Mel Robbins explains that bad spending habits mask emotional needs. Instead of chasing the next purchase, ask what feeling you're trying to fill. Every dollar saved buys future independence; every dollar of debt is time you'll owe someone else.
If you have bad spending habits, how do you change them, Morgan?
I think you first have to ask the question, why do you have bad spending habits? What hole are you trying to fill? What has buying these things done to your happiness in the past? And if the answer is nothing, which is probably the answer, trying to fill that hole first, trying to answer that question first. So I think you have to kind of start on the therapist's couch, literally or figuratively, and take a look in the mirror and being like, what am I trying to achieve? Who do I want to become? Why do I want to be that? And why am I striving for these things? And for a lot of people, it's kind of like a binge spending that has gotten them into trouble where it's a stress relief. It's a relief valve. And I think what the valve— I think in your head, what you probably think it is, is if I bought these things, then my problem was— then my problems would go away. And the truth is that that might be true in the moment. For spending, it's almost never true. It's very rarely true that your binge spending is going to fill any kind of emotional hole that you have. You know, every dollar of debt that you have from these poor spending habits is a piece of your future that somebody else owns. It's a piece of your time that you owe to the bank, you owe to the lender. And the opposite of that is every dollar of savings that you have, the reverse of bad spending habits, is a piece of your future that you own, that you have control over. Every single dollar that you have is a piece of your future that you own. That's always how I've wanted to think about it. And since my goal has been independence, When I save money, it's not because I say, oh, I'm saving up to buy a new car, even though there can be that and that could be great. If I save $100, I view that as purchasing $100 of independence. I'm spending that money. It's giving me independence today. And I think that can be an antidote to bad spending habits.
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