"It doesn't feel like spending"

The coat was two hundred and twenty pounds and it didn't feel like two hundred and twenty pounds. It felt like a tap. That's not carelessness. It's what the card is for.

Drazen Prelec and George Loewenstein, in 1998, described what they called the pain of paying, the small discomfort of handing money over, and how it depends on whether the paying is tied to the getting. Cash is tightly coupled. The note leaves your hand as the coat arrives. A credit card decouples them. The coat arrives now and the paying happens weeks later, as a line in a statement, and the pain that would have attached to the coat attaches to nothing in particular. Priya Raghubir and Joydeep Srivastava, in 2008, found across four studies that people were willing to spend more with a card than with cash, more when a card logo was merely present, and more with tokens than with notes. An earlier book in this series uses both studies for buying when low. I'm using them for the balance, because the balance is what a decade of painless coats adds up to.

The card does one more thing that cash never did, and chapter 3 touched it. It hides the running total. A wallet with cash in it gets thinner and you can feel the thinning. A card doesn't. The coat, the meal, the thing for the house and the train ticket all go through the same tap, and none of them shows up until the statement, and the statement is a list of forty lines that you don't open. You're spending from an account whose balance you never see at the point of spending, and Raghubir's finding is that people spend more when the money isn't real to them, and nothing is less real than a number in an unopened email.

So "it doesn't feel like spending" is the truest thing you could say about the card, and it's not a defence. It's the mechanism. A payment method that doesn't feel like paying is one that gets used more, by design, and the balance is the design working on you for years.

The fix isn't to feel worse. It's to bring the feeling back where it belongs, at the point of purchase, and chapter 21 does that by living on the account, where the balance falls as you spend and the falling is the feeling the card removed.