Money Lessons with Andrew Temte, PhD, CFA

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy opens up the machinery that moves money out of a household without ever passing through a decision. 

He starts with the narrow definition psychologists use for the word "habit" — a behavior repeated in the same surroundings until conscious decision-making drops out — and walks through the 2002 wristwatch studies that measured how often people's minds were somewhere else while they acted. 

He makes the case that habits are not a character defect but a feature that buys back mental energy, then shows why the same mechanism that makes a habit useful is what makes it nearly impossible to recall. 

AndrewTemte.com

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

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy launches a brand-new series on personal financial management by drawing the map: the six jobs your money has — earn, spend, borrow, protect, grow, and give. 

He explains why spending feels so effortless in a consumer-driven economy where household spending makes up about 68 percent of everything the U.S. produces in a year. Along the way, he introduces the idea that will guide the entire series: managing your money is stewardship of your own small economy, held in trust for your future self and the people who count on you. 

The episode closes with one simple assignment — watch the flow this week, and name the job each dollar is doing. New episodes every Saturday morning.

AndrewTemte.com

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy closes the series on equity by turning to the hardest part of owning stocks: holding on. 

He explains why volatility is the price investors pay for the equity risk premium, and why the market's steepest falls and sharpest recoveries tend to arrive back to back — which is what makes market timing a losing game. 

He looks at the evidence that the more investors trade, the less they tend to keep, and at how modern trading apps are built to encourage the very activity that erodes long-run returns. 

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In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy makes the long-run case for owning stocks — why, over a lifetime, equities have rewarded the patient owner. 

He unpacks the equity risk premium, the extra return stocks have paid over bonds and cash since 1928, and shows how compounding turns that yearly edge into life-changing wealth. 

Andy closes with direct advice for young investors — start early, invest steadily, and give compounding the decades it needs to build the wealth a last-minute scramble never can. It's a lesson about patience, access, and the quiet power of starting now.

AndrewTemte.com