Will intuitive spending have catastrophic consequences?

Intuitive eating might seem OK, but does spending whatever you want seem more dangerous? Here’s why it’s probably not

“What would happen if you allowed yourself to buy anything you wanted?”

Stylist

Dacy Gillespie

has been opening an intriguing conversation lately, examining her feelings of scarcity around spending money on clothes and, most recently, posing the above question.

Dacy wrote about a month-long experiment where she let herself buy anything she wanted, avoiding burdensome decision-making and fighting scarcity mindset. I recommend a paid subscription so you can read this full post, where she taps into the parallels between intuitive spending and intuitive eating, among other insights.

As often happens when Dacy leads a discussion about money, her piece stuck in my head, and I’ve been thinking about it for days.

She voices a concern I hear often when I compare budget culture with diet culture: While it feels reasonable to get behind less-restricted eating, many people worry that spending as much as you want will have, as Dacy writes, “more catastrophic consequences” than eating whatever you want.

Awareness of diet culture is much more widespread than that of budget culture. The conversation has been happening longer. So it’s not surprising that more people are comfortable with the concept of intuitive eating — a practice that’s complex enough to merit a whole book but that can be bluntly distilled to “eating what you want when you want it.”

I think of intuitive spending in the same way: Buy what you want when you want it.

I can hear your buttholes tightening at the idea, and I understand why this practice sounds like it could be more dangerous than the intuitive eating many people have already come to know and accept.

But I assure you it’s not.

Intuitive eating vs. intuitive spending

If you think about what we’re afraid of in diet culture, it’s gaining weight. People are afraid to eat whatever they want whenever they want it, because they’re afraid of being fat. (People might say, and even believe, that their fear is health-based, but the same kind of cultural fear doesn’t exist around not eating enough food, and that’s been much more reliably proven to be detrimental to your health.)

If you listen to so much fat phobia in our culture, the end game of being fat is really bad health outcomes and early death. Those sound pretty catastrophic, if they were true.

But lots of intrepid anti-diet journalism has disproven claims like that and helped dig a lot of us out of the hole of diet culture. We feel safe attempting intuitive eating, because we realize what we eat doesn’t have the direct impact on our size and health diet culture has led us to believe it does. That doesn’t eliminate the cultural stigma against fatness — it doesn’t make airplane seats any bigger, clothing sizes more diverse, hiring managers more inclusive. But it goes a long way toward reducing our internal anti-fat biases and helping us make choices by listening to our bodies instead of outside noise.

All of this applies to intuitive spending, too.

The budget culture parallel to being fat is accumulating debt. When people with limited resources spend money without restricting, they don’t tend to run out of money; they tend to go into more and more debt. So a fear of “overspending” is actually a fear of debt. Budget culture likes to present debt as catastrophic, but it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes it’s just the way you access stuff when you don’t have other resources.

Just like fatness and health outcomes, indebtedness can correlate with negative outcomes, and we can’t discount those. Staying in debt could reduce your access to financial services; it could mean losing something important like a house or a car; it could bring harassing calls from collectors. But it doesn’t have to lead to those things. And debt alone isn’t always the cause of any of these catastrophes. Just like with health, there are a ton of systemic forces to factor in — individual spending decisions are rarely the true reason someone is in dire financial straits.

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Trust yourself

There’s a bigger point here, though. You can probably argue and find evidence to back up claims either way about whether unfettered eating or spending will lead to catastrophe. And I’ll certainly cede that the budget culture conversation is much newer than the diet culture one. We need a lot more research questioning the premise of budget culture, just like we have for diet culture.

But even without that, I feel comfortable assuring you that intuitive spending won’t lead to catastrophe.

Because I know you don’t want to bring catastrophe into your life.

Remember, the core idea of intuitive spending is buy what you want when you want it.

Buy what you want when you want it.

How much do you really want?

Intuitive spending doesn’t mean buying everything all the time. It doesn’t even mean following your every whim or impulse — because when you learn to listen to your body, just like you do with intuitive eating, you realize you don’t want everything all the time. You learn to recognize when you feel compelled to buy something because a friend has it, because your family has expectations for a holiday, because the grocery store’s layout steers you toward it.

Intuitive spending isn’t only about buying what you want; it’s also about letting yourself stop buying the stuff you never wanted.

(There’s a danger of using just the second half of that and turning intuitive spending into another way to budget. People make this mistake and turn intuitive eating into a diet all the time. Don’t do that. Remember the first half, too! It’s not about restriction; it’s about knowing what you want.)

I don’t believe intuitive spending will lead you into a catastrophe, because I believe you know what’s right for you.

But what if there’s not enough money?

I know your next question: Sure, Dana, I can buy what I want without restriction. But what about people who don’t even have enough money to pay their bills? Surely they can’t just buy whatever they want, or they’ll starve/become homeless/lose everything?

First, I don’t ever hear this question from poor people. I only ever hear it about poor people. So please pause before asking it to consider whether you really understand what it looks like to not have enough money.

Second, everyone deserves to spend money intuitively. You don’t forfeit that right because something about your circumstances keeps you from having a high income or access to wealth.

If there’s not enough money to have what you want when you want it, maybe you have to consider other resources. Community resources that provide free or reduced-cost food, child care, housing and other necessities might free up cash for other purchases. Government resources like tax credits, housing vouchers, SNAP, unemployment or disability benefits could expand your buying power.

And debt can go a long way. It might get you into a house or a car or a business. It might get you into clothes that make you feel safe and comfortable in your body and command respect from the people around you. It might help you make memories with your kids while they’re still kids.

If there’s not enough money, it’s not because you spent too much on clothes or ice cream or video games. It’s because of the obstacles that have been laid in your path.

Intuitive spending includes using alternative resources without shame. Budget culture wants you to restrict your spending to avoid using these resources, and it wants you to feel ashamed if you use them. Letting go of that restriction means understanding those resources are just as valid as earned income and using them in exactly the same way to buy what you want when you want it.

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Not convinced by this post? You Don’t Need a Budget is my 300-page argument against restrictive spending and budget culture!