Do you have a spending problem?
In today’s episode, I share how your personal spending story can help reshape the way you think about money and guide you toward making more intentional purchases that align with your budget and financial goals.
I’m not here to make you feel bad about spending, and I don’t advocate for “no-spend” challenges that vilify buying the things you want. Instead, I want to help you identify the emotional, habitual, and environmental triggers that drive your purchases. This awareness will help you regain control of your finances and shift toward intentional, guilt-free spending based on your values.
If you’ve ever found yourself overspending or feeling out of control with money, this episode will give you practical insights and tools to reflect on your spending habits and make meaningful changes.
Listen to learn how to discover your personal spending story so you can feel empowered about the choices you make with your money.
- [03:25] How to discover your personal spending story
- [05:04] Spending type: habitual vs. environmental vs. emotional
- [11:10] Identifying where you overspend
- [16:25] 4 actional steps to make intentional shifts in your spending
Tune into this episode of Money Files to learn how to discover your personal spending story and learn steps you can take to make intentional shifts in how you spend money.
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 the discussion about your personal spending story, check out my episode, The Power of Micro Habits for Financial Success!
Transcript for “Rewriting Your Spending Story: How to Spend with Purpose and Confidence”
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 back to another episode of Money File. So I think this episode today is a lot of you are going to relate to it, but I had a client the other day, we were in a coaching session. She’s like, Keina, I have something to tell you. I’m just like, yeah, what’s up? She’s like, KeIna, I have a confession. She’s like, I think I have a spending problem. And I kind of smiled. I smiled because we are, I’d say like a month, like four to six weeks into her budget and her really understanding her spending habits. I always love to talk about this part of working with me, we’re building this awareness and prior to working with me, most people don’t really look at their numbers. You are paying your bills right now and you’re managing to the best of your ability, what’s left in your account.
I would say people, regardless of how much they’re making, majority of my clients, they make six figures. But regardless of how much you’re making, whether you’re making a $100,000, 200, 300, even a million, because I have clients that make a million dollars as well. When we work together and we start looking at your numbers, like things become illuminated, there are things that you are doing with your money that you don’t realize you’re doing. So this awareness that we have now, has my client saying like, I think I have a spending problem. So most times when people recognize like, oh my goodness, I feel like I’ve just been burning a hole through my pocket and I’ve been spending so much money, the thing that you probably naturally think about doing is like, let me jump into a no spend challenge, especially as we come into the New Years and we finished the holidays. People are doing dry January, they’re doing no spin challenges, all of those things.
And what happens, especially if you just came through January and you did that no spin challenge, you have probably now reverted to your old spending habits and you probably rewarded yourself for not spending all of January by going to spend. I don’t want you to do a no spend challenge. I actually don’t like no spend challenges. I want you to hear this clearly. It’s not about, I think that there can be appropriate times where you’re like, okay, I’m just going to cut that out because I feel like I’m going a little bit crazy. But the reason I don’t like no spend challenges is because I think that they villainize spending. I want you to know that it’s actually okay to spend money. I don’t want to villainize your spending. I want you to actually understand how you spend to be able to reflect on how you spend, and to be intentional about your spending.
I want you to be able to spend drama free. I want you to be happy about the money you spend. I want you to love everything that you buy. I want you to spend with ease. Like that’s what I want. So instead of you trying a, Hey, I’m just going to stop spending and hopefully I’ll get better, I actually want you to find your personal spending story. That’s where I want you to spend your time and I want you to spend your focus. If you feel like you’re someone who’s in that bucket of like, I think I have a spending problem. I should also say early on in this episode, I know that there are real issues that people have with spending, which in that case, like you might want to see a financial therapist or even talk to your therapist. But a lot of the problems that I see and the challenges that I see with my clients, if you can find your personal spending story, it is really going to help you reshape how you think and feel about your money.
It’s going to help you enjoy what you are spending on. It is going to help you feel better about your bank account. And remember, you can feel like you spend a lot of money, even if you have a lot of money, spending doesn’t really have anything to do with being in debt or how much you have saved, like you could just not like the way that you’re spending. So I also want to name that as we go into this episode. So I want you to find, like I said, I want you to find what’s your spending story. And your spending story is made up of your habits, your environment, your emotions that influence how you use money. And the goal, like I said, is not for you to feel bad about your choices, but it’s to understand them so you can start making shifts that actually stick.
So the first part of this, I want you to ask yourself about your spending. Like, is my spending just habitual? And so habitual spending is just like the things that we do really without thinking, do I grab a coffee? Do I grab a snack or a few extra items at the store without thinking, do I always say yes to giving my kids money and even didn’t even realize that I gave them money two days before. They’re just things that we do because they are habits that we have. It’s important just to know those things about yourself. Because if you are doing a no spend month, you’re not thinking about the different categories that your spending falls into and so some of it can be habitual spending. I have one client and we’ve been talking about his spending and he has a habit of when he’s out and I can see it in his bank account every single time he’s out, he generally pops in like at a gas station, at a grocery store and he picks up something.
