"I blame my mother." "Everybody else is doing it." "The little voice in my head told me so." "It was the dog -- I swear!"

It's easy to brush off bad behavior with these time-honored yarns. But all eye-rolling aside, our families, the Joneses, and even that persistent little voice really do wield a fair amount of influence over our daily money decisions, say the authors of The True Cost of Happiness: The Real Story Behind Managing Your Money.

It's the failure to examine how such dynamics affect financial behavior that gets people stuck in the gap between wanting to change their behavior and actually changing it.

"There's a huge disconnect between what people really want out of their lives and the ways in which they conduct their financial lives," says financial journalist Stacey Tisdale, who cowrote the book with financial "life planner" Paula Boyer Kennedy. "Bringing mindfulness and awareness to your finances helps you bridge that disconnect and allows you to redirect your resources toward what is really important."

So, back to your mother. Only this time I'm serious.

The authors emphasize the importance of recognizing the strongest influences on our adult behavior. Cue parents (or your primary caregivers). Long after they stop bankrolling our food, clothing, and shelter, Mom and Dad can continue to have a profound effect on our adult financial behavior. That's not necessarily a drawback, of course. The trick is to recognize the valuable influences that guide your money decisions and ignore the ones that cause you financial harm.

Don't assume that you will need an extreme money makeover. Just start with small steps.

Below are excerpts from my interview with the authors of The True Cost of Happiness and their advice on the best way to handle the most common money baggage.

Respect Mom and Dad, but don't blindly follow their cues
Stacey Tisdale: Your model of what you do with money came from those very first lessons that you saw. I was overwhelmed in my research for this book by how much of that came from the ways in which our primary caregivers relate to money.

Case in point: My parents grew up poor and black in the South in the thirties and forties, so as they were growing up, at some level, on some unconscious level, they had to tell themselves that they were not going to let money stand in the way of what they really wanted. They were not going to let money be the reason that they didn't have certain things and do certain things with their lives. I grew up seeing that, so I grew up with the message "Don't let money be an obstacle to what you really want."

That message has some curses and some blessings. The blessing is I probably wouldn't have taken the past four years and freelanced and written this book and stayed home with my child if I let money be my sole guiding force. But on the curse side, there are probably some times when I should have looked at the financial consequences. My becoming aware that that was at work in my adult financial behavior gives me that "Oh, that is what is really happening here," and at that moment, I can make a different choice.

Don't be afraid to ignore the standard set by the Joneses
Paula Boyer Kennedy: There's a tinge of fear in the messages all around us: We're told we need to have certain things or else we won't be happy; that if we don't send our children to certain schools they won't be able to compete; that by not driving the very best car there's no evidence of our success. Continued...