It is okay to value spending money differently than the way your friends value spending money. Sometimes, we are so focused on keeping up appearances or worried about missing out that we allow our friends to pressure us into spending money on things we don’t really care about.
In today’s episode, I share four effective strategies for setting financial boundaries with your friends. From initiating conversations about your money goals to suggesting alternative, budget-friendly activities, I’ll cover how to keep your relationships strong without compromising your money goals.
You don’t have to match your friends’ spending habits or feel pressured to say “yes” to every event. True friends will respect your financial boundaries. Don’t be afraid to be proactive and clear about your current and future goals. By setting these boundaries, you protect your finances and set a positive example for your friends.
Learn 4 ways to set financial boundaries with your friends including…
- [02:46] Practicing sharing financial goals with your friends
- [06:28] Being the friend that makes the plans
- [08:14] Being the friend that suggests something new
- [10:57] Getting comfortable saying no
Tune into this episode of Money Files to learn 4 strategies to set financial boundaries with your friends so you can maintain meaningful relationships without sacrificing your money goals.
Are you ready to start asking for help with your finances? Apply to work with me, and let’s start working towards your financial goals.
If you loved this conversation about setting financial boundaries with friends, check out my episode Aligning Expenses with Values: How to Conduct a Cost Saving Audit.
Transcript for “Balancing Friendship and Finances: 4 Ways to Set Financial Boundaries with Your Friends”
Intro: Hi and welcome to Money Files. I’m Keina Newell from Wealth Over Now. I work everyday with professional women and solopreneurs to help them get out of financial overwhelm and shame so they can experience more flexibility and ease with their finances. Are you ready to gain confidence and learn to manage your finances intentionally? Tune in and grab financial tips that will help you master the way you think about and manage your finances.
Keina: Hello and welcome to another episode of Money Files. So today I want to talk to you about setting financial boundaries with your friends. And I think this is timely for this season because there are seasonal activities that are coming up. There’s going to be Thanksgiving that’s coming up, there’s going to be Christmas and the holidays. Just a lot of things that could cause you to lose track of where you are financially if you don’t go into the season with a plan but also just establishing with and for yourself that you are allowed to set financial boundaries with your friends. You don’t have to do everything that your friends want to do. You don’t have to spend money like your friends. And I know that sometimes you can get to a place where you’re like, oh my goodness, like everybody else around me is spending so much money and I just want to let you know because I listen girl, I look at budgets all the time and not everybody is doing as well as you think they’re doing.
And I say that out of love, but don’t try to keep up with the Joneses. So you are going off of what you see people doing and you think that if one of your friends can do it, you think that you should be able to afford it. And listen, it may be true that some of your friends can afford everything they’re doing, but for you and in your house, I want you to know your financial boundaries so that you are living by your own financial boundaries and you are not letting other people influence you. I want you to be happy about the decisions that you make, not because you have a fear of missing out or appearing a certain way, like you don’t have enough money. Like girl, quite frankly, you don’t even have to say it’s not in the budget. You could just say like to yourself, that’s honestly not even how I value spending money.
When I think about some of my girlfriends and I, we spend money in completely different ways and I just don’t value spending money in the same way they spend money and they don’t value spending money in the same way that I spend money. And I can be okay with that. I can realize that I don’t need to try and keep up with everyone. So I want to give you four ways that you can set financial boundaries with your friends. Alright, I’m coming out of the gate real strong. So the first one is I actually want you to practice sharing your financial goals with your friends. I know that this may be really awkward and you don’t even have to take friends plural. This does not mean that we have to sit at a table and be like, Hey guys, here are my goals. I would like to pay off my $20,000 worth of credit card debt.
I would like to get $1000 in savings. That is not what I mean. You don’t have to sit everybody down and read them what your goals are, like 1, 2, 3, 4. But I’m sure in some ways with some of your friendships you have started to talk about money. And so I think that’s the easiest place to start is in those relationships where you’ve already started to talk about money and you can start opening up and having conversations. Maybe you have it, maybe you start with one friend that you feel comfortable with and you can say like, Hey, like for the rest of the year going into like 2025, like one of the things I’m working on is I want to stop spending so much money eating out, like I want to be really intentional about saving money.