He tells me that he only does it when he goes to work. I’m like, okay, but look like, look at these days. And I was naming for him. I said, I think you just do these things out of habit and I realize that you’ve shifted a lot of your behaviors, but I just want to highlight what you’re doing because I think it’s just a habit that you have that you don’t think much about. I want you to be in control of this habit ultimately, but I want to present that information to you. So that’s just a really great example of some habitual spending that we have. I think another place that habitual spending shows up a lot is at the grocery store. I think I’m super guilty of this because I think that if I am buying groceries, groceries are free money. I have to eat, I have to have food. So the grocery store is where I have to be really mindful of, if I go in there, and I’m like, oh yeah, I’m going in there because I need a bell pepper and a pack of chicken for dinner. If I get to cruising down the aisles and I see stuff on sale, it can go into my shopping cart and instead of getting those one or to two items, I’ve now come out with 8 to 10.
And like I said in my head, it’s a grocery store money, so it’s free money. But if I’m not being mindful and just going in with my list, I’m going to fall into my habitual spending patterns. So check your habitual spending that you do. The next is asking yourself, is my spending environmental? So do I spend differently when I’m with certain people? How do I spend when I’m with my friends? How do I spend when I’m with my coworkers? How do I spend when I’m with my family? This is important to note especially when you are just starting to manage your money, you’re probably going to notice this even more where you feel like, okay, I do really great when I’m just by myself and I’m just managing money just for me and I don’t leave the house. But what happens when you leave the house and you encounter your friends?
What happens when you leave the house and you encounter your family or you encounter your coworkers? Like how does that change how you spend? And do you even find yourself shopping because you’re with a group of people that are shopping and you kind of do what the group does, even if it wasn’t in your plans? So just think about your spending. Where does that show up? Is it environmental? Lastly, I want you to think about like, is my spending emotional? So do I shop when I’m happy? Do I shop when I’m stressed? Do I shop when I’m bored? I think a great example of this is, I know if I’ve had a long day and you guys have probably heard me talk about this quite often, is like, if I’ve had a long day, I can find myself scrolling on my phone and I’m like scrolling down Athleta or what have you.
And if I’m not paying attention, packages will come to my door because you’re kind of like shopping in a space and in a moment where you’ve kind of checked out and that’s how it can show up for me when I’ve just like had a really long day. But emotional spending isn’t just about you being stressed or you being tired. It can also happen when you’re happy and you can use spending as a way to reward yourself. And sometimes there are appropriate times for that, but how do you use spending to reward yourself? Maybe you reward yourself for a long day or for getting through a long day or you reward yourself for a big win or you reward yourself for your birthday, that treat yourself mentality. And so just thinking about how emotional spending shows up. I usually caution people, especially as the weather starts to change. I think we get these like happy dopamines with the sun shining, all of a sudden now we’re like, oh, let me call up some girlfriends and we need to be at a happy hour. We need to be outside and we need to enjoy this weather.
And so just thinking about, there’s nothing wrong with that, but just knowing, oh, I’m a sunshine girl. And when the sun starts like popping outside, all of a sudden, my wallet and my debit card, my credit card, it’s swipe, swipe, swipe. We need to know these things about ourselves because this goes into our personal spending story. And so ask yourself, is my spending habitual? Is it environmental or is it emotional? And so when we’re thinking about like, okay, we’ve answered that for ourselves. Now I want you to think about the types of things that you tend to overspend on. Are you overspending on food? So maybe it’s eating out, going to the coffee shop, at the grocery store. Like what are the things that kind of tend to be your triggers there? Or do you find yourself spending your money on clothes? If it’s on sale, like you had to get it, maybe you are overspending on trips or even experiences, like you’re going to every single concert that’s coming up. Like where do you see that your money flowing out. Maybe even overspend on your kids and you are doing some guilt spending there? Because I know moms have a lot of guilt and they’re like, oh, they just needed this or they asked me for this, they never asked me for this.
And you get into a pattern of justifying things. But if we’re really looking at just like how you’re overspending or how much you’ve been spending, especially now that you have an awareness, where is your money going when it comes to your kids? And then lastly, thinking about personal care, maybe it’s your hair, your nails, your skincare, wellness, splurges. So I just want you to know what are the types of things that you tend to overspend on and what are the triggers when you are thinking about this overspending? What causes you to overspend in these areas? I know a client that I’m working with, we have been working together, we just actually finished up our five months and we’re going to pick back up in March, but she came to me because her and her husband, she wanted to get their overall family spending down. And she says I’ve been through AA, I’ve lost a lot of weight, like having a coach I know is a thing that’s going to help me with my overspending. And so we’ve actually done a lot of work around identifying like what her triggers are, what she overspends on.
