The Author
Jason Henrichs
Chief Operating Officer
Jason is a serial entrepreneur with a long history in financial services. He began his career making boxes in the shipping department of Deluxe Check Printers over 15 years ago. He’s come a long way since then, helping both public and private companies to build products that better meet the needs of their customers and to discover the digital world. Most recently he helped a large public company overhaul its strategy to offer multiple financial products tailored to the needs of students.
Jason believes deeply in the power of high technology to improve people’s lives. He has participated in high-tech start-ups as an advisor (of companies building everything from mobile phone apps to travel advice), an investor (as Managing Director at Rock Maple Ventures), and an executive (as the Chief Operating Officer of US Genomics). For Jason, PerkStreet’s ability to use technology to reinvent banking and rewards is what really gets him jazzed. Jason has a degree from Harvard University and is a frequent speaker on the subjects of innovation and customer-centric organizations. When not working from a coffee shop, Jason can be found doing just about anything active outdoors.
Photo by Bryce Vickmark Photography
While credit cards aren’t always the evil piece of plastic the media would have you believe, they have a sneaky way of increasing our spending, even when we think we are using them responsibly (e.g. paying our balance off in full each month). Research by Dunn & Bradstreet and several others shows that you will spend 12-18% more when using a credit card. Why? I won’t cite all the reasons that have been uncovered, but I found several of these intriguing and impactful in my own life. This is the first in a series of posts on how our brains can trick us into bad behaviors.
Trap 1
Ever wonder why it seems expensive to spend $20 on a CD, but $20 to go out for dinner seems cheap? Here’s a short version of a great article (read the full article here: http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/04/avoid-relativity-trap-how-thinking.php ): it’s difficult for us to compare values of unrelated items and as a result we think about the expense of an item relative to similar items, rather than on global level. For example, when I bought my TV, I compared the cost relative to other TVs instead of thinking about where else would I spend this money. Had I used my debit card, I would have noticed that I was about to use half the money in my checking account and asked myself: “how do I want to spend this money” instead of “which TV is the better deal.” If I had asked myself this question, I would have a much smaller TV on my wall.
My father has a less scientific saying when my mom comes home with an item she purchased on sale: “think how much you would have saved if you didn’t buy anything at all.”
To be continued…