Many personal finance bloggers espouse: “Spend whatever you want, just make more money to support your spendiness.”
I respectfully disagree.
More income can be a great thing. I took that route when I changed careers: over three years, I doubled my income by leaving grant writing behind to learn an in-demand skillset (software development).
Initially, I used my extra money to adopt a high-spending lifestyle. But in the end, while making more did give me peace of mind for emergencies, my spending wasn’t making me any happier.
Looking around at my community, tens of millions of Americans already make plenty of money to reach financial independence. They just need to see how doable it is, how completely manageable it is to save hundreds of thousands of dollars over time.
Why Saving Like a Champ Beats Spendiness. Every. Time.
The Definitive List:
Most people in the middle class already have much, much more money than they need to retire early. What we lack is time to spend with our loved ones. The time burden of a side hustle or a more demanding job takes use further from our personal goals, not closer.
Spendiness means missing out on all the good stuff. A spender assumes:
challenge = hassles = BAD. 😿
By corollary:
easy = relax = GOOD. 😸
We spend to create shortcuts around “annoying tasks” like cooking and doing household repairs so that we can watch TV or overcommit ourselves to outside projects. But the tasks we are short-cutting are so much more fulfilling than an hour spent with Modern Family. We pull out the plastic as an alternative to the satisfaction that comes from pulling up our own pants and creating solving our own damn problems.
Spendiness reflects a victim mentality. A high-spending lifestyle puts other people in the driver’s seat of your life.
When a new product comes out, that company is telling you, “What you have is not good enough. YOU NEED THIS.” Typically we don’t need a retina display or a crazy blender — what we have is great. We let the company decide what we need instead of deciding for ourselves.
When I talk to people about my own personal “sacrifices” [aka life choices], they tend to act threatened. Out of the blue, they’ll say, “But how will you provide for your kids someday?? Everyone’s kid has a cell phone and a new car, and I refuse to let my kids feel less than!!” or “I need a giant yard because that’s how my parents and siblings and friends live!! And once a year I barbecue. So.”
TRANSLATION:
Because someone else made this decision, I now HAVE to make the same decision! I have no choice! It’s not up to me!!
Because someone in the past created a world centered around shopping and SUVs and workaholism and private schools, I am stuck in it. It’s not my fault!!
Let me ask you something:
Are your parents smarter than you? Are your great grandparents smarter than you? Did they make the perfect decisions about how to design the world?
Why spend your own money to perpetuate the choices of men who lived 100 years ago, with high school education levels who had never traveled outside their home state?
Going further back: Are cavemen smarter than you? Do you still kill animals with clubs?? Why would you blindly accept what’s been handed down to us?
“Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it … Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” — Steve Jobs
Mr. Spendy Spender (MSS) is not aware of the low likelihood that his earn / spend mentality will lead to financial success. This is because there is no correlation between income level and financial intelligence. There is no course when you hit $40k called “Managing Large Sums of Money.”
In fact, most high earners are no better at money management than people in poverty who win the lottery and piss it all away.
The vast, vast majority of humans scale their “needs” up as their income increases. In the United States, people who make $160k or more have an average of $11,000 in consumer credit card debt.* That’s a higher debt balance than people in any other income bracket.
That’s right. People who have more money than God also have more consumer debt than the rest of us. They have veered far, far off the course of creating the rich life they once dreamed of.
Spendiness reflects lack of priorities. Mr. and Ms. Spendy Spender aren’t making mindful choices about what they truly want in life; they are trying to have it all.
When they mention ‘cutting back’ to afford a vacation, what they mean is removing things from their budget that they don’t value that much anyway, like their gym membership that they never use, or using up food that is already in their pantries.
People who think — really think — about what they want in life make big sacrifices in some areas to kick ass in others.
That’s not how the Spendy Spender family rolls. In fact, you’ll never meet a high spender who makes life-altering choices in one area in order to afford the things they love most like amazing vacations or taking a year off work. They spend indiscriminately in every area, “spending generalists,” if you will. That’s why you’ll never meet a high spender who is also car-free. You’ll never meet a spendy person who lives with housemates by choice.
High spending builds a world none of us wants. We all already worry about traffic, child labor, lack of community, trash on the side of the road and in the oceans, the child obesity epidemic, yet each of these problems has direct causes in the irresponsible spending that we control.
Finance blogger Ramit Sethi says that frugal blogs are based around guilt. But guilt is a useless emotion. I instead use the word responsibility. I use the word fulfillment. I use the words hope and happiness.
Mr. Spendy Spender imagines that when he throws trash away it magically disappears. He is staunch in his irrational belief that when he throws money away it doesn’t hurt anyone [except the people around the world who still don’t have clean drinking water].
At age 22, as I struggled with a major financial decision, a successful friend advised, “Ginna, stop stressing! IT’S JUST MONEY!!!” That statement perfectly encapsulates the spendy life motto: it doesn’t matter what you spend on or what the effect is on anyone else. It’s just money.
True adulting requires a realization of the power we each wield in this world.
Every action we take affects people around us — especially considering that Americans control 25% of the world’s wealth. You personally have power that no person in Zimbabwe could dream of having, not in a million years. Our spending choices are monumental.
As an adult, I accept that my choices affect people in my family and community every single day. I am using my power to create the world I want:
a world with fewer car horns and more wind whistling past my face, where people know their neighbors, where we don’t need to destroy trees and oceans in order to find happiness.
I want a world where my neighbors and I share our skills and our stuff, where we do the hard work of relationships and reap the benefits.
Spenders often lack common sense. They’ve seen again and again that no amount of spending makes them happy, yet they keep doing it.
As a consumer myself, I love to imagine that I’ve discovered a miraculous cure for discontent — buying stuff!! It really does make me happy, until it doesn’t. Then I need to buy more stuff.
It’s been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the different results.
As of now, I’m abandoning this magical thinking. Since I already KNOW that buying more stuff won’t make me happy, why not figure out another way?
Above all, being frugal is a game I get to play every day. I love it. The premise of the game is to outsmart societal norms. Moreover, it’s about outsmarting myself.
Frugality is not time-consuming. It just means that I get paid to learn skills I want to learn anyway. For me those are cooking, resurrecting used furniture, and learning how to ride and repair my bike.
What have you always wanted to learn? Motorcycle repair, sewing, home-building skills, plumbing, electrical work… By investing time in learning, you are saving so much money that you’re literally getting paid to learn that skill.
*Source: https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-credit-card-debt
Looking at these numbers, you’ll notice that both Gen-Xers and Boomers have more credit card debt than Millennials. At least Gen-Xers don’t feel the need to lecture us on money management… 😬