Like that’s one of my goals this year. Similarly you might tell them like, yeah, I am working on like I have some debt because over the summer, I was traveling a lot and so I want to be able to pay off my debt from the summer. And so that’s what I’m working on for the next six months. But like you can casually insert your financial goals into a conversation that doesn’t have to mean that you divulge all of your numbers and you don’t have to feel ashamed about it, but it’s just bringing in more opportunities for you and your friends to talk about money. It will also help you feel more comfortable setting financial boundaries with your friends. And I guarantee you a lot of your friends are going to be like, thank you so much for having this conversation because like, girl, I need to get my stuff together too.
I am on the same page as you and I need to be cooking at home and using what’s in my refrigerator. But you don’t know where the conversation can turn, but when you and your friends are on the same page financially and your goals don’t even have to look the same, it’s going to provide for more fruitful relationship where it doesn’t always have to be about spending money for you guys to enjoy one another. One of my friends, Martha, who is on, she’s been on a couple podcast episodes, but we’re also friends in real life. Like she would be a great example of a friend that knows my financial goals, I know her financial goals and we don’t always have to spend money to hang out with one another. Like we are cool going to sit on each other’s couches. We are cool like going on a walk together or sometimes we are just going to grab coffee and like those are the ways in which we connect.
But every time we get together I don’t have to feel like, oh my goodness, I got to spend like $200 to hang out with my friend. And so it’s nice to not have that pressure. But I’ll also say like both of us are also really good at getting each other to spend money at the same time when there’s something that we both equally enjoy and we equally want to do. So I feel like we have a very balanced financial relationship, if you will. And she’s not a friend that costs me a lot of money. But like I said, just find your friends in your circle that you can share your financial goals with because they’re going to help you actually reach your financial goals as you progress throughout 2024 and into next year.
The second one is I want you to be the friend that suggests the outing. Oftentimes when we are in friendships and relationships, we just kind of go with the flow of whatever our friends are saying that they want to do. And one of the ways that you can actually control your finances and control what you want to do is that you can actually control the conversation about how you guys are going to hang out. If you know that like you’re working on not eating out so much and you want to be eating more at home, then you can suggest that you guys go on a hike and that maybe you don’t go and eat out or you could suggest, hey, maybe we are all going to do, like everybody brings something and we’re going to have a picnic at the winery. Like there are things that you can suggest that you know fit within your lifestyle, they fit within your budget and they fit with how you like to connect with your friends.
But if you are the one who suggests the outing, then you can be in control of the numbers. And if you couple this, like if you have friends that you have been working on your financial goals with, you can also say like, Hey guys, we usually eat out like every single weekend. Let’s actually do something different because it’s going to help us actually reach our goals a lot quicker. And then your friends are also going to see you model that. And that’s going to be an example that you have in your friendship group for not always needing to spend 2, $300 when you guys get together.
Step three or opportunity number three I should say, is that I want you to be the friend or the person that suggests something new. I specifically was thinking about as we get into the holidays, we have a tendency to want to buy for friends and we’re buying for families. And then you think, oh my goodness, I got like 20 girlfriends over here and I got 10 nieces and nephews. And like, it can be really hard when you start to think about like, how much money do I want to spend or do I want to invest? And honestly, you’re probably not even thinking about how much you want to spend. You just are going into this feeling obligated. And so you are going in with an open wallet/credit card and you don’t have a plan in advance. And so I want you to be the friend that can suggest something new especially when you think about something that can traditionally cost you a lot of money when you haven’t planned for it, when you haven’t thought about it.
So maybe you’re the friend that’s like, Hey guys, if there’s five or six of you in a group and you usually exchange gifts, maybe you decide like instead of buying gifts for each other this year, because we’re all working on saving money, how about we go for an experience. Like maybe we want to take a cooking class together, or maybe we want to go feed the homeless together, whatever that looks like. Like you can change the narrative on how you and your friends celebrate the holidays. There are no rules. You get to create the rules. You may have to feel uncomfortable suggesting something new, but in that discomfort you could open up a new opportunity for how you and your friends are thinking about money and just thinking about valuing your relationship. If you’re like, no, Keina, we have to exchange gifts. Something else that I’ve heard people talk about doing in friend circles is drawing a name out of a hat and then you have someone kind of like white elephant.
