Mental Accounting Studio – Tool for the Deep Dive Series

In the Deep Dive Series: Behavioral Money, we explore the psychology behind financial behavior. The blog on Mental Accounting this Friday will refer to a practical tool: the Mental Accounting Studio.

Why a Mental Accounting Studio?

Money never feels the same, even though every euro has the same objective value. A salary payment feels different than a cashback. This is called mental accounting: our brain labels money, which changes how we spend it.

This tool was built to make that behavior visible and measurable. You can log your transactions and add behavioral attributes such as:

• Conscious / Auto (was the spending intentional or automatic?)

• Pain (1–5) (how painful did the payment feel?)

• Regret (none, low, medium, high)

• Notes (free reflections about the context or feeling)

  
  

The tool then visualizes your data in clear dashboards:

• Average pain per month

• Comparison of Conscious vs Auto spending

• Regret analysis

• Spending categories overview

This way, you gain unique insights into how emotions and biases shape your money choices.

How does it work?

1. Open the tool in your browser.

2. Manually add your transactions (or start with the sample dataset download and import it, see below).

3. Analyze your data through the charts. Click a bar to filter and explore deeper.

4. Everything is stored locally in your session only.

If you want to reuse your data later, you’ll need to export it via the tool and save it yourself.

Why is this interesting?

• It shows how feelings drive financial decisions.

• It highlights your personal biases: do you spend more automatically? Do certain categories cause more regret?

• You can experiment: change your habits and see the effect in the dashboards.

Important to know

This tool works entirely in your browser. No data is saved externally. This design choice means:

• ✅ Safer (your transactions remain private).

• ❌ Less user-friendly (you need to import/export yourself).

That’s also why I’m not a fan of tools that connect directly to your bank. They feel convenient, but it also means your financial behavior is stored and analyzed by a third party.

With the Mental Accounting Studio, you choose insight without giving up your privacy.

mental-accounting-2025-savings25.json

Download JSON • 60KB