Does thinking about making money help people save money? Behavioral economics—monetary wisdom across genders: Ardent love of money aspirations and $1 million resource allocation

Abstract

Squandering lottery winners spend their money, leading to bankruptcy, murder, and suicide—a lottery curse. With a fixed amount of money, saving and spending are mutually exclusive. To study ordinary citizens’ behavioral decision-making, we follow Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s advice, incorporate ardent monetary aspirations—Rich, Motivator, Budget, Make, and Success as yoked antecedents of the latent construct—Monetary Wisdom (MW), frame MW in the context of income (Time 1), and explore individuals’ $1 million resource allocation (Time 2). Among full-time managers, thinking about Making money helps them Spend more and Save less. However, university students have lower incomes and more difficulty making money than managers. This study challenges the existing findings of full-time managers. We theorize that thinking about Making money helps students Save more and Spend less. We ask 443 students to imagine that after fulfilling tax obligations, they could freely allocate $1 million lottery money to 20 options (sum = 100%). Our results support our theory. Men have significantly higher incomes than women. The Paths from Factors Rich and Budget to MW are significantly stronger for men than women. With higher income, thoughts on becoming Rich and Budgeting money cause men to Spend more and Save less. Vigorous Budgeting thoughts may cause the depletion of self-control power, leading to self-control failure and Spending. Wanting to become Rich incites Spending. With lower income, thinking about Making money causes women to Save more and Spend less. Interestingly, women spend significantly more money on experiential and material consumptions and family, and less on investments (business and education) than men. The differences in Saving and Donating money to charity are non-significant across genders. Monetary Wisdom is not significantly related to income. We help people make happy, healthy, wealthy, ethical decisions, and mental accounting and avoid the lottery curse. The life you save may be your own.