Before we talk strategy, I want to normalize something. Having the urge to spend money is a normal human response to the world we live in. Everyone has spending urges. Just like everyone has a belly button.
What actually matters is not whether you have spending urges. It’s how you respond to them.
In this episode, I’m walking you through why spending urges show up, what fuels them, and how to respond in a way that doesn’t rely on shame or self punishment. You’ll hear why willpower is not the solution and why awareness, choice, and self trust matter far more.
When you learn how to pause, respond, and reflect, you stop feeling out of control with your finances and start building financial trust with yourself.
If you’ve ever felt frustrated by your spending patterns or confused about why you keep reaching for your card even when your goals are clear, this episode will help you understand what’s really happening beneath the surface.
Episode Highlights:
[01:11] Why spending urges are a normal human experience
[05:00] The emotional states that trigger spending
[09:30] How marketing and accessibility shorten the spending cycle
[14:45] Recognition, response, and reflection explained
[20:10] Why delayed gratification creates more satisfaction
[25:00] How small “not right now” decisions have a compounding effect
Tune into this episode of Money Files to learn how to work with spending urges in a way that protects your goals, honors your humanness, and builds long-term financial confidence.
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 spending urges, check out Episode 204: The Pause Method: How to Stop Impulse Spending and Reclaim Your Wealth.
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Transcript for “Why Spending Urges Are Normal and How to Respond Without Shame”
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 before we move into today’s episode, I actually have an ask, wherever you are listening to my podcast, will you take a moment to subscribe and also leave a review. I love reading your reviews or hearing about how the podcast has impacted you. Thank you to everyone who has ever sent me a DM or an email. But I truly, truly love to hear from people that are listening to the podcast. It makes me feel connected to you and I enjoy knowing the reach that each one of my episodes or a series of episodes might have for you. So before you go any further, I would appreciate it if you would do that for me, and we’re going to go ahead and dive into today’s episode.
So I want to actually talk to you about spending urges, and I would just simply define a spending urge as an urge to spend money. Nothing really, really complicated. But I was thinking about this over the holidays because I think my spending urges increase and I can feel them in my body. And I’m more aware of spending because I feel like tis the season to spend money. And I want to normalize that we all have spending urges. I don’t know what you think about me from listening to my podcast, but I suffer, if you will from the same impulses that you also have. I have just done work around it. I think I have a different type of awareness and spending urges are real. As I was writing this podcast, I’m like, everyone has spending urges, just like everyone has a belly button. Like no one is excluded from having an urge to spend. I think the difference is how I respond to a spending urge and how you respond to a spending urge or from any one person to another person. It is how does that individual respond to the urges that they get to spend?
So if you’re listening to this, I don’t want you to shame yourself for having a spending urge. It’s not actually productive for that to be your conversation. It’s not beneficial to talk to yourselves like in that way or to be ashamed for having spending urges. Your brain is actually just responding exactly as it’s designed to, when you actually feel a desire for something that you want. And having a spending urge is a normal human response to living in 2026. So when we can actually accept and normalize that it’s completely normal to desire to spend money, it changes how we interact with our desire to spend money. And that’s what I want to talk to you about today is why we have spending urges and then how we can work with them in a way that’s actually going to protect our financial goals.
The only reason that we are distraught, if you will, about having spending urges is because it impacts something else. If you had a blank check and you could just probably buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy and not have to worry about it, you probably wouldn’t think much about your spending urges unless you just ended up with a house full of junk. But then if you had as much money as you wanted, you probably just get it hauled off. But the reason that we care about spending urges is because it is impacting our financial goals in some way. It’s impacting our ability to pay off debt. It’s impacting our ability to save money. It’s impacting our ability to maybe buy a house or impacting our ability to save for a wedding, impacting our ability to feel safe in a relationship like something is happening.
And we need to understand why do we talk to ourselves about our urge to spend? Or why are we worried about our urge to spend? Like what is the thing that it’s getting in the way of? And if you can actually articulate that, I think that is helpful. Maybe you’ve made a promise to yourself or you’ve made a commitment to yourself, or you have a desire to be more intentional this year and you’re thinking like, I want to be able to save. And so if the reason that I want to pay attention to my spending urges, or maybe the reason I feel a little bit annoyed by my spending urges is because I’m not able to actually save $5,000 before June. So just being a little bit more clear and specific can be very helpful. But I haven’t written a thesis on spending urges, but in the research that I’ve done from looking at my own life and working with hundreds of clients, I have been thinking about the reasons that we have spending urges.
