There is a scene in The Wolf of Wall Street where Jordan Belfort tries to bribe FBI agents on his yacht. They won’t take the bribe, so he gets frustrated and kicks them off. He then grabs a roll of cash and starts throwing hundred-dollar bills off the boat while taunting them:

“Look, a year’s salary right here. You know what I call them? Fun coupons!”

Yes, it’s an obscene disregard for money. But the scene stuck with me for a different reason:

Beyond a certain level, isn’t money just fun coupons?

Money sits in your accounts like an unused gift card. And then it expires when you die (for you, anyway).

I’m sometimes shocked at how people view the utility of their own money.

The most common mistake I see is anchoring to outdated judgments about what things should cost. You know the person who complains about $5 gas because they remember when it was 25 cents?

These people do that with everything they buy.

Often the worst offenders are the savviest savers. They built their wealth on smart spending habits that no longer serve them, but they keep those habits because they’re comfortable.

The problem: anchoring to past judgments about cost is illogical.

Let’s say you’re 25 and have a few thousand dollars in the bank. You decide to take a short vacation and go to buy a plane ticket. You peek at first class and see it’s $1,500, while economy is $350. You laugh: “What idiot would pay $1,500 for the same flight?”

Fast forward 30 years. You’ve worked hard and done well for yourself, but you still look at that first-class ticket and say the same thing.

What makes this hard is that your 25-year-old self was right in one way: at 25, it was a waste of money.

But your wealth has now reached a level where you will literally die with that $1,150 you didn’t spend. It’s a fun coupon. And you’ve decided to die with it because you’re emotionally reacting to the price.

Now, maybe you still don’t want to spend your fun coupons on first-class flights. But shouldn’t you be spending them on something?

The next objection will be: “I’m not doing X because I’m happy with the cheaper option,” or “I’m happy not doing X.” First, have you tried X? Try it. If you don’t like it or it doesn’t matter to you, don’t do it again.

But you shouldn’t object to it until you’ve tried it.

What this takes is System 2 thinking instead of System 1 thinking, in the Kahneman sense (Thinking, Fast and Slow).

System 1 is your fast, emotional, gut reaction to the price.

But you need System 2: the spreadsheet and a projection of what you’ll leave behind. When you move into that world, you realize you’ll either try something or die with a pile of money you never spent.

Spend those fun coupons.