teaching the next generation about money, suddenly we all start talking like economists! One man explained that he would not want a child to know the social implications of money, only its purpose as a unit of currency. I understand the desire to protect the innocent from unpleasant truths, but the difference between the book definition of money and its actual impact on our lives is enormous. Are we really teaching our children about money if we leave out any discussion of class?”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“Staying in a loveless or destructive relationship because of financial dependence is not an experience limited to women, but it is more common among women due to traditional gender roles. There is a group called Women in Financial Education (WIFE) that has a funny/sad slogan: “A man is not a financial plan.” I love this slogan, but it highlights a real problem. Not just women, but anyone who is dependent on another person financially, may be tempted to compromise their true values out of fear of not being able to make it on their own.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“His childhood dream of comfort has been harder to reach than he imagined because he didn’t account for the deep, unconscious fears that would eventually haunt him even as he accomplished his financial goals. Peace of mind involves more than just the numbers on our balance sheet.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind

“Our minds want to make sense of the patterns we see. We crave meaning, even if we don’t like the story the patterns tell us.”
― Sarah Newcomb, Loaded: Money, Psychology, and How to Get Ahead without Leaving Your Values Behind