22 May

We've just lived through two decades of economic 'boom' times. Part of that was people losing perspective around their spending, at every scale, from what they're prepared to pay for a drink or a meal, through to the outrageous mortgages many are now struggling with. Those who swum against this stream were often called cheap or stingy, but as this piece says, that misses the point. It's more about having some degree of intentionality about your use of money. Being a grown up with it, rather than a perpetual teenager. Living 'below your means' - a wonderful phrase. All booms are really psychological phenomena. You can try to explain them using economics, but 'irrational exuberance' is about how people feel and think. They're mostly about comparison, booms are about people leveraging up to feed the comparison of status.