In this episode, I dive into how social media is reshaping our spending habits without us even realizing it. We’ve all heard of “Keeping Up With the Joneses,” but now, those Joneses might be right in your social media feed—whether it’s the latest wellness craze, food trends, or parenting expectations. I share stories and tips to help you identify and disrupt these sneaky influences before they derail your financial goals.
If you’re ready to take control of your spending and reset your financial habits, this episode is a must-listen. Tune in to find out how to spot and stop the new Joneses from taking over your budget!.
Discover how social media has replaced “Keeping up with the Joneses”:
- [02:33] Social media is shaping our spending
- [06:00] Wellness & self-care
- [08:38] Food and lifestyle
- [11:34] Parenting
- [17:13] Steps to reset your financial taste buds
Tune into this episode of Money Files to learn how external influences could be impacting your spending and preventing you from hitting your financial 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 the discussion about how social media influences our spending, check out my episode, Shifting Your Financial Taste Buds: The Power of Intentional Spending!
Transcript for “Stop Letting the ‘New Joneses’ Control Your Budget”
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 Files. So I feel like I’ve been talking about spending recently a lot on my podcast. I mean, I’m a money coach, a financial coach and I think that’s just one of the things I have to talk about. I think sometimes it can be so helpful to hear it from different angles because there are things that are going to stick for one person and it may not resonate with someone else, but then there is something else that I can say that’s going to resonate with another client or a listener. So this episode actually comes from, I was talking to a client that I’ve been working with since, I think we’ve been working together since November and I was telling her, I said, I just feel like so many times we’re caught up with the Joneses.
And she’s like Keina, like I don’t really like name brand things or I don’t have designer bags. And if you’ve ever heard the phrase or the terminology keeping up with the Joneses, it’s mainly like you think about the person down the street, they have 2 BMWs sitting in their driveway, maybe they have $3 million home. That’s kind of some of the imagery. We think of like these luxury, kind of like this luxury family that we’re trying to keep up with. I told her, I said, that’s so interesting that you say that because I think that the Joneses, they have like cousins now, they’re different. One of the examples I brought up to her. I said think about social media, if you’re on social media and how you are seemingly minding your own business and social media has now presented something to you. I feel like sometimes social media has heard your thoughts or they have heard your conversation as one of my friends says like, our phone is just a hot mic, and all of a sudden you have something in your feed that now you need.
You have this instantaneous urge to buy what you need. I think the Joneses now aren’t even necessarily the person that’s down the street. Sometimes it’s right there in the palm of our hand, in our phone, and it is driven a lot by social media. As I was thinking about this episode, I was like, how much does social media drive our spending habits. How much are we unaware of it? I think if you take nothing else from this podcast episode, I want you to think about how is social media shaping my spending and where are the things in my life that have kind of crept up in a very sneaky way, where I haven’t actually got, I’m unaware of it and because I’m unaware of it, I have money going out of my accounts each and every week, each and every month that I’m not tracking, that I’m not paying attention to.
And the reason that’s a problem, it’s like because of the fact that you are missing a savings goal that you have for yourself, you’re missing an ability to be able to pay off debt in a way that you want to be able to pay off debt, or you’re missing the opportunity to actually be able to sleep better at night or you’re missing the opportunity to put more into your retirement because one day you know that you don’t want to work. Even just immediate things, you’re missing the opportunity to actually cash flow a vacation that you want to take this summer because of the fact that there are some cousins to the Joneses that you don’t recognize and that you’re not paying attention to. I think I’m guilty of this too. When I think about, there’s a lot of things that I watch in terms of fitness, like nutrition stuff, and someone can all of a sudden be talking about, oh, I love these shoes.
There’s a shoe that I recently saw, it’s called Rad Global. See some of y’all are now going to look that up, but they were comparing it to the Metcon, which Metcons are the things that I work out in, or Nike shoes that I work out in. And even for myself, I can find myself down a rabbit hole and all of a sudden I’m like, oh my goodness, I am ordering shoes. So once again, not a bad thing, but when we’re not aware of how many times we’re going down these rabbit holes because we’ve been influenced, that’s the thing that we want to disrupt. And we have to be able to identify these new Joneses in our life because the new Joneses are taking over and they are coming for all of your money. They’re coming for all of your coins and how you do life.