You have someone that you are specifically buying for. I guess white elephant really isn’t that, but white elephant is a different game. But just thinking of like you are actually, or secret Santa, that’s what I’m thinking of. You are actually drawing one of your friends’ names out of a hat. Now you’re just using your resources to buy for one person instead of having to buy for five people. And then you still get to have that gift exchange that may be important to you because gift giving could be one of your love languages, but we are making sure that we are staying within your financial boundaries that you have for yourself and staying within your budget. And then the last one is really the simplest one. I want you to get comfortable saying no and no doesn’t have to mean that you can’t afford something. No can just mean that you don’t value spending money in a certain way. You might have a friend that wants to do a $400 spa date and you’re like, Hmm, I don’t really value massages like that.
Like me spending $400 to hang out with my friend. It’s not something that I value. You can say no to that spa date. That doesn’t mean that you don’t value your friend. So I want you to separate those things. It has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t value your friend. And I think sometimes when you don’t show up for the $400 spa date, you are worried about whether or not your friend likes you. You’re worried about whether or not they think you can afford something. Like you’re having this story, but you’re not actually checking in with yourself to ask yourself like is this something that I value? In a month from now am I going to be really happy that I spent $400 on this spa date, even a week from now am I going to be happy that I spent $400 on the spa?
So I need you to position yourself to be in control of how you’re spending by saying no. You can have that boundary for yourself, especially when something is like that doesn’t actually align with how I want to spend my money. Some of my friends like to go to different concerts than me and actually one of my really good friends and some of y’all are going to have a fit about this, but when we were, I can’t remember if we were in college or right out of college, but Beyonce was performing and y’all, I’m sorry, but I don’t really care for Beyonce. Like I didn’t care to go to the concert. And I will say that I did spend a hundred dollars to go to the concert and it was all about me and my friend getting to hang out together. But I joke with her all the time that I’m like, no, that a hundred dollars was to be able to hang out with you. It wasn’t about really going to see Beyonce.
And so like, I mean, I intentionally made that decision, but I definitely know that there are concerts now that I wouldn’t go with my friend if I didn’t actually want to go and I feel very comfortable saying no, but I want to hang out with you so can we put another time on the calendar that we can get together? I just don’t want to go to that concert. So you can say no to the thing that your friend is asking you to do, but then you can also suggest like, is there another opportunity for you and your friend to hang out and to connect and to be able to put in deposits in that relationship. Your relationship doesn’t have to solely be based off of spending money. Your relationship doesn’t solely have to be based off of like whether or not you show up for every single activity that your friend wants to do.
You are allowed to say no. And I want you to know this above all is that your true friends will respect your financial boundaries. You don’t need to do anything special for your true friends. Your true friends are going to understand like my friend has financial priorities and so she’s being mindful of how she’s spending in this season, and that’s okay. I want to give you permission to be that person in the friend group that’s paying attention to their money because I want you to be that person in the friend group that can retire comfortably and not be worried about your finances. So think about what your financial boundaries are and out of those four, like where do you want to start with your friends? Like who are your friends that you can have a conversation with about your goals? When you look at your calendar and people that you know you want to hang out with, how can you suggest something new with your people that you’re hanging out with that they’ve been talking about?
Like, Ooh, we’re going to get together. We’re going to get together. Like, how can you suggest the outing so you can make sure that the outing is something that feels in alignment with where you’re going financially? And quite frankly, some of your friends are going financially. So I hope this episode was helpful as you prepare for what could be one of the busiest seasons of the year, but it doesn’t just stay here. It goes really into your entire life to really think about what are my financial boundaries that I want to have with my friends, and how do I put myself in control of establishing those boundaries with my friends? So thank you so much for tuning into this week’s podcast episode and I will talk to you next week.
Outro: Thank you so much for listening to Money Files. If you’re ready to take the next step to reach your financial goals, head to www.wealthovernow.com/appointment and let’s get started.
