Welcome to Personal Finance Reimagined, the organization challenging outdated financial education and exploring a better way forward. I’m Jeff Hulett, a banker, entrepreneur, professor, and the founder of PFR.
Over the years, I’ve seen firsthand how personal finance education has failed to keep up with the realities of the modern world. We still teach financial literacy as if the information is scarce, as if people need to memorize details about mortgages, credit cards, and investments to succeed. But that approach is outdated—and it’s failing the very people it’s meant to help.
That’s why I created Personal Finance Reimagined. It’s not just another financial literacy program—it’s a fundamental shift in how we teach people to make financial decisions. At PFR, we focus on decision-making first, because in today’s world, financial success isn’t about having more information—it’s about knowing how to process the overwhelming amount of information already available.
So, why does this change matter? Because the way we’ve been teaching personal finance is stuck in the past, and it’s time to fix that. Let’s dive into the problem—and more importantly, the solution.
The Problem: An Outdated Approach to Personal Finance
For a long time, personal finance education focused on gathering information about financial products—mortgages, credit cards, loans, and investment options. That made sense when financial information was scarce. If you wanted to make a good decision, you had to seek out the limited details available, compare a few key points, and make a choice.
But today, we live in the Information Age, and everything has flipped 180 degrees. Now, financial information isn’t just available—it’s everywhere. Instead of hunting for financial facts, we’re drowning in them. And worse, not all of it is accurate. With a few AI-generated prompts, you can access more information than a banker from 30 years ago could in an entire career.
So if information overload is the real challenge today, why is personal finance still being taught as if information is scarce? The traditional method—teaching financial products like divisions in a bank—no longer serves students. It feels more like bank marketing than real financial education.
The Shift: Personal Finance Is a Decision-Making Challenge
The problem isn’t about having enough information—it’s about making good decisions with an overwhelming amount of it. The reality is that financial success in the modern world isn’t about memorizing details. It’s about developing a strong decision-making process—one that works across all major financial choices, from buying a home to managing debt to planning for retirement.
Here’s the key shift:
✅ Personal finance isn’t an information accumulation problem anymore—it’s a decision problem.
And if we want to teach financial success effectively, we need to start by understanding how people actually make decisions. This brings us to the core of Personal Finance Reimagined: a decision-first approach grounded in evolutionary biology, neurobiology, behavioral psychology, and structured decision-making.
The Science of Smart Financial Decisions
To truly change the way we teach personal finance, we need to build education around how the human brain makes decisions.
1. Evolutionary Biology: Why We Struggle with Long-Term Financial Planning
Natural selection shaped our brains to prioritize immediate survival, not long-term financial planning. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors weren’t worried about retirement savings—they were focused on escaping predators, finding food, and protecting their tribe.
Because our brains evolved for short-term survival, we’re naturally wired to seek instant gratification over long-term rewards. This is why saving money, avoiding debt, and investing for the future can feel unnatural—it’s a constant battle between our modern financial goals and our ancient instincts.
2. Neurobiology: The Biochemicals Behind Our Financial Decisions
If evolutionary biology explains why financial decisions are hard, neurobiology explains how they happen in our brains.
Our financial choices are driven by neurotransmitters, including:
Dopamine – The “reward” biochemicals that fuel spending and impulse purchases.
Oxytocin – The "love" or “trust” biochemicals that make us feel safe when making financial choices (sometimes even when we shouldn’t).
Acetylcholine – The biochemical that helps us learn from mistakes and adjust future decisions.
Serotonin – The neurotransmitter linked to long-term satisfaction, crucial for building financial patience and resilience.
Understanding these biochemical helps us recognize why certain financial decisions feel good in the moment but hurt us later—and why we need a structured system to override impulsive mistakes.
3. Behavioral Psychology: How Biases Sabotage Our Money Choices
Even when we have good intentions, cognitive biases influence our financial decisions in ways we don’t always recognize. Some of the most common include:
Confirmation Bias – Retaining selective information that confirms existing beliefs (e.g., someone who believes renting is the smarter financial choice only reads articles about the flexibility and lower upfront costs of renting, while ignoring counterarguments about the long-term wealth-building potential of homeownership).
Availability Bias – Over-weighting immediate, easy-to-perceive information at the expense of under-weighting longer-term, harder-to-perceive information (e.g., student lending preys on availability bias by making loans feel like "easy money" through instant approvals and deferred payments, while the harsh reality of repayment, interest accrual, and long-term financial burden only becomes clear years later).
Herd Mentality – Making financial choices based on what everyone else is doing (e.g., jumping into cryptocurrency investments at their peak because friends are making money, without understanding the risks or underlying technology).
Because these biases shape our everyday financial habits, personal finance education must focus on building better habits and behaviors—not just throwing more information at students.
4. Personal Finance Decision-Making: Creating a Repeatable Process
At its core, Personal Finance Reimagined teaches that financial success comes from a consistent, repeatable decision-making process.
Why is this important? Because no one can predict every financial situation they’ll face in life. But with the right decision process, anyone can navigate complex choices with confidence.
The good news? This process is the same across all major financial decisions. Once you master the framework, you can apply it to any financial choice—whether it’s choosing a mortgage, negotiating a salary, or investing in your future.
Even better, we now have technology to support this process. Decision process and AI tools can help filter out bad information, curate the best options, and guide users toward smarter decisions—if they know how to use them correctly.
Conclusion: The Future of Personal Finance Education
The era of memorizing financial product details is over. The future of personal finance is about teaching decision-making—and Personal Finance Reimagined is leading the way.
If you’re ready to take control of your financial future, check out our book, Making Choices, Making Money, which provides the decision-making technology you need to build a lifetime of wealth.
You don’t need to be a finance expert—you just need the right process. Let’s rethink personal finance together.
Until next time, this is Jeff Hulett, signing off from Personal Finance Reimagined. Keep making smart decisions.
Resources
📖 Grab your copy of Making Choices, Making Money today! The book includes our decision technology Definitive Choice.
📲 Learn more at www.FinanceRevamp.com.
🎙 Subscribe to Personal Finance Reimagined for more insights on making confident financial choices.
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