Brett F. Whysel 
I never could have imagined how important managing emotion, cognitive biases and behavioral hurdles is to saving enough, spending wisely and managing financial risks. For about a year, I informally coached a woman (we’ll call her “Leigh”) in her late twenties who wanted to eliminate the $5,000 of expensive credit card debt she was rolling over each month, … Read more
…and Will Likely Stay That Way In January 2016 I founded a tech start-up help Americans make better financial decisions. I’ve since learned that most people are stressed out because they save little, have enormous debt, don’t know where their money goes and feel they’re not on track to meeting their long-term goals. I also found that … Read more
Trump’s federal government shutdown, May’s Brexit proposal, Sears’ and Victoria’s Secret’s retail strategy, even my own struggling start-up: these are all examples of potentially failed strategies. These strategies might have had a chance had they been created using a little Design Thinking. This is a creative problem-solving process that eschews grand solutions in favor of an incremental, failure-welcoming, iterative … Read more
Do you get stressed around the holidays with just too much to do? Many of us feel more stress, anxiety and depression during the holidays. In addition to the normal demands of running a start-up and teaching, I’ve got presents to buy, travel to plan and a child to get to college. At last count, I … Read more
Is there any financial decision that we dread more than the annual chore of choosing a health insurance plan? It’s got everything we hate: choice and information overload, time pressure, ambiguity and confusion, consequences worth thousands, uncomfortable scenarios involving disease and injury, inscrutable jargon coming at a time of the year full of other business, … Read more
Is that website or app, in which you’re pouring personal information, time, money and trust, ethical? Learn how to systematically evaluate the ethical status of any website (or business).
Did you know that “knowing” is definitely not half the battle? The G.I. Joe Fallacy is but one of the many provocative and counter-intuitive ideas I learned at this year’s Behavioral Summit. Organized by ideas42, a nonprofit behavioral science consultancy, the Summit included speakers from diverse disciplines including healthcare, sexual assault, risk, fundraising, systems analysis, happiness, diversity, financial inclusion and, of … Read more
How You’ll Know There’s a Problem Sometimes employees’ financial stresses get so intense, they become unavoidable management issues. They can reduce productivity and engagement and increase turnover, healthcare utilization, absenteeism and worse. Employers’ resources for addressing this kind of issue are typically very limited. It’s not unheard of for employees to directly ask their managers … Read more
Alternative facts and sloppy thinking. Either one can hijack our efforts to learn the truth and make quality decisions. Increasing political polarization, inequality and mistrust make it harder to reach consensus in politics, business, and society. This can slow human progress and result in catastrophic mistakes. A clear understanding of, and greater emphasis on, the … Read more
Fortnite Battle Royale at GDC 2018. Image by Official GDC. A quick headline search on the word “cause” produced this doozy as the first result: “Fortnite helped cause 5% of UK divorces this year” That’s a great headline. After all, the search engine’s algorithm placed it at the top of the list, and I clicked on it. … Read more