• The house I did not buy at Rs 46 lakh three years back now costs Rs 1.1 crore.
• The Rs 5,000 I put in a mutual fund three years ago is now worth Rs 15,000. I regret not putting in Rs 5 lakh.
• The best-performing fund slipped as soon as I bought it.
• I sell a stock after holding it for years, and it begins to fly like a kite the day I sell it.
• My neighbour got a super price for his land; I did not for mine.
• I have the wrong insurance policy, but am holding on to it.
• The price of my car dropped a week after I bought it.

I feel unlucky with my financial decisions. Here I am, a perfectly normal sort of a person with a good job, a great family, in control of most of my life. Except for one thought that rankles in my overall feeling of well-being. I feel that I constantly take financial decisions that are not so cool.

If you find any of the above even a little bit familiar, take heart, most of us feel exactly the same way. Did you know that the human mind is programmed to fall into some behavioural traps that cost us big money? A relatively new branch of Economics, called Behavioural Finance, lays down a paradigm that is different from traditional Economics, where all people were rational, all economic choices were the best possible, and markets were mostly in equilibrium.

This meant there was a perfect world out there, where men were calculating machines with zero emotions such as fear, greed, regret and anticipation, and with perfect information about all products, services and prices at all points of time. But when psychologist-economist Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize for his work in Behavioural Finance, this more real branch of Economics came centrestage.

And it is now accepted that the human mind is programmed to make big money mistakes due to habit - and emotion-driven actions. Though the scope of behavioural finance is much wider, we shortlist the five most common behaviour patterns that most often cost you a lot of money. And tell what you can do to sidestep these traps.

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