I know you’ve planned to buy this and buy that with your tax refund. You have a few things you want to do with your economic stimulus rebate check, too.

Let’s call this psychological spending.

It very quickly becomes overspending.

Maybe it’s because you don’t actually have the money yet, but you make one plan for it, then you make another. Somehow, you never add all the sums up. Because if you did, you’d know you were planning to spend $500 of that $300 rebate. So you never do the math and you go on making plans that will soon overwhelm the amount you’re about to get from your friends in Washington, D.C.

No, I have no intellectual back-up for this thought.

I just know people do it. I hear them. “When I get that refund, I’m going to…."

And they say people don’t make financial plans. We do. We just make too many of them, for money that’s never enough.