And I think it’s important to identify why we have these spending urges because it makes them more normalized. And anytime we can normalize something, we can have less shame around it. So one of the first things that I think about in terms of why we have spending urges is because of our emotional state. So we have happy emotions and we have sad emotions, and both of those can make us want to spend money. So if we think about these feel-good emotions that we have, the happy emotions, maybe you’re celebrating something or you’re excited about something new, you have a great day, you might have an urge to spend money because you want to celebrate or it’s warm outside. And so that makes you want to hang out and you might want to do a little shopping. But those emotions cause you to want to spend. On the flip side of that, you might have had a terrible day at work and as a way to release, you start scrolling on your phone and you are just in your bed.
You’re thinking about like, oh my goodness, I had like such a bad day. Like, just need to treat myself, like, I want to self-soothe with my spending and so both of these emotions can trigger the urge to spend. So our emotional state is a really big trigger for spending urges. The second thing that I think about is marketing and accessibility. If we think about the role of a marketer, the role of a marketer is to create desire within us. Each and every single person is a customer. And so companies want to make sure that their commercials, that their ads speak to the desires that maybe you didn’t even think about. But after you watch an ad or you see a commercial and you’re like, wow, I do need that thing that they just tried to sell me. I do need a remarkable notebook. I do need a sono speaker because it could enhance my life.
Well, they’ve done their job, they have created desire within you, and we just need to know that because we have so many ways in which we can be marketed to in 2026, we also need to be aware of that. You have technology that puts things in front of you, like you know those conversations you have with your friends, and then all of a sudden you pick up your phone and you’re like, wow, that’s creepy, this is there in front of me. And so it’s like your phone knows your pain points, your phone knows your happy moments, and it’s giving you ideas. And so just to acknowledge that is one of the reasons that you could also be having spending urges. And if you heard me talk about, on other podcasts, I tell people like, pay attention to why you decided you need to buy the thing that you’re buying.
Like how did the sweatpants get into your cart? And sometimes it’s a conscious decision. Oftentimes I would bet that it’s an unconscious decision because you found yourself down a rabbit hole and now you have sweatpants in your cart, or you have a purse in your cart, or you have perfume in your cart. And the second part of this, as I was talking about, is accessibility. But one of the ways I was thinking about accessibility was even giving, like I was thinking about my own childhood. I grew up in the nineties and I was thinking about eating out. When I was a child, it was a treat for us to get like Little Caesar’s Pizza or Pizza Hut, like maybe that would’ve happened on a Friday night or if we went out to eat, that felt very special. But then when I got to college, it was very normalized to go out to eat.
I feel like it was something that I started to do more because it was also like a social thing you started to do with your friends. And then fast forward a couple of decades, by the time I’m in DC I’m an adult. And now we have things like DoorDash, we have Uber Eats, we have Postmates. And you can get food delivered to your house at any point. There are 24 hour grocery stores. But I’m telling you this story because I think about accessibility. Things used to be the food is the example here. It used to be like a special occasion, but now eating out is something that can just be an everyday occurrence. It is not uncommon to eat out for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, that could just be something that you do every single weekend because that’s how you live your life. On the weekends it’s almost like a release. But it’s also easier to do that now because of accessibility. Whether we think about the number of restaurants there are, or we just think about how we get food.
But knowing this can help us think about how that impacts our spending urges, that we have more frequent spending urges because there’s a lot more opportunities for us to have instant gratification and we have one click purchases. We have Amazon, we have Apple Pay, we have DoorDash. So the accessibility for us to be able to spend money is a lot quicker. The cycle is shorter. I literally remember as a child, like my mom getting like Spiegel magazines or like JC Penney’s, where you had to like call and order the things. And there was a lot more built in opportunities to pause to figure out if you actually wanted something. Or I feel like I remember mailing a check in with a mail order form. So now you got to go and put it in the mailbox of the post office. It’s going to take however many days or weeks it’s going to take for it to get to their customer service department and then for them to get it back to you.
