Money is mostly vibes

How you feel about money is as important as the numbers in your bank account

A few times while peddling You Don’t Need a Budget, I’ve been faced with some form of a critique that my approach is “money management based on vibes.”

I wouldn’t have thought of that description myself, but I’m quite fond of it.

The concern in the critique is that, without a budget, you have no data to guide your financial decisions. So you’re just feeling around and making financial decisions based on how you feel in the moment. Instead of making rational, informed choices based on a set of accepted standards, you’re managing your money based on vibes.

And my response is… yeah. I guess that’s kind of what it is. Because money is vibes.

Financial journalists, educators, advisors, economists, analysts and gurus want to believe that money is a uniquely rational thing in human society. It’s the thing in our lives we can put into charts and spreadsheets, that we can track empirically, that we can measure with standard tools. We can set measurable goals and know without doubt when we’ve achieved them. We can measure anything in dollars and know exactly where it fits into the marketplace, because the value of a dollar is absolute.

But of course none of this is true. Money is every bit as irrational as every other part of human existence, because it was created and is maintained by humans.

The value of a dollar is anything but absolute. Even the empirical value of a dollar and everything it buys changes by the minute if you watch any stock exchange. The same dollar can’t even buy the same amount of gas from one end of town to another. Money is completely made up, and it would take a lot of stress out of your money management efforts to recognize that.

Money IS vibes

One-time analyst Kyla Scanlon threw financial media into a tizzy in 2022 when she coined the term vibecession to identify the visceral experience of Americans doing very not well under an economy whose every indicator suggested we should all be doing very well.

We never did fall into the recession financial media was predicting during those years, according to the data. But the feelings never changed.

A Jan. 2025 Gallup poll showing Americans’ feelings about the economy shifting post-election, long before the White House had even changed hands.

Scanlon later pointed out that “vibes” have been part of economics for as long as humans have paid attention to the economy. The entire field of behavioral economics is basically studying what people do based on how they feel about money.

After the proliferation of vibecession, financial journalists took the word “vibes” in a lot of directions. One popular route was to translate it as “feelings that don’t align with reality” and chastise the public for believing the economy was bad when it was, empirically, good.

But, Scanlon argued, data doesn’t make your day-to-day life better. And feelings are part of reality.

I was among the financial journalists throughout 2022 trying to battle sensational headlines stoking fears about inflation and a recession that never came. It’s frustrating to watch people freak out over a media frenzy about economic circumstances that aren’t actually happening to them.

But when you’re spending more and more on groceries to feed your family, and a new car costs a million bucks, and your property tax bill has shot up because apparently your house is worth 30% more this year than last, and you’re reading about layoffs and union busting and wondering whether your job is safe… it doesn’t really matter that data shows average wages growing faster than average prices. You’re watching your salary rise at the same measly pace it’s always taken; you’d have to get a new job to benefit from this “workers’ economy,” and would that mean moving or extending your commute, and didn’t you just read something about gas prices going up, too?

It doesn’t matter what the data says, because, ultimately, it’s all vibes.

Rich people have always known this

Whether they’d use these words or not, people who live off of wealth instead of paychecks have always known money is just vibes.

Wealth is tied to value, which is a dollar amount pulled out of thin air that gives some people more power than others. Stock values shoot up and down, making someone a billionaire one day and a mere multi-millionaire the next. Rent prices can soar while buildings sit empty, because the rich people who own (stock in) residential buildings know how to manipulate the charts that make their ownership valuable.

One of my favorite examples of rich-people money manipulation totally jumping the shark: The fast-growing coworking company WeWork famously crumbled into near obsolescence after (among other things) it became a laughingstock in the investment world when its filing to go public unveiled its custom accounting metric, “community-adjusted EBITDA,” which leaves out a bunch of expenses to pump up projected profit to a level that founder Adam Neumann vibed with.

Investors can laugh at community-adjusted EBITDA all they want, but they continue to swallow the original “EBITDA” metric as if it makes total sense. That calculation also leaves out common costs of running a company and pumps up profit — but in a way everyone has agreed is fine?

Money is vibes. It’s why we allow corporations and rich people to use debt to make more money, but working people are shamed for using credit cards to buy groceries. Why companies can declare bankruptcy and carry on with running multinational operations, but Dave Ramsey says a person can’t eat at a restaurant if they have unpaid debt.

The rich know money is just vibes, and their vibes are feeling pretty good.

Our vibes can feel good, too

For those of us who do need paychecks to buy groceries and don’t have a direct line to a banker to extend debt whenever we feel like gambling with trendy investments — our money vibes can be more than fear of the next recession.

That’s why You Don’t Need a Budget covers not only reverse budgeting and bank account automations (totally tangible and not at all vibey practices, TYVM) but also meditation, money dates and spending diaries. Because your relationship with money is as important as the numbers on your paycheck or in your bank account.

Rich people have the kind of relationship with money that makes them feel entitled to access and comfort. So they use the tools available to them to demand access and comfort.

Poor people do this, too, even if you don’t know you do it.

When lack of money means losing your apartment or having your electricity shut off, money feels pretty real. But say you live in a state with a policy that prevents disconnection during certain months. Suddenly you can stretch your dollars a little further for a few months. Say your lease stipulates a fee for paying rent late. You know exactly how late you can pay and how much extra you’ll be charged — and you can make 30 days’ worth of money last 45.

Years ago, I used a PayPal debit card to turn no money into more money all the time. I had no access to credit cards and was always strapped for cash. I figured out transactions on the PayPal card took way longer to process than those with my normal debit card (because of some bank loop-the-loops on the back end), so I could use it to get by while waiting for money to reach my bank account. Banks weren’t willing to give me credit — but I figured out how to take it for myself, because money isn’t real.

Owning your right to feel good about money can help you make it happen. This isn’t law of attraction, raising your vibrations or whatever. It doesn’t actually get you more money by any means. It’s about getting creative to use the system against itself and claim the good money vibes you have every right to experience.

That might mean stretching a dollar around the block when you’re living paycheck to paycheck.

It might mean putting off student loan payments for as long as possible. Or figuring out how to accumulate credit card debt you never have to pay back.

Maybe it just means not fretting over social media chatter about the price of eggs.

There’s a very real aspect to money — we exchange it for the things we need to live and thrive in that life. And we depend on a system that works to keep as much of that life as possible from as many of us as possible.

But the extent to which we bow to the expectations of that system is up to us.

Budget culture rules expect you to hustle harder to earn more, pay off debt faster, optimize investments, compare grocery prices. What if you decide not to live by those rules — and enjoy your life, anyway?

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If this essay made an iota of sense to you, you’ll appreciate my book, You Don’t Need a Budget.

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