But actually when it came time for Christmas, we talked through like what are your triggers going to be? What are the opportunities that you are going to have to spend money, that you’re going to feel like you want to say yes to? And so we talked about a family tradition that they have where they fill stockings and she’s like, usually I just give my daughters my credit card and like they spend whatever they want. And I was like, okay, but do you want to do that? And so she’s like, huh, I can have control over that? Yes, you can totally have control over that. I said, we’re not taking away the joy of filling stockings at Christmas, but let’s actually talk about if we set a limit for each stocking. If each stocking you are thinking about $50 and if you have, I can’t remember how many people are in the family, but just for the sake of this conversation, let’s say there are five stockings.
So now we have a limit of $250 and now we don’t have to feel like we’re overspending and then the number that just comes back to us, we’re going to be shocked by it. I said, you can actually have a conversation with your daughters to say, okay, this year we’re going to have a limit. It’s going to be $50 for each stocking, so you guys can buy whatever you want, but just stay within the $250 limit for the five stockings. And the byproduct of that is that helped her stay within the limits that she wanted to stay within for the holidays. And it’s helping her with her overall goal of being really mindful about overspending. And so literally, we’ve just been rinsing and repeating this process of helping her identify like, what are going to be the things that are coming up for you that are going to make you feel triggered or where you tend to overspend in the past and how do we actually carve out some boundaries around that because we don’t have to villainize the spending, the spending isn’t bad, let’s just put some guardrails on it so we can stay within these guardrails and it stays and lives within those goals.
So just giving you an example of how I’ve used this with a client, but for yourself, like you need to know what are some of the things and like I was just talking about with my client, thinking ahead and saying like, what are some of the things that trigger me that I want to be thinking about? So if I’m thinking about the next 30 days, where are there going to be some opportunities for me to want to overindulge with my spending? Is there going to be a really great sale? Am I going to find something that I love? Or is this, oh my goodness, there’s this one brand and it only, like what are the stories that you’re going to tell yourself and then creating another opportunity for you to rewrite that story? That’s going to be very important. So once you actually know your spending patterns and you have identified like, okay, they seem to be like more emotional, or they seem to be some habitual things that I’m doing, or I have some social things, we want to start thinking about how can you make intentional shifts so you don’t have to feel like I’m just someone who loves spending and I overspend and this is totally out of my control.
I want to give you some tangible steps to actually think about how do I incorporate some of these changes into how I’m managing my money. So the first thing I want you to do is actually create spending categories in your budget that acknowledge the ways that you actually enjoy spending money. So by actually doing this, you’re going to create opportunities for you to spend money in ways that you enjoy. If you know that you enjoy shopping, we should see clothes in your spending budget. If we know that you enjoy eating out, like make sure that we have some eating out there. And once you actually have a number in your budget. So if you know throughout the year I spend about, $3,000 on clothes, you can divide that upper month and you are going to have to make some tough decisions where it’s like, okay, well maybe this month I’m not actually going to buy the thing that I saw because next month I know that I want to take advantage of using my clothing money because I’m going to go on a trip and I know that whenever I go to this state or whenever I go to this country, I always love to shop.
So you’re going to make some choices, you’re going to make some decisions, but it’s going to give you an opportunity to love the things that you buy and to be able to make decisions that feel good for you. The next thing I want you to do is I want you to actually reflect on your last five indulgent purchases. So the things that you feel like you overspent on and where things came into your home or went into your belly, what have you and what were those indulgent purchases? What I want you to do is review them because it’s going to allow you to learn about yourself even more. But I want you to know like, which of these purchases still feel really good to me and which ones would I actually rethink? You are going to notice some patterns about what you buy. You’re going to notice some patterns about your experiences that you partake in. They’re going to help you in the future decide, like, this is something that I always want to be able to say yes to. And this is something that I don’t need to be able to say yes to, like I don’t want to be able to say yes to.
To give you an example, one of the things, and one of the areas that I feel like overspending can show up is when we’re in like a scarcity mindset or sometimes we just have a “good idea.” And I remember years ago, it’s actually two stories. I remember years ago I had these shoes, they were flats and I really love them. So I bought two pairs of the same shoe because I was like, oh, once the other shoe wears down, then I’ll have another pair to use, this is brilliant, this is absolutely brilliant. I never actually used the second pair of shoes. I think by the time my other shoes wore out, I don’t think I liked them anymore. When I think back, I had this kind of scarcity mindset behind it, like I needed to have the two. I ultimately ended up wasting money because I think I probably gave them to a friend or something like that. But what I’ve learned from that experience is Keina, you don’t need to buy two of the same thing, like you are going to be able to find another pair of shoes that you need. I think it would’ve been much different if perhaps it was a different situation. It was like you know within 30 days the shoes are going to wear out, like if you were someone who was training for a marathon or something like that, maybe then I would allow myself to buy two pairs of shoes.
