If only he hadn’t spent so much on those turntables!

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**Reema Khrais** (0:30)
One of my biggest financial regrets is not investing earlier. I remember reading this article a while ago that showed just how much of a difference it makes when you start young. And of course, I did the thing I shouldn't have done. I started calculating what I could have had if I invested even a small amount like 10 years ago. The number that came up was tens of thousands of dollars. I really hate thinking about it, but I also think that kind of regret is so common, you know, not saving enough, not investing earlier, not making some smart money move when we had the chance.
In fact, I hear from a lot of you about this, about how haunted you feel by certain financial decisions you've made or didn't make.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:12)
Hi, I'm Emily. My worst financial mistake was buying a house. I had no business buying. My husband and I made a move from the Midwest to the East Coast, thinking that we were going to stay in the city for a while, picked out a property, ended up hating the neighborhood and the city, lost about 20k on the house and moved back to the Midwest.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:34)
Hi, my name is Bruce Merlin. I just wanted to share my money regrets.
The first one, going to university. I don't think it really helped me in the long run, but being from an age where they told you that was going to get you ahead, and I fell for it. Secondly, having a wedding, and I'm reminded of this all the time. My wife likes to remind me that hey, that 10 grand we spent there could have paid for you.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:58)
Hi, I'm Gary, high school math teacher. When I wanted to start saving for retirement, I always thought you had to access that service through a financial advisor. After about four years, I said to myself, I've been blindly trusting him with my money. I eventually learned with the amount that I'm investing with him and the fees that I'm paying, I'd be paying him like 80 to $90,000 just in fees. And then now I can learn I can do it by myself.
So I fired him and moved all of my investments to a low-cost index fund or a target date fund.

**Reema Khrais** (2:30)
I'm Reema Grace and welcome to This Is Uncomfortable, the weekly show from Marketplace about life and how money messes with it. One of the things that makes financial regret feel especially haunting is that a lot of the time, you can quantify it. Like you can calculate what you lost on the house or what that wedding cost or what that degree didn't return.
But this week, instead of just dwelling on those regrets, which is very tempting, I want to understand why these choices can feel so painful in hindsight. Like why we can be so hard on the person we were when we made them, and why we keep assuming that some future version of ourselves will finally be better with money. So I'm calling up two researchers who study how we make these decisions and how to make sense of them after the fact.
Hal Hershfield is a professor of behavioral decision-making at UCLA. His research looks at how we make decisions over time. Basically, why it can be so hard to do things now that our future selves will thank us for later. Hey, Hal.

**Hal Hershfield** (3:27)
Hey, Reema. It's nice to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Reema Khrais** (3:29)
I'm also chatting with Abigail Sussman. Abigail is a professor at the University of Chicago Business School. She studies why we make the financial decisions we do and why they don't always line up with what we actually want.
Hey, Abigail.

**Abigail Sussman** (3:42)
Hey, thanks so much for having me. Nice to be here.

**Reema Khrais** (3:44)
Okay, so first I should say, you two know each other pretty well, right?

**Hal Hershfield** (3:49)
Yeah. Abby, when did we meet? I think it was probably 2010, 2011

**Abigail Sussman** (3:53)
It was in grad school in New York a long time ago.

**Hal Hershfield** (3:57)