Welcome to the Healthy Rich podcast, a show about money for misfits!
I’m Dana Miranda, a financial educator and author of You Don’t Need a Budget.
In this episode, I discuss how to turn yourself from a saver into a spender (and why you’d want to):
🥑 Why saving too much can be as much of a burden as saving too little.
🥑 How naming your needs and values can help you decide how to spend money without a restrictive budget or spending plan.
🥑 Three exercises to help you name your needs and values and how you can use money to support them.
Mentioned in this episode:
🔗 Healthy Rich podcast: How do you avoid spending money you don’t have?
🔗 Buy What You Love without Going Broke by Jen Smith and Jill Sirianni
🔗 You Don’t Need a Budget Reflection Questions worksheet
You can always follow the podcast right here via email or Substack, or you can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. The transcript is below. Enjoy!
Transcript
Welcome to the Healthy Rich podcast, a show about money for misfits! I’m Dana Miranda, a certified educator in personal finance and author of YOU DON’T NEED A BUDGET: STOP WORRYING ABOUT DEBT, SPEND WITHOUT SHAME, AND MANAGE MONEY WITH EASE.
In today’s show, I’m going to talk about how to turn yourself from a saver into a spender — and why you would want to do that.
This is inspired by a reader question. This person said, “I’ve been a saver all my life. I’m now 75 and a widow. I need to start reversing my trend to save and start spending. I find it stressful thinking about it.”
I love that you’re recognizing this! Money is meant to be spent, so it’s important to know when it’s time to spend your money.
It’s also so good that you recognize how difficult it is to just flip a switch and adjust a restrictive, disciplined mindset you’ve held your whole life.
We idealize saving as obviously a good move under budget culture — but we don’t often take the step to understand that, when we’re saving money, we’re ostensibly saving it to spend at some point in the future.
So we can’t ONLY think about saving. We have to know what we’re going to do with that money and give ourselves permission to spend it at some point.
It’s important to give yourself permission to use the money for anything that contributes to your comfort. The thread of greed that runs through budget culture encourages a habit of hoarding under the guise of good money management, so you can start to believe being a saver is the only right way to be. And budget culture threatens you with scarcity to discourage spending.
That fear of scarcity can keep you always worried about the next thing that’ll come along. It makes you feel like - What if you spend funds on something less severe now, and you don’t have them when you really need it?
In You Don’t Need a Budget, I wrote about my friend Erik, who got into the habit of over-saving and found himself with around $500,000 in a savings account. But he still wouldn’t spend on comforts he needed — like a car when he left New York City or furniture to get him through the pandemic supply chain disruptions.
Erik grew up working class and learned to fear scarcity. As an adult, he got in the habit of talking himself out of spending money out of self-consciousness and low self-worth.
An important reason to switch your mindset from chronic saving and toward comfort with spending is to let yourself know you’re worthy of the experiences and things you want and need.
For many people like Erik, saving too much can be as much of a burden as saving too little. Naming a purpose for the money can help give yourself permission to spend it.
So let’s talk about how to give that money a purpose that’s meaningful and useful for you…
One thing to keep in mind when you want to make the shift from being a saver to a spender is to understand that actually, those aren’t opposing states of being.
In their book Buy What You Love without Going Broke, Jen Smith and Jill Sirianni teach that “spending is a skill.” They point out:
“Spending is what we do, not who we are.”
The dichotomy between spender and saver isn’t really real. They write, “Everyone spends, everyone saves.”
Jen and Jill consider spending a skill, and their book is about getting better at it, so this is a perfect reference for our conversation today. Building that skill isn’t just about reducing your spending the way budgets try to do. It’s about feeling good about how you use money to support the life you want.
That’s what conscious spending is all about, what Jen and Jill call “values-based spending.” It’s about, as they write, “spending without guilt on what you love and building the right barriers to say no to what you don’t.”
The “spender versus saver” dichotomy in budget culture is a simple way to encourage discipline and restriction. It’s a black-and-white rule that says saving is good, spending is bad. Save money, and you’ll be good. Spend money, and you’ll be bad.
It’s nice to believe in that kind of right-versus-wrong structure to life — but of course it’s not real. This doesn’t hold up in reality, where we have to spend money to do anything, where some saving can actually become detrimental hoarding.
But building that skill of spending isn’t as simple as just saying “start spending.” Because under capitalism, our relationship with money is complicated by the fact that businesses are always trying to sell us something, and they’ll tell us lies to do it.
So they tell us lies about who we are and who we should be. They tell us what’s wrong with us and what we can buy to fix it. They tell us what’s missing in our lives, and it’s always something we can buy from them.
We’ve, understandably, tried to build up a defense against this consumer culture. That’s a good instinct — we should resist those messages that say we’re not good enough, that we should be something different. We shouldn’t buy into the messages that see our suffering and convince us some corporation has the solution just behind a paywall.
But that attempt to resist toxic consumerism blends too easily with budget culture’s message of restriction.
Our cultural relationship with money expects restriction and discipline of us. When we’re already primed to try to resist consumption or to be minimalist, budget culture can take advantage of that and latch its restrictive messages onto our minimalist values.
So when are you being a minimalist, and when are you being restrictive?
When are you spending consciously, and when are you spending haphazardly?
In Buy What You Love without Going Broke, Jen and Jill teach that the first step to “buying what you love” is to know what you love. That means understanding the wants and needs you’re trying to meet with the things you buy (or don’t).
They mention a couple of frameworks to help you figure out what you love and value, and I like them both. Try some reflection, meditation or journaling exercises with these frameworks in mind to start to sketch out the ways you truly want to spend money.