I didn’t actually need to do that. Another place that over the years that I learned about myself too is, I used to buy a lot of stuff on sale that I felt like was a good deal. I am much less prone to buy things on sale now. I want to buy things that I love. And that’s what I’ve learned from reviewing my purchases because I’ve had multiple pairs of shoes, I’ve had jackets, I’ve had different things that have sat in my closet that I bought when they were on sale because I thought that I could find a use for them. And once again, I just think it’s this like, it’s these urges and sensations that I have. I’m in this emotional state, I can’t think clearly and I bought things. And then when I’m actually able to reflect on it, I realize I don’t need it. And even to give you, like a day-to-day example, I think the same is true when I think about the grocery store. I’m laughing as I’m thinking about this. If you guys know the place Kava, I don’t know if they have one where you live, but it’s like a Mediterranean kind of like Chipotle thing.
And at Whole Foods they sell like their taziki sauce, they sell their dressings. And every time I see it on sale, I’m like, oh, I should pick one up. Literally my brain is saying, oh, you should get one Keina. I have probably allowed myself to buy it once or twice and then I never use it and it goes bad. And the reason I don’t use it is because it’s actually not like I haven’t like planned any meals around it because when I go in the grocery store, I generally have a grocery list and I know what I’m eating. And so with these sauces that Kava sells, they have a whole different grocery list. It’s not like I would have a whole different grocery list to actually be able to buy the things, I would need to be buying like chicken shawarma and just like a different. It’s a different flavor palette. And that’s like a another example of just like in ways in the grocery store that I can be overspending because I’m caught up in this moment and I think like, oh, it’s on sale. I need to take advantage of it and I don’t need to take advantage of it. I could actually afford it when it’s not on sale and I should just leave it in the store because not only, like I just end up wasting money. So those are three examples for you, just going through your last five indulgent purchases.
And indulgent doesn’t necessarily need to mean that you spend a lot of money on it either. Just like the examples I gave you, just where did you tell yourself even that you needed something or what are you categorizing as a spending problem in areas of your life and how do you go back through and investigate how you spent in those areas and asking yourself which ones felt good and which ones do you want to rethink in the past or moving forward? Next, I want you to choose a micro habit. I have another podcast episode that you can listen to. I think it came out a couple of weeks ago, but it’s about you choosing a small change that you want to focus on this year that’s going to have a big impact for you. And so a small change is not a no spend challenge, like that’s not the goal. You might decide that one of the small changes you want to make this year is that you’re going to give yourself 24 hours before you buy something or one of the things I know that I’ve been practicing this year is not buying things from my cell phone.
I think that that’s dangerous, like I’m on the couch, I could be in the grocery store, I could be at a stoplight and find yourself all of a sudden opening up a shopping cart. So I’ve been really mindful about not buying things from my phone. Another micro habit you could do is checking your budget before you make a purchase, the small simple habit that you could make yourself do before you actually purchase something, so that way you are connecting to your spending regularly. You could decide to shop your closet before you buy new clothes. Another habit you might pick up is maybe you’re going to pre-plan your gift purchases for an entire quarter instead of last minute spending. Like that’s another way that I think we tend to overspend. And then lastly, I want you to make sure that you are monitoring and reflecting in your weekly money dates about your urges, like where do you notice throughout the week that you had a really strong urge to spend? Did you indulge in it? Did you let it pass? Why? How did you feel afterwards?
But just being able to have this set of questions for yourself and asking yourself on a weekly basis, is going to allow you to become more intimate with your personal spending story. And allow you to actually shift your spending habits and become more aware and the more awareness you have, the more you’re going to be able to create the type of spending story that you want. Because the question here is, do you like the spending story that you have? And if you’re telling me, Keina, I think I have a spending problem, I think I would say you don’t like your spending story that you have. So I want you to actually build a spending story that you’re proud of and I want you to feel like you are intentional with your spending. And I don’t want you to villainize your spending in 2025.
So thank you so much for tuning into this podcast episode. If you found something helpful, share it with a friend. If you would like to take this work deeper, I would invite you to apply to work with me in my five month coaching partnership. You can go to the show notes or you can go to Wealthovernow.com and you can book a call with me there. Thank you again and I’ll chat with 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.
