Spend Like You Mean It

Most of what gets written about spending is about restraint. Spend less, save more. Keep housing below a certain share of your income. Divide your paycheck into 50/30/20 buckets. Skip the latte. None of that is wrong. Those rules have helped a lot of people build a solid foundation, and we use versions of them ourselves. But they share a quiet assumption: that every dollar spent is a dollar lost, and the best financial life is the one that spends the least.

What about the other half of the equation? Money is meant to be used. The goal is not to spend as little as possible. It is to spend willingly, within reason, on the things that truly bring happiness and fulfillment, and to be unsentimental about cutting the things we don't really care about. Two writers I admire, Carl Richards and Morgan Housel, have a lot to say about this.

Carl Richards is a financial planner best known for explaining money with simple sketches on napkins and index cards. One of his favorite drawings is two circles. One circle holds what we say is important to us. The other holds how we actually spend our money, time, and attention. As he puts it, "There is almost always a gap between what we do and what we say is important to us."

In Richards' view, real financial planning is the work of closing that gap. Spending is where the gap shows up most plainly. Most of us would say family, health, experiences and generosity matter most. A few months of credit card statements may tell a different story: subscriptions we forgot about, upgrades we barely noticed, purchases made mostly because someone else had one.

His test for any purchase is simple: is it worth it? Not by someone else's standard or a rule of thumb, but by ours. Richards also admits that most of us avoid looking at the gap on our own. That is why he recommends giving someone, whether a spouse, a friend, or a planner, permission to point it out.

Morgan Housel, author of The Psychology of Money, has spent years writing about why people behave the way they do with money. He wrote a whole book on this topic last year, The Art of Spending Money.

Housel argues that money's greatest value is not the things it buys but the freedom it provides. "A key use of wealth is using it to control your time and providing you with options," he wrote. He is equally clear about what money does poorly. Spending to impress other people rarely makes anyone happier, because there is always someone further up the ladder. "Wealth, in fact, is what you don't see."

In The Art of Spending Money, Housel pushes the idea further. Saving is not the goal in itself; it exists to support good spending. He suggests thinking about future regret: which experiences would you be sorry to have skipped? He also reminds readers that "the people, not the stuff, are what's actually meaningful."

To show how much happiness depends on expectations, Housel turns to Ernest Shackleton's Endurance Expedition. After their ship was crushed by Antarctic ice, Shackleton's men spent nearly two years stranded before rescue in 1916. Once home, they found a hot bath, a simple meal, and a night's sleep almost overwhelming. The things themselves were ordinary. What made them extraordinary was the gap between what the men expected and what they received.

Put Richards and Housel together and a different kind of spending plan emerges. The goal is not a lower number. It is a better-aimed one. In practice, that can look lopsided, and that is fine. One family drives the same cars for fifteen years so they can take their kids somewhere new every summer. A retired couple happily skips the country club but never misses a chance to fly out for a grandchild's birthday. Someone else spends real money on a hobby that fills their weekends, and almost nothing on clothes or restaurants. None of these choices fit neatly into a budgeting ratio. All of them reflect what those people actually value.

The flip side matters just as much. Every dollar that drifts toward things we don't care about, whether it is an unused membership, a premium version we never noticed, or a purchase made for an audience, is a dollar not available for what we do care about. Cutting those isn't deprivation. It is making room.

There is one more pattern worth naming. Many of the most diligent savers I know find it hardest to spend once they reach retirement. The same habits that built their wealth can keep them from enjoying it. For them, the question is often not "Can we afford it?" but "Will we let ourselves?"

If you'd like to find your own gap, try this with the last three months of statements in hand:

1. Mark the purchases you would make again without hesitation. Then mark the ones you barely remember.

2. For each larger purchase, ask whether it was for you or for an audience.

3. Ask what you would regret not doing ten years from now. Is anything on that list getting funded today?

4. List the recurring costs you don't really care about. Which could go tomorrow without being missed?

5. If you're married, do this separately and then compare notes. Your values may overlap less than you think, and that conversation is worth having.

The freedom to spend generously comes from having the foundation in place: an emergency reserve, retirement savings on track, and debt under control. With those set, spending on what you love isn't reckless. It is the point.

That is also where we can help. If there is a trip, a cabin, a gift to your children or grandchildren, or a year of doing something different that you have been putting off, let's run the numbers together. Often the answer is that you can afford more than you think. Sometimes it is "not yet," and we can map out when. Either way, you'll be deciding with clarity instead of guilt.