how can mental accounting be prevented 
the key to dealing with mental accounting and not succumbing to it is to treat money as interchangeable and not give it labels don t consider certain money less important because it came from an unexpected source or continue to park money in a savings account paying little to no interest when you have debts to repay with much higher borrowing costs the bottom linemental accounting is a trap that many including seasoned investors fall into the majority of people assign subjective value to money usually based on where it came from and how it s intended to be used while that approach may sound harmless and totally reasonable it can work against us and leave us economically worse off 