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QUIRK: HAVING TOO MANY CREDIT CARDS WITH BALANCES When you have balances on multiple credit cards, mathematically there's just one correct way to minimize your total payments over a set

period of time: Send all your extra money to the card with the highest interest rate until that card is paid off. Then focus on the one that has the next highest rate. Another school of

thought, which focuses more on good psychology than pure math, is to pay off the smallest balance first, so you'll be energized by that quick achievement. But most people do neither,

reports Neale Mahoney, a University of Chicago economics professor. They dole out money to different cards in proportion to how big the card balances are, his research found. That's

because humans are uncomfortable betting on one thing, Mahoney says. We've heard we're not supposed to put all our eggs in one basket, and it makes us nervous to do so, even in

situations such as credit card payoffs, where it makes the most sense. We're irrational in other ways with credit cards, too. Mahoney is now studying the common practice of carrying

high-interest debt on credit cards even when we have enough money in savings (often earning negligible interest) to pay it off. FIX: PAY OFF HIGH-INTEREST CARDS FIRST Focus like a laser on

your highest-interest card, and send all the money you possibly can there until you burn the balance. And don't consider your savings account off-limits. Let's say you have a

$2,000 balance on a card charging 18 percent interest (about the national average). Paying it down at the rate of $50 a month will cost you $1,077 in interest over the years. You're

better off pulling $2,000 from your savings to pay the balance, then putting that $50 a month back into your savings account. If you have an emergency before you've saved enough to

cover it, you can borrow on your card to cover it. You might also consider playing the balance-transfer game: Move the balances from your high-interest cards to a new card offering a low

(maybe zero percent) introductory rate for a specified stretch of time (often a year). You'll probably pay a onetime fee of around 4 percent, but that will still buy you time to pay off

the balance. Do this if you're comfortably convinced you'll be able to pay off the balance within the introductory period. And definitely don't convince yourself it's OK

to run up a new balance on an old card. That would be self-defeating. QUIRK: WE SAVE MONEY IN ROUND NUMBERS We love our round numbers. Workers tend to contribute to their 401(k) plans in

multiples of five — usually 5 or 10 percent of their salary — even when the evidence shows a different number might be more sensible. For example, most companies will match a substantial

part of your contribution up to 6 percent of your salary; why stop at 5 percent? But we do. Similarly, academic researchers working with Voya Financial showed that the higher the suggested

percentage of deduction, the higher that workers set their contributions — until the suggestion hit 11 percent, which they ignored. They much preferred 10 percent, even if a higher level was

both affordable and sensible. Many workers planning their future Social Security strategy also peg round numbers, according to researchers with the Anderson School of Management at the

University of California, Los Angeles. Associate professor Stephen Spiller and his colleagues found in one study that many workers, when asked at what age they intended to start taking

Social Security, picked the age when that benefit, stated annually, would clear the nice round number of $20,000. Yet when that same benefit was expressed not as an annual figure but in

terms of a monthly payment — in this case, an ungainly $1,692 — workers would often choose a different age for beginning withdrawals. FIX: OPTIMIZE CONTRIBUTIONS FOR RETIREMENT Play your own

mind games to build your retirement savings. If you get a bonus or a raise, pretend it doesn't exist and just shovel that money into your 401(k) or other savings account. Go for the

round number if you must, though aim high: If you've been trying to put away 6 percent of your salary, aim for 10 percent. A good way to defer gratification, Spiller notes, is to take

time to visualize the money you'll have in retirement and the specific ways you'll enjoy spending it. The more detailed your imaginary retirement is, the better you'll be at

saving for it. _Longtime journalist Linda Stern is the former Wall Street and personal finance editor at Thomson Reuters._