Small Change

Money Mishaps and How to Avoid Them

By: Dan Ariely, Jeff Kreisler

Narrated by: Simon Jones

Blending humour and behavioural economics, the New York Times bestselling author of Predictably Irrational delves into the truly illogical world of personal finance to help people better understand why they make bad financial decisions, and gives them the knowledge they need to make better ones.

Why does paying for things often feel like it causes physical pain?
Why does it cost you money to act as your own real estate agent?
Why are we comfortable overpaying for something now just because we’ve overpaid for it before?

In Small Change, world renowned economist Dan Ariely answers these intriguing questions and many more as he explains how our irrational behaviour often interferes with our best intentions when it comes to managing our finances. Partnering with financial comedian and writer Jeff Kreisler, Ariely takes us deep inside our minds to expose the hidden motivations that are secretly driving our choices about money.

Exploring a wide range of everyday topics – from credit card debt and household budgeting to holiday sales – Ariely and Kreisler demonstrate how our ideas about dollars and cents are often wrong and cost us more than we know. Mixing case studies and anecdotes with tangible advice and lessons, they cut through the unconscious fears and desires driving our worst financial instincts and teach us how to improve our money habits.

Fascinating, engaging, funny and essential, Small Change is a sound investment, providing us with the practical tools we need to understand and improve our financial choices, save and spend smarter and ultimately live better.

Published in the US as Dollars and Sense.

Critic reviews

Engaging and funny, rife with anecdotes and advice, the book defangs a difficult topic while teaching a lot.

A user-friendly and often entertaining treatise on how to be a more discerning, vastly more aware handler of money.

If you want to know why you always buy a bigger television than you intended, or why you think it's perfectly fine to spend a few dollars on a cup of coffee at Starbucks, or why people feel better after taking a 50-cent aspirin but continue to complain of a throbbing skull when they're told the pill they took just cost one penny, Ariely has the answer. (Daniel Gross)

Ariely raises the bar for everyone. in the increasingly crowded field of popular cognitive science and behavioural economics, he writes with an unusual combination of verve and sagacity.

If you want to get better at making good financial decisions, read “Dollars and Sense”…What the two authors do brilliantly is take behavioral economics and make it accessible.

Pretty good money dealing structure

Love it because has crucial and specific points of managing money.
This book goes to any person. Anyone should read it.
Contains good and simple topic terms with examples.

Copy/Paste of "Dollars and Sense" book :(

It is so, so disappointing to realize that this book is practically Copy/Paste of "Dollars and Sense", same author(s) book (please correctly me if I’m wrong and such detail of same content/ different title is mentioned somewhere and I’ve missed it).

Why? Why one would deceive us readers by publishing practically same book with different title?
Unfortunately similarly is with the book “Payoff” that is content-wise pretty much Copy/Paste of Dan Ariely’s earlier books.
Why?
It looks that one of the possible reasons is GREED, what else it could be?
It's probably 100% legal, but it simply doesn't feel right.

Summary:
Dan Ariely's presentation on YouTube was recommended to me. I liked it a lot and since in presentation he mentioned that he wrote books I went checking for his books. Found that he wrote several books and went listening “Predictabily Irrational” (date wise first published on Audible)” and liked it a lot. For me, a true 5 stars master piece with pinch of great humor. Wow I thought, this guy is amazing, let me get all of his books.
I went buying total of 7 Audio books with Dan Ariely as author or co-author available on Audible (plus "The End of Rational Economics" - Harvard Business Review).
“The Upside of Irrationality” great, another 5 stars,
“The honest truth about dishonesty”, great another 5 stars. I’m thinking, wow, this looks so good to be true, this guy is amazing.
And then reality kicks in. “Irrationally Yours” – short answers earlier published in newspapers, not so great, but hey, anybody can have a bad day or a book.
I went on, “Payoff” such a disappointment, content-wise practically Copy/Paste from earlier books.
“Dollars and Sense”, wow, great book, 5 stars, guy is back, I’m happy for him.
And then very last one “Small Change: Money Mishaps and How to Avoid Them” such a disappointment, practically Copy/Paste of “Dollars and Sense”.
To quote the author: “What’s going on here?”
Wondering if somebody has acquired Gordon Gecko’s “greed is good” attitude?

And, to paraphrase the author, endings are so important since we remember the endings the most.
In my case, after listening Total of 7 Dan Ariely's books, I went from initial total excitement and praise of the author, to this final finding of duplicate book(s), that made me feel so disappointed and created such a bad ending experience for me.
Pity, it had all the potential to be, for me, one of THE best authors, my hero, but Gecko type of behavior is far from my idea of a hero.
Hoping that future books from Dan will be intresting, relevant, inspiring and funny as he have demostrated that he can be.
For the time being...
Bad ending, Gecko, you blew it
disappointingly yours H