So the cycle takes a lot longer, but now everything is so accessible. I think that is probably one of the biggest reasons that we have spending urges is because of, or an increase, I should say on spending urges because of marketing and accessibility. And then the third one I would attribute to our spending urges is our personal money stories. It’s really important for us to understand our personal money stories. Thinking about, what did we hear about money as a child? What were our experiences with money as a child? And if we think about the psychology of money, then we can get to a point where we’re thinking about, okay, as a child, I wasn’t allowed certain things and now maybe I want to give myself more permission to spend on things because I wasn’t allowed to have it when I was younger.
Or maybe we saw our parents struggle financially and now we’re overcompensating for our own kids. And so understanding our own money story, also is going to help us understand our own spending urges. So just to give you, like I said, just a little why, as to why I think we have spending urges and where the foundational route is, so it could be, an emotional state that triggers a spending urge, accompanied by marketing and accessibility, and then also accompanied by our own personal money stories. So now that we actually know, why we have spending urges, I just want to talk to you about how to work with your spending urges. We are already at a place where we’re normalizing that we’re going to have the urge to spend. So we want to be able to work with ourselves. We don’t need to fight against ourselves. Fighting against ourselves actually, I think makes the urge just grow. And now you’re like, nope, I got to have it.
It’s kind of like telling yourself you can’t have chocolate or I can’t have french fries. And I think it makes you just desire it more. So I think about three steps in order to be able to work with ourselves when it comes to our spending urges. And those three steps are recognition, response, and reflection. So there are three Rs. Recognition is the first step. So this is about noticing the urge that you have to spend without shame and just naming it, like I have an urge to spend today. I have an urge to spend in this moment. And when you have this urge getting curious about what that urge is, where are you feeling it in your body? What story are you telling yourself about the urge that you’re experiencing? How are you fantasizing about whatever you are going to buy? So just to give you a personal example, in December, so about a month ago, I was at one of my girlfriend’s houses and she had an amazing holiday scent in her house.
And I love things that smell good. You could probably get me anytime with something that smells good. And I remember thinking, oh my goodness, like I need this. Like this smells like, oh, this is great. And I went down this rabbit hole of looking up the diffuser and looking at all the different scents. Like I was in a place where I was like, no, no, no, I’m going to put this in my cart. I’m going to buy it. When I go back home, it is going to be at my house. And I noticed I was able to calm myself down and realize that I was having like a spending urge. And for me, what I notice is that I have this sense of like immediacy and almost the urge, I can almost feel it in the middle of my chest. And it has like an upward motion. And it’s usually met with this desire for instant gratification. And it almost is like it pulsates in my body, like I need to get this now. And as I was thinking about this and had time to actually respond to it and think about like why am I telling myself this story about why I need this diffuser? I was fantasizing about how my house was going to smell, about people noticing the smell.
And at this particular time, I was actually going to my mom’s house where I’m like, oh yes, I want to share and I want my mom to actually smell the scent. I want my parents to smell the scent and I want there to be this experience around it. So I’m like using my parents and my mother as this justification. And just to be really clear, y’all, my mother does not care about this. She hits me with like, is this a fake math Felicia thing? Because she knows about fake math Felicia, she knows about fake math and my mom doesn’t care. But in this moment, like I’m fantasizing about being able to share this experience with her and how cool this is. And mom, didn’t this smell so good? Because I actually gave myself some time and in the moment I’m not having this conversation, but in reflection I can think about the story that I was telling myself.
So this recognition piece is being able to catch yourself in the moment and having enough time to pause, to ask ourselves what is the story? And the fantasy that I’m telling myself, is it actually true? And sometimes this recognition piece can also happen in reflection. Like the fact that I was fantasizing really came more so in the reflection piece. But it’s also, this happens like in a nanosecond, in the moment when you’re having the spending urge. And so just being able to recognize that is very, very important. So the second step is response, and it’s choosing how you want to respond. And this is where you get to decide what do I want to do about this urge that I have to spend? And with this diffuser, I’m like laughing because I feel like I’m being very animated about this diffuser, but it is literally the reason I wrote this podcast episode because I was thinking about you and how do you respond to urges that happen.
When you have an urge to spend, does everything end up coming to your house? How do you talk to yourself? Because it’s a real thing and it happens. But with a diffuser, at the time it was like, ooh, you could get a $55 diffuser because it was like Black Friday special, whatever that means. Let’