Don’t Let Technology Crack Your Nest Egg: Rethinking Personal Finance for the Digital Age

When Ken Kamen launched his financial services career, technology had just begun to transform how we earn, spend, save, and invest money—along with every other aspect of our lives. Today, nearly four decades later, we have access to boundless possibilities with only a few keystrokes. Technology empowers us by making countless tasks easier and speedier to accomplish, but it also compounds our human tendencies to act impulsively and emotionally, both of which are enemies of long-term financial security. Computers and search engines have lulled us into complacency, making it easy to find just-in-time answers to all our questions. The unexpected consequence has been a decline in the desire, and even the skills, to plan ahead. In Don’t Let Technology Crack Your Nest Egg, Kamen presents startling facts that reveal how our reliance on technology poses growing economic dangers. For example, our addiction to our screens leads us to squander our most precious resource: time. Aspirational consumption has become such a budget-breaker that 60% of millennials say their #1 money-saving plan is to stop following social media. The incremental growth of cashless transactions makes us increasingly lax about tracking our spending. And although computers provide us access to a cornucopia of information, many people carelessly put their trust in “knowledge” from unreliable sources. In the real world, we guard our wallets and lock our doors to protect ourselves from unknown threats. But in the virtual world, we are cavalier about allowing motivated parties to invade our privacy and track our behavior, manipulate our buying decisions, and sway our opinions. We trust that simplistic, computer-generated solutions are comprehensive enough to provide carefully considered recommendations for our own particular needs. We allow our cyberself to wander the internet, compromising our identity and acting as an unsupervised agent on our behalf in our interactions and transactions with strangers. Kamen explores the wide-ranging consequences these new forces can have on our financial futures. This book will be cautionary and eye-opening both to older readers with a nest egg to protect and to younger readers just building one—to anyone, in fact, wanting financial insight into navigating a world that is rapidly being transformed by technology.