Present Bias: Why Your Future Self Keeps Losing the Argument

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? AndrewTemte.com