Money Myths
Renting is not throwing money away, and neither is most of a mortgage payment
The phrase treats rent as uniquely wasted while ignoring interest, maintenance, insurance and transaction costs. Both routes have…
Money Myths
Received wisdom about earning, saving and spending that does not hold.
21 articles · updated August 11, 2026 · page 1 of 2
Money Myths
Diamonds are not rare and the two months' salary rule was written by an agency
A single advertising campaign in the 1940s created the engagement ring convention, the slogan and the spending guideline. The scarcity was managed, not natural.
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Money Myths
Checking your own credit file does not damage it
Two different kinds of enquiry get recorded, and only one of them belongs to a lender. Conflating them has stopped people looking…
Money Myths
Carrying a credit card balance does not build anything except interest
The belief that you must leave a balance unpaid to prove you are borrowing has no basis in how repayment behaviour is reported. It…
Money Myths
The wheel has no memory, and a famous night in Monte Carlo proved it expensively
The fallacy is named after a run of one colour at a casino in 1913, when the crowd bet ever larger sums on the correction that a…
Money Myths
Einstein never called compound interest the eighth wonder of the world
The quotation appears in financial promotional material decades after his death, with no source. The mathematics behind it needs no…
Money Myths
Black Friday was named by traffic police, not by accountants
The term described the chaos in one American city on the day after Thanksgiving. The story about retailers moving into profit was a…
Money Myths
The story about prices ending in nine is itself a myth
Everyone knows the ninety-nine ending was invented to force cashiers to open the till. Almost nobody can produce evidence for it…
Money Myths
Tipping does not come from an acronym, and America tried to ban it
The word is far older than any of the phrases it supposedly abbreviates. The practice was imported, widely resented, and outlawed…
Money Myths
Nobody was queuing to jump from windows in 1929
The image comes from a comedian's joke and a handful of prominent cases that the press amplified. The suicide rate that autumn does…
Money Myths
Money and happiness have a messier relationship than either slogan admits
One influential analysis found the effect flattening above a threshold. A later one using different methods found no flattening.…
Money Myths
There is no cheapest day to book a flight, only a cheaper way to look
The advice came from an era when airlines loaded fare sales overnight and competitors matched by Tuesday morning. Pricing systems…