Finding opportunities to spend less in certain areas can free up room in your budget to save for emergencies, pay off debt, invest for retirement, buy a home, donate to great causes, or work toward your other goals. However, that tends to be easier said than done. How do you choose what to cut and what to keep? Ellevest breaks down 4 ways to practice spending more intentionally.
Why not spending is so hard sometimes
If money decisions were straightforward and logical, it wouldn’t be so hard to save. We would tell ourselves, “I’m going to cook dinner more often this month,” and we would spend less on delivery. But money decisions don’t actually work like that: Research by behavioral economists shows that emotions and unconscious biases affect our spending in lots of invisible ways.
So, if you’ve ever found yourself vowing to save money and then swiping your card anyway, congrats — you’re human. Doubling down and getting stricter with yourself isn’t likely to help, because these kinds of choices aren’t simply logical. Instead, find a more intentional way of looking at spending decisions. This means getting to know your personal values better, then aligning your goals and choices with them so that moneysaving tradeoff decisions can feel easier, better, and more meaningful.
Here’s how to approach it.
1. Make a list of your most important values
Your values are the core beliefs that are most important to you — the principles that bring meaning and purpose to your life. Start by making a list of your top five. There are no wrong answers here, and no judgment. Some examples: achievement, adventure, balance, compassion, curiosity, the environment, faith, family, feminism, friendship, growth, happiness, integrity, justice, love, optimism, responsibility, security, service, and success.
2. Map your values to your money goals
Next up is to figure out how your values play into the things you want to accomplish with your money in the future.
Write down your money goals, both for the short term and the long term. For each goal, write down some ways it might connect with your top values, or what kinds of valuesrelated things you could do more of if you accomplish it. For example, if you value family and you’re struggling to save for emergencies, maybe you frame each deposit into your savings account as a gift to your family’s future financial security.
3. Use your values to make meaningful decisions
The easiest way to start saving money is to cut where it’s (more or less) painless. For example:
- Start with the places where you’re spending habitually. Maybe you always go to one grocery store, but there’s a less expensive one nearby you can try out.
- Ditch the things you really don’t use. Maybe you’re paying for HBO, but you rarely watch it. Maybe there are things you signed up for and have been paying for monthly and have forgotten about entirely: subscriptions, dues, and memberships.
- Look more closely at things that might feel like a sacrifice. How does your current spending create meaning in your life? Understand that, and you can start finding ways to honor your deepest values even as you change your spending behavior. For example, one of your values may be “healthy lifestyle.” You might decide to cancel your gym membership and start running instead, to honor that value but spend less. On the other hand, maybe another of your values is “me time” — and the gym feels like it’s getting you healthy and giving you personal time. In that case, you might decide to keep it, and choose something else to cut back on.
4. Practice money mindfulness every day
You can also use your core values to make more mindful decisions in daily life. For example, let’s say you want to order a delicious latte from your favorite local coffee shop. Does the experience of sitting quietly with a warm drink map to a core value of self-care? Does sharing coffee time with a friend relate to your value of creating meaningful ties with people? Or maybe you value self-respect, and you’re deciding to respect your own time.
That might sound like a lot of self-examination for a cup of coffee. But this type of mindfulness will become more natural as you practice it. And you might even find, from time to time, that “no” is as satisfying as “yes.”
Because here’s the thing: Rather than telling yourself what you “can and cannot” spend money on, you’re telling yourself why you’re making certain tradeoffs. And you’ll be making financial tradeoffs all your life — in tough times when you need to make choices to cut back, and in better times when you need to choose between several goals and priorities.
When you know exactly why you’re doing something — and can easily relate it back to what really matters to you — then you’re spending intentionally, and even difficult decisions can feel more “right.”
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