Did the initial phase of the pandemic cause you to overspend in an effort to make up for lost time?
If you did, you aren’t alone.
An article published last week in The New York Times, “I Spent Two Years Revenge Spending. It Was Hard to Stop,” discusses the financial phenomenon and shared the expertise of McIntire faculty member Chiraag Mittal.
Writer Lauren Larson gives a first-person account of her own splurges, and asked why such a great number of Americans came out of the earlier part of the pandemic with a greater willingness to spend.
Mittal, who studies consumer behavior and decision-making through a lens of human development and behavioral ecology, notes how the impact of extra money from government-issued stimulus checks temporarily changed consumer spending in light of the worldwide health crisis.
Mittal explains, “Death and mortality were just so salient that the immediate effects were to say, ‘You know what? I can die anytime. What’s the point of putting everything on the back burner?’”
