Last week I found myself at a local car yard, trying not to get distracted by knobby-tyred Jeeps. I was talking shop with the business manager in the glass-walled back office whose job it is to get folks to seal the deals.
Surprisingly, she and I encounter essentially the same problem: people who mentally latch on to a specific payment in their heads - what's known as "anchoring". Once they get a car price in their heads that they feel works, there's no budging them. They want that deal... at all costs.
The difference is, in her case she'd like to increase their payments in order to sell them add-ons like insurance or protective car coatings. In mine, I'm trying to budge people to make higher repayments in order to save themselves a pile of interest!
Anchoring happens with mortgages, too. What are the numbers that our minds latch on to? There are probably three that we hear in our heads: the house price, the interest rate and especially the minimum payment. That last one blares particularly loud - once we set our minds on a payment we think we can handle, we'll move heaven and earth (and whanau) to make it happen.
