Spending with Intent

Making Margin Podcast
Episode 53 - Spending with Intent

Welcome to the Making Margin podcast! Greenway’s team is here to discuss common financial mistakes and to help you navigate them. 

Meet the voices behind this episode of Making Margin:

NickJeffNatalie AllieJen

In this episode, we continue our conversation on using your finances to live your values, focusing on spending with intent. The discussion is inspired by Morgan Housel's blog post titled ‘A Few Thoughts on Spending Money,’ sharing our own ideas and tweaks to his advice. Join us as we chat about getting intentional with our spending!

Questions:

“There are two ways to use money. One is as a tool to live a better life. The other is as a yardstick of status to measure yourself against others. Many people aspire for the former but get caught up chasing the latter.” 

Is that true? Are there only two ways to use money?
 “Money is a tool you can use. But if you’re not careful, it will use you. Sometimes the stuff you spend money on has so much influence over your autonomy and sanity that it’s not clear whether you own things or the things own you.” Where do we see this happening?
 “How you spend money can be a reflection of what you’ve experienced in life. To someone who grew up snubbed by poverty, owning a fancy car might be the ultimate symbol of what you’ve overcome. To an old-money family, it might be the ultimate symbol of ego and insecurity. People don’t just spend money on things they find fun or useful. Their decisions often reflect the psychological wounds of their life experiences.”

Does this explain a lot of what we see?
 “The more money you have, the harder it becomes to know how to spend it in a way that will make you happy. And that confusion sets in at fairly low levels of income. Luke Burgis writes: ‘After meeting our basic needs as creatures, we enter into the human universe of desire. And knowing what to want is much harder than knowing what to need.’”