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The world is a tumultuous place. The value of currency fluctuates constantly: by the day and the hour. Consumers struggle to mind their money through fiscally responsible decisions in the midst of chronic volatility and future uncertainty (Joireman et al. 2005; Sato 2011). In addition, the Edelman Trust Barometer shows there is declining trust in government and business (Harrington 2017). To cope with financial ambiguity, consumers adopt strategies including personal budgeting (Wagoner 2011), willful cognitive disengagement, rational ignorance (Caplan 2001), and boycotting traditional markets (Yosupov 2015). With varying levels of financial literacy, consumers navigate financial decision-making using a combination of prescribed and folk/lay semantics (Baroni et al. 2011), and utilizing and foregoing institutional advice, assistance, and programming. This session tightly ties to the ACR 2018 conference theme,“Trust in Doubt? Consuming in a Post Trust World,” addressing the issue of consumer financial decision-making in a low trust context. Two questions guide this session: 1) how do consumers orient to institutions when seeking fiscal responsibility in low trust contexts and 2) how do consumers operationalize semantics to make sound financial decisions. The first paper examines consumers’ efforts to use precommitment programs to inspire healthy habits. The author shows that consumers sign up for a pre-commitment program through their health insurance provider and voluntarily risk guaranteed financial resources to incentivize themselves to engage in healthier eating. This provider-designed program motivates compliance by linking …