7 TED Talks that will make you smarter about your money

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Keith Chen, behavioral economist and economics professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management, discusses how the language we speak could be keeping us back from getting rich.

Languages can either be "futureless" or "futured," he explains in his TED talk. His research has found that languages without a concept for the future — "It rains tomorrow," instead of "It will rain tomorrow" — correlate strongly with high savings rates.

If the future feels more distant from the present, that's going to make it harder to save money, he explains. On the other hand, if you speak a futureless language — where the present and future are spoken about the same way — you're going to feel the same way about them, making it easier to save in the present moment for the future.

According to Chen, this subtle difference in grammar could help explain why citizens of the US (English is a futured language) save much less than people in other countries.

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If you want to teach your kids to be rich, entrepreneur Cameron Herold's TED talk will give you something to chew on. "I think we should be raising kids to be entrepreneurs instead of lawyers," Herald says. "I think we miss an opportunity to find these kids who have the entrepreneurial traits, and to groom them or show them that being an entrepreneur is actually a cool thing."

He shares his own childhood entrepreneurial endeavors, from starting a caddy business to buying and reselling soda pops to a bridge club of 70-year-old women. He also shares smart money habits to pass along to your kids, and touches on the contentious topic of allowances — and why you should not use them.

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We have "two selves": the present self and the future self, behavioral economist Daniel Goldstein explains in his TED Talk. Every day, we make decisions that have good or bad consequences for our future selves — oftentimes, our decisions satisfy the present self and "trounce all over the dreams" of the future self, he says.

"Saving is a classic two-selves problem," Goldstein explains. "The present self does not want to save at all. It wants to consume. Whereas the future self wants the present self to save."

He then discusses how we can stop neglecting our future selves and start making decisions that will result in future financial success.

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In his TED talk, entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk demands his audience do exactly what makes them happy. "Look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, 'What do I want to do every day for the rest of my life?'" he says. "Do that. I promise you can monetize it."

In this day and age, the formula for success is simpler than ever, so there's no excuse to not do what you want, he argues: "We're going through a gold rush of branding. In the old days, to become a brand, you needed a lot of mainstream media attention — but now, if you get talked about enough in all these social webs, you can get there. You can build your brand or your company's brand, but it all starts with that first moment when you look in the mirror. 'What do I want to do?' So many people will kill it if they do!"

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Not sure how to invest in a post-economic crash world? Social commentator Geoff Mulgan answers just that in his TED Talk.

He explains how a financial crisis can actually evoke positive change and how we can use it to our advantage. "I think one of the lessons of history is that even the deepest crises can be moments of opportunity," he says. "They bring ideas from the margins to the mainstream."

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"A lot of us resonate with this phrase that money can't buy happiness," social science researcher Michael Norton says in his talk at TEDxCambridge. "And I want to suggest that, in fact, that's wrong. And in fact, if you think that, you're actually just not spending it right."

Money often makes us feel selfish, he explains, and he proposes that the reason money doesn't make us happy is because we're spending it on the wrong things — in particular, on ourselves.

He put this hypothesis to the test by having one group of people spend money on themselves and a separate group of people give money away. He then measured their happiness. He found that pro-social spending not only benefits others, but it can benefit you and your work.