Money and spending

Q: Are young people worse at saving than before? A: I don't think it's quite that simple — young people aren't necessarily worse at saving, they're saving under worse conditions. Rent and housing costs have gone up much faster than wages, so a lot of what used to be leftover money to put aside just doesn't exist anymore. That said, I'd admit there's also a cultural shift — buy-now-pay-later apps and constant online shopping make spending frictionless in a way it wasn't for previous generations. So it's probably both: harder circumstances and slightly worse habits, and it's hard to separate which one is doing more damage. Q: Should schools teach personal finance? A: Definitely, and I'd say it's one of the more glaring gaps in the standard curriculum. Students leave school able to solve quadratic equations but with no idea how compound interest works against them on a credit card. It doesn't need to be a full subject — even a few practical lessons on budgeting, interest, and how debt actually behaves would change how people approach their twenties. The counterargument is that parents should be the ones teaching this, but realistically not every parent is equipped to, so the school ends up being the only consistent place it could happen. Q: Does more money make people happier? A: Up to a point, yes — money removes a specific kind of stress, the constant low-level anxiety about whether you can cover rent or an emergency bill, and that's genuinely life-changing. Past that point, though, the returns seem to flatten out pretty quickly; someone earning twice as much isn't twice as content, from what I've seen in people around me. What tends to matter more once the basics are covered is things like autonomy at work and the quality of your relationships. So I'd say money buys you out of certain problems, but it doesn't really buy you in to happiness itself. Q: Is it better to spend money on experiences or possessions? A: Experiences, on balance, though I don't think it's an absolute rule. Research on this tends to back it up — a trip or a concert becomes part of your personal story and gets better in memory over time, whereas a new gadget just becomes normal within a few weeks and stops registering as a source of pleasure at all. I'd qualify that a little, though: some possessions genuinely reshape your daily life, a good mattress or a reliable laptop, and those are worth more than an equivalent amount spent on a forgettable weekend away. So the real distinction might not be experience versus object, but whether the thing keeps delivering value after the initial excitement wears off. Q: Do you think advertising makes people spend more than they should? A: I think it does, though it works in a subtler way than people assume — it's less about convincing you to buy one specific product and more about constantly resetting what feels normal to want. You see enough images of a certain lifestyle and your baseline expectations quietly shift, so spending that would have felt excessive five years ago now feels ordinary. I wouldn't put all the blame on advertisers, though; people also choose what they engage with and could opt out more than they do. But given how targeted and constant it's become, especially online, I don't think it's realistic to expect willpower alone to cancel it out.