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The first is one many of us have heard of: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. This is that pyramid with various levels human needs: physiological needs like food, water and shelter at the base; followed by:
Safety and Security
Love and Belonging
Self-Esteem, which includes respect from others and experiencing achievement
and at the top, Self-Actualization, morality, creativity, experiencing purpose.
Maslow arranged these needs as a hierarchy, not because any of them are more important than others. All of these needs — physiological, psychological and self-fulfillment — are equally vital to human health and well-being. They’re a hierarchy, because when needs at the base of the pyramid aren’t met, it’s harder or nearly impossible to address needs higher up.
So understanding this hierarchy of needs is a way of understanding the deficiencies you have to address — or that we have to address across society — in order to support people in meeting their higher needs.
So draw out your own version of this hierarchy of needs, and consider how your spending can support them.
How do your spending decisions support your need for food, water, shelter and rest? Are there things about your relationship with money that impede these needs?
What adds a sense of safety and security to your life? How can money support that?
What (and who) fulfills your need for belonging and love? How do you use money to bring those people and things into your life?
What makes you feel confident and accomplished? How does that intersect with your decisions about work and spending?
What makes you feel creative and purposeful, like you’re pursuing your innermost potential? How do your spending habits help or hinder this in your life?
Take a few minutes to think or write through these questions.
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The second framework Jen and Jill offer is one they created: The four F’s.
These are the things they’ve identified as things that people overall value most: family, friends, faith and fulfilling work.
They offer these four F’s in part to say that the things we value most in life are things that can’t be bought. And that’s true, in a literal sense. But I want to add that knowing it doesn’t mean you’ll never use money to get closer to things you love.
You might buy gifts for your kids to show them you were thinking of them and you see them enough to know what they’d love to receive. You can name that, and maybe it makes you think of alternative ways to show your love. In that way, you can meet your need or value without spending money. But maybe, instead, knowing this just lets you know buying gifts is an important way of spending your money that you don’t want to sacrifice.
Budget culture will always push you toward the first option because that option supports restriction. But understanding that money is meant to be spent helps you embrace the second option if that’s what’s right for you.
So I encourage you to use this framework in the same way we just used Maslow’s hierarchy. Think about what family, friends, faith and fulfilling work mean in your life, and how can your relationship with money support those?
Your definitions can be as broad and unique as you want. Maybe your family of origin is only a source of stress in your life, and you find joy in a chosen family that you may or may not literally label as “family.” Maybe “faith” is a red-flag word for you, and you want to replace it with your own understanding of a higher purpose or connection to the divine (even if that doesn’t begin with F!). In my interpretation, “fulfilling work” doesn’t have to mean work for pay or work outside of the home; it can be any way of occupying your time that’s in line with your values.
Spend some time with these ideas, and begin to form a sketch of what you love and value, the life and experience you want to have, and how you can use money to support that.
I love Jen and Jill’s book, because it’s explicitly about very intentionally building that skill of spending. So I highly recommend it for anyone who is in this same boat of feeling like you only know how to be a saver but want to learn to spend consciously.
I also recommend their book if you know you want to make this switch, but budget culture messaging has you afraid of spending money because you’re afraid you won’t be able to control yourself. I share a lot about countering that mindset in You Don’t Need a Budget, but because their book is all about personal spending, I love that they get really specific about some of the work you can do to get comfortable with how you spend money.
You can also go back and catch the Jan. 16 episode of this podcast (which I’ll link in the show notes) — where I talked about using money to support your head, heart and health as dimensions of financial wellness. That can offer some guidance on determining your needs and values, too.
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I’ll close out today with one more exercise from You Don’t Need a Budget to help you think about how you want to spend money in your life. You don’t have to do all three of these, but I’m giving you some options so you can find what works for you.
In order to name your spending priorities and goals, name the values that underly those goals. For example, if “family ties” are a personal value, a financial goal might be a vacation or holiday fund that lets you spend time with your extended family. You don’t have to attach a number or a limit to that spending necessarily like you would with a budget or spending plan — you can just make conscious choices that support the value within your available resources.
Grab a notebook, or go to YouDontNeedABudget.com/Resources to grab my “Reflection Questions” worksheet and flip to Chapter 10. Jot down ideas as we work through this exercise.
Step 1: Make a list of personal values you hold — just jot down what comes to mind when you consider:
What’s important to you?
What do you want in your life no matter what?
What kind of experience are you trying to create in your life?
Step 2: Based on your answers to these questions, make a list of values you hold.
Values might be big ideas like “family” or “free time,” but they might be simple things like “fashion” or “good food.” Values aren’t the things money can buy directly, but don’t force yourself to name highfalutin things that don’t actually matter to you just to avoid feeling shallow. (Consider things that support your head, heart, and health.)
Step 3: For each item on that list, answer these questions:
In what ways do you already spend money to support that value?
What are some other ways you could spend money to better support that value?
Do you need to save up to support this spending? What kind of dedicated spending fund(s) would help you achieve those additional goals?
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When you’re clear on the needs and values you want to support, you create a sort of guide for where you want your money to go without relying on a restrictive budget or spending plan.
That gives you some guidance for spending that can hopefully reduce some of that stress that comes from budget culture’s fetish of restriction. When you’re spending money to support the needs and values you’ve identified, you can be comfortable knowing you’re spending money the “right” way — because it’s what’s right for you.
What one financial topic do you wish you knew more about? What would help you have a better relationship with money? Submit your question to guide a future episode!
Check the show notes at healthyrich DOT co for a form to submit your questions.
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