Happy Thanksgiving!

1. Can Gratitude Raise Your Net Worth?
“Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all
abundance.”
– Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth
The Emotion that Helps us Make Better Financial Choices
Gratitude is an important element to experience
contentment and inner wealth. But does it have a
positive impact on our financial wealth?
According to a research study published June 2014
in Psychological Science, when people feel grateful,
they make better financial decisions. Being in a state
of gratitude made participants more likely to have
the patience to save for a higher return on their
money. The study demonstrated that gratitude helps
people delay gratification and save more money
effortlessly – without having to strive for willpower or contemplate the “rule of 72.”
David DeSteno of Northeastern University Department of Psychology led the inter-disciplinary
research project, entitled “Gratitude: A Tool for Reducing Economic Impatience.” The study’s
aim was to weigh how various emotions affected people’s ability to make better financial
decisions by choosing to receive a greater amount of money in 30 days versus a lesser amount
immediately. Adult participants were given a choice between receiving $54 now or $80 in 30
days. To test the influence of specific emotions on their financial decision-making, participants
were directed to spend 5 minutes journaling about something that would lead them to feel
either grateful, happy, or neutral before making their decision. Those who were either happy
or neutral were very likely to take the $54 offered instead of waiting for the $80, with no
significant difference between those in a happy or a neutral state of mind. However,
researchers discovered that those who put themselves in a grateful state of mind had a
noteworthy increase of patience and self-control. Not only were the participants in the state of
gratitude more likely to wait 30 days to receive the $80, the results also showed
that more gratitude the participants reported feeling, the more willing they were to wait for the
larger return. While the dollar figure was modest, the rate of return was impressive – a
monthly return of 48%, or an annualized return of 577.78%.
“Be Thankful, Save More… Gratitude Helps Us Reach Financial Goals” declared Psychological
Science. “A sizable body of research shows that people tend to discount the value of future
rewards in favor of short-term gratification, but a new paper… finds that thankfulness triggers
patience and a willingness to hold out for greater monetary gain.”

2. Money Plus Emotions Doesn’t Usually Equal Good Decisions
There are countless ways in which emotions affect our financial choices, and almost always, the
outcome is not positive. Indeed, the field of behavioral economics documents countless ways
that investors self-sabotage when emotions dictate their investment decisions. Impatience,
distrust, and sadness can compromise sound decisions where money is concerned.
One study showed that those who could not feel emotions
at all (the result of a brain lesions compromising affective
processes) made better investment choices than those of
similar IQ who had “normal” emotions – because those
who could not feel emotions were most likely to act on
logic rather than fear of loss, which led them to make
mathematically illogical decisions. It may be that gratitude
is the only emotional state proven to lead
to better financial choices.
How does gratitude foster more economic
patience? Perhaps because gratitude leads us to be
thankful for what we have, rather than desiring what we
don’t have.
The first Principle of Prosperity is to “THINK” from a
prosperous mindset. When we are consumed with thoughts of scarcity and “not enough”
rather than gratitude, we act in a way that brings about more scarcity, clinging to what we have
rather than saving and investing for the long term.
The Benefits of Delayed Gratification
The Stanford ““Marshmallow Experiment” tested to see if children could wait 15 minutes to
receive a second marshmallow (or other goodie) along with the first. Through follow-up studies
over many years, the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment showed that the ability to delay
gratification was tied to big benefits later in life. The children who successfully wait for the
second marshmallow before eating the first went on to become teens and then adults who as a
group average higher SAT scores, better social skills, higher levels of educational attainment,
and lower rates of substance abuse and obesity.
Obviously, the ability to delayed gratification also presents a clear advantage when it comes to
a person’s financial success. “On average, we increased people’s financial patience by about 12
percent,” said DeSteno, who led the Gratitude study. “That doesn’t sound like much, but
imagine if you could increase people’s savings by that much.”

3. Are You Saving with Gratitude?
It’s clear that for both our peace of mind and our net worth, we need to be cultivating gratitude
all year long, not just around the Thanksgiving table. After all, who doesn’t want to save 12%
more effortlessly?
Some simple suggestions for bringing MORE gratitude into your life:
• Keep a daily gratitude journal and develop the habit of writing in it either every morning
or evening.
• Set aside time each week to write appreciation and thank-you notes to the people you
are grateful for in your life.
• Cultivate the practice of Positive Focus. Begin your day, your meals, even your meetings
thinking or speaking about what you are grateful for. Especially when circumstances are
challenging, look for the silver lining and the learning.
Whether waiting in line at the store, dealing with a work challenge, or celebrating a “win” with
our children, gratitude simply makes everything better.
©Jamie Mundy, CORE Financial Group, ©Prosperity Economics Movement