So there are a couple areas that I want you to take a pulse in because I think with social media, it influences our spending habits, but also like our friends are on social media. So even if you’re not heavily on social media, your friends may be on social media which influences their habits, which is also going to influence your habits, especially when you’re just, once again, you’re unaware and you haven’t taken the time to think about it. I want this episode to give you an opportunity to think about your spending habits and how the Joneses are showing up in your life in ways that you didn’t even know that they could get in. It’s like the Joneses are on the dark web and they’re all in your life and you didn’t know it, but today after this podcast episode, you’re going to know.
So one of the things I was thinking about is even just how we talk about wellness and self-care, there was probably a day where you would just go into your local drugstore and you’re like, alright, I’m going to pick up some Neutrogena and I’m going to get this oil of the leg because that’s what my grandmother was using. And like, this is my face routine, but now your self-care has really become this shopping spree, and you have been hearing the fact that if you really care about yourself, then you’re like, you’ll invest in your face and your facial products in this way. I know this is true, guys, because I remember in my twenties, and I love my dear friend Jeff, but Jeff worked at Nordstrom and Jeff had me out here buying La Mer, and I don’t even know if I’m saying that right, but I was in my twenties buying this little bitty, I don’t even know if it’s a whole ounce, it might be like half an ounce of facial moisturizer.
And then I’m out here telling my friends like, yeah, Jeff says like, we’re not gonna have wrinkles for this or if we use this. I just think about that influence and that skincare product. I do know that there is some credence to having really good skincare and taking care of yourself, but just think about how are you being influenced in ramping those things up in your life? Whether it’s like there’s a mat that’s supposed to be like acupuncture, maybe you’re going to get a massage every week and you have a membership to hot works. But just look at how your self-care routine has slowly started to increase and that’s where you’ve started to spend a lot of money. Once again, that could be a phenomenal routine for you, but just think about the things that you’ve taken on because of the influence of others and not because you really know whether or not those things are good for you.
So I would say in like self-care and wellness, that’s one way that shows up. And if you just took a stock, like how much are you actually spending on those things every single month? And you should note, I think I spend a lot of money, I would say on wellness. I pay 400 bucks a month to work with a virtual trainer. I pay another $25 to go to Crunch Fitness. So I’m not saying don’t spend money on those things, but I am really mindful on like what are the things that I’m willing to spend money on? What are my hell yeses here and what are my hell nos or I can come back to them? So that’s one. The other place that I see people spending a lot of money is, even just thinking about their food and lifestyle. So in the day and age of social media and the things that are presented to us, it could be something as simple as you’re getting ads for local coffee shops and there is a must try latte or something that you feel like you have to have, a special tea that you have to have.
And if we go back to like the early 2000s, 2010, 2015, you probably had one of these like once a month or every once in a while. But now when you look at your routines and you look at your habits, you are the girl at the coffee shop that you have this 3, 4, 5 times a week and you are spending a lot of money on food. And so food might be the new Jones in your life and it could show up by way of your favorite latte, your favorite drink. It might even show up in ways that you’re ordering food. I know a lot of my clients, they like to use Factor, had a client tell me about Hungry Root. And so once again, this is just an opportunity for you to audit. Are these things that I’ve adopted or are they bringing ease to my life? Are they aligned with my values? Is it aligned with how I actually want to be spending money in this season?
It is always a great opportunity to open up and ask yourself these questions because when you are asking yourself these questions, nothing has to change immediately, but we want to open up and bring awareness to this. One of my clients likes to have an energy drink for the gym and he’s been spending a lot of money on this energy drink. On a coaching call this week, I was like, Hey, can we find a place to order this energy drink from that you really like? And he is also telling me that he wants to not drink the energy drink as much. And I was like, great, let’s order the 12 pack. It’s going to stop you from spending $4 every single time you go to the gym, which is, if you go to the gym five times a week, that’s $20, it’s $80 a month you’re spending on this energy drink.
What if we could get a case for, he actually messaged me and said he got a case for 20 bucks. So now you have 12. Also, this can encourage you in the way that you want to taper down and not drink as many of these energy drinks. So once again, if we don’t invite the conversation in, we’re not going to actually look at our spending if we’ve just given ourselves permission because this is the way that we do things now. And maybe some things are just the way that you do things now, in this season of your life, but we really want to make sure that you are in control of what’s happening.
And then lastly, another area that I see where the new Joneses are showing up and social media influenced is really thinking about how it shows up when we think about parenting. I think,10:59 I slowly watched this one, especially with clients that have kids and just think about, like how are you spending money in ways? Because although keeping up the Joneses, you think it’s a designer bag, but what are your expectations when it comes to your kids’ birthday parties? What are your expectations when it comes to the clothes your kids wear? Or what are your expectations in your extracurricular activities for your kids? And where might some of these things have slowly crept up in cost because of the fact that you are comparing yourself to something that you’ve seen on social media? It may not even be that you’re comparing yourself to your friends, but because of the fact that you’re in your parenting era and social media knows that you’re in your parenting era, where they’re showing you things and you’re being influenced.
Also, if your kids are of an age where they’re able to articulate their needs and their wants, then their friends are also being influenced. And think about your kids. They might have access to social media in their hands, and so they’re being influenced, which is then therefore influencing you, especially if you have any type of guilt about your own childhood and what you want to be able to provide your kids. And if that is coupled with you wanting to be the best mom or best father, whatever that looks like, then you are going to spend money in a different way. And so once again, today’s episode is really to get you to think about what and how do I want to reshape how I think about my spending? I’ve presented to you a couple of areas of your life and you might even be thinking of like, okay, Keina, like I would ask you the question, what are your new Joneses in your life?
No, it’s not a Chanel bag. No, it’s not a Birkin. No, it’s not you feeling like you need to buy a new Mercedes, but what are your new Joneses that cause you to spend money and you haven’t checked them? Like you haven’t actually made sure that this is how you want to spend. I want you to know what your new Joneses are because I want you to also be able to reset things for yourself. If you feel like you’ve been influenced in this way, I want you to do a reset. And when I was thinking about like what does this reset look like? An experience that I had years ago doing a whole 30, I don’t even know if you’d call it diet or experience, but with whole 30, one of the things you cut out is sugar. So I was thinking about when I cut out sugar for 30 days, I actually really didn’t like sugar when I reintroduced it into my diet. I shouldn’t say I didn’t like it, but there are certain things, like right now I don’t really love orange juice, I don’t love juice. There are just certain sugars that when I drink them now I’m like, oh my goodness, this is so sweet. I can’t believe I ever drank this. I never would’ve gotten to that place had I not actually cut out sugar or just observed and had that experience of cutting sugar out of my life.
So you know that I’m not the person that’s like having a no spend month. I’m not necessarily telling you, you can do this, I think in a number of different ways, but I’m asking you to try something different with your spending. Try something different in, like I’m thinking about a client where we actually talked about her daughter’s birthday party and in the past she just would’ve bought whatever her child wanted. Like that’s just what she did. So what I actually asked her to do is this, I said give your daughter a budget and tell her she can have, let’s just say she can have $300. So she has her list of wants, but now she has to decide from her list of wants, what does she want with her $300? How does she want to spend her $300? By way of just offering this to my client as an opportunity to try something new, she was able to shift a habit and a relationship that she had with how she spent money when it came to her kids.
And so it was kind of like that sugar detox that I had, she was able to just introduce something that she hadn’t thought about introducing into her life, which is allowing her to have more money to be able to put towards the things that her and her husband are also saying are very important to them. Whether that’s saving for their girls to be able to have a car when they turn 16 or even it meaning that they get to go on a vacation as a family and they’re able to cash flow it. But because we were able to actually introduce a new idea and a new concept, we were able to shift what I would call her financial taste buds and be able to also just shift her thinking about what she wants to do for her kids and how she wants to show up.
So for you, first in this entire process is like identify what are your triggers? Where do your spend cravings come from? So where do you notice and how do you notice yourself spending money? Is it social media? Is it a certain group of friends? Is it work? What are the things that cause you to want to spend money? So those triggers and then we want to remove some of that noise. So in this case, when I was talking about my client, it would be like the pressure, it could be simply the pressure of her daughter’s birthday coming up. So what we actually did was we decided to create a boundary and actually set a limit for how much her daughter could spend. In this case for you, you might decide like if some of your things are coming from social media, maybe you’re going to unfollow or mute certain people that make you want to buy.
It doesn’t mean that you can’t, go and look at them at some other point in time, but maybe you need to silence them because it’s just not healthy for you. Maybe you want to actually avoid different stores or websites that trigger impulse spending. I know for me, like years ago when I would shop at like Banana Republic and Ann Taylor, I remember being so triggered by sales emails and I’m like, oh, they’re having a sale. So I unsubscribed from a lot of those emails because I knew that made me want to spend. And if I don’t know about the sale, I can’t participate in the buying of it. I think Athleta would be my new trigger where, I don’t get any of their emails because I know that if I see something that’s like, oh, there’s a sale, all of a sudden I’m going to be scrolling and looking and finding something that I need to add to my closet, even though I don’t need to add anything.
Another thing that you could do is also just take 30 days and maybe you want to pause like non-essential spending, right? You’re like, okay, I’m only going to spend on things that are essential for me and I’m just going to observe what my brain wants to spend money on. By doing that simple exercise, you’re also going to find out what are some of the triggers that actually cause you to want to spend money. And then step three, I want you to add simplicity and mindfulness into your spending. So before buying something, ask yourself, would I still want this if no one saw it? Do I have something already in my house that could actually meet this need? Or even asking yourself, how will I feel about this purchase 30 days from now? Those are all three really great questions that you can ask yourself.
You can also spend time doing things that bring you joy without spending money.
One of my favorite things is to ask clients to create a joy list. And being able to know, these are the things that create joy for me. Maybe it’s being able to go on a walk with a friend or maybe it’s being able to sit outside when it’s warm and have coffee, or maybe it’s being able to call up a friend, or maybe it’s having a really great playlist while I cook dinner. But have your go-to joy list so that way you can fill your cup in meaningful ways so shopping or spending money doesn’t have to be the thing that gives you joy or fills your cup. And as you’re going through this process, just be able to write down like what’s actually happening? What do I notice about what’s going through my mind as I’m kind of going through this process of identifying my triggers and removing some of the noise and asking myself some of these questions before I actually make purchases?
Because you know yourself best, like you are your number one advocate. So when you start to notice these patterns about your spending, you’re going to be able to change these things. These are the things that I love to celebrate with clients on coaching calls where they’re like, Keina, let me tell you this week, like I did not spend any money on DoorDash. And it is not because I’m telling them like you can’t spend money on DoorDash, but they’re realizing the DoorDash might be disruptive to something else that they want to achieve in their life or maybe they don’t like the fact that when we added it up, they spent $600 on DoorDash, whatever it might be. But they’re having these aha moments that are meaningful for them.
So when you actually go through this process, what’s going to happen is you’re going to start to reset your financial taste buds. I actually have another podcast episode on Financial Taste Buds because I think the number one concern I think of any one of my clients that comes to me is like, Keina is going to make me stop spending or I’m not going to be able to buy the things that I want to buy. And I’m like, none of those things are actually true, but your financial taste buds are going to change because of the fact that you are in control of your money. I would say that more often than not, what happens is you’re like, I actually don’t want that anymore because I know what I could do with that money. And it doesn’t mean that you don’t still have a frivolous spend here or there, or that you don’t want to treat yourself to a coffee or you don’t want to buy something in a social media ad, but your awareness of it and why you’ve done those things in the past is going to be so much more clear and you’re going to find yourself doing these things less.
So at the end of the day, the goal isn’t to never not spend money, it’s to actually spend money in ways that make you happy. And not just because you saw it on Instagram or someone else is influencing you to do it. I want you to actually be in control. So think about who are these new Joneses in your life and how do you want to make sure that you’re aware of them so that way you are not stopped from meeting the financial goals that you have in 2025. So thank you so much. If you made it to the end of this podcast, thank you so much for listening all the way through. I know I was probably talking really, really fast, but I was thinking, I was like, I need to share this. And once again, I don’t think this is a new episode necessarily because I’ve talked about these things before, but I’m like, oh no, no, no, these Joneses, they’re out there and they don’t always just have on a designer Chanel dress and a Birkin bag on the shoulder.
The Joneses are out there in different ways. So I don’t want you to let yourself off the hook and saying like, oh, I’m doing a good job because I don’t have any Birkins. But like what do you have that’s creeping into your life that is stopping you from actually meeting your financial goals? And if you want to do this work and take it deeper, I would definitely encourage you to apply and work with me in my five month coaching partnership. I would love to be able to walk alongside you and really help you start to be able to spend money drama free. So I’ll talk to you later.
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.
