Notes

This book gives general information about an everyday habit. It isn't financial advice, and it's no substitute for a debt adviser who knows your situation. The organisations I mention are free UK services as I found them in September 2026. The book makes no claim about what anyone earns or spends.

I've kept sources out of the chapters where I could so they read easily. Here they are by chapter, with the limits I'm aware of. Unless I say otherwise, I read the published summary of each paper and not the full text. I checked each paper for a retraction or correction notice in September 2026 and found none, though the Dunn paper carries an erratum notice whose content I didn't read. Where a chapter isn't listed, it rests on my own reasoning. That includes chapters 1, 2, 4, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 20, 21, 22, 25 and 26. The restaurant, Lisbon, the kitchen, the car and the ski trip are invented.

Before you start. StepChange, Citizens Advice and National Debtline are named on the NHS page on financial worries, as verified for earlier books in this series.

Chapter 3. Frank, Levine and Dijk, "Expenditure cascades", Review of Behavioral Economics 1, 2014, pages 55 to 73. A model tested against savings data. The claim that nobody at the table knows anyone's finances is mine.

Chapter 5. Solnick and Hemenway, "Is more always better? A survey on positional concerns", Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 37, 1998, pages 373 to 383. A survey using hypothetical choices. Half of respondents chose the world with half the real income and higher relative income. The reading that position isn't the evening is mine.

Chapter 6. Boothby, Cooney, Sandstrom and Clark, "The liking gap in conversations: do people like us more than we think?", Psychological Science 29, 2018, pages 1742 to 1756, used in an earlier book in this series. Dunn, Aknin and Norton, "Spending money on others promotes happiness", Science 319, 2008, pages 1687 to 1688. The distinction between giving and matching is mine.

Chapter 7. Savitsky, Epley and Gilovich, "Do others judge us as harshly as we think? Overestimating the impact of our failures on others' judgments", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, 2001, pages 44 to 56, as verified for an earlier book in this series. What the table actually thinks is my observation and not a finding.

Chapter 8. Van Boven and Gilovich, "To do or to have? That is the question", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85, 2003, pages 1193 to 1202, used in the earlier book You didn't want it yesterday. Quoidbach, Dunn, Petrides and Mikolajczak, "Money giveth, money taketh away: the dual effect of wealth on happiness", Psychological Science 21, 2010, pages 759 to 763. The application to the kitchen is mine.

Chapter 10. Prelec and Loewenstein, "The red and the black: mental accounting of savings and debt", Marketing Science 17, 1998, pages 4 to 28, and Raghubir and Srivastava, "Monopoly money: the effect of payment coupling and form on spending behavior", Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 14, 2008, pages 213 to 225, both as verified for the earlier book You didn't want it yesterday. The application to the split is mine.

Chapter 15. Dunn and colleagues as above. The distinction between giving and leakage is mine.

Chapter 17. Kasser and Ryan, "A dark side of the American dream: correlates of financial success as a central life aspiration", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65, 1993, pages 410 to 422. Dittmar, Bond, Hurst and Kasser, "The relationship between materialism and personal well-being: a meta-analysis", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 107, 2014, pages 879 to 924. Both are correlational, which the chapter says. The claim that keeping up is materialism in disguise is mine.

Chapter 18. The earlier book on saving is Pay yourself on payday. The next book in the series covers living on credit.

Chapter 19. Frank and colleagues as above. The claim that someone at the table can't afford it is my expectation and not a finding.

Chapter 23. Gollwitzer and Sheeran, "Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis of effects and processes", Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38, 2006, pages 69 to 119. The rule hasn't been tested as a package, and what I say to expect is my expectation and not a finding.

Chapter 24. The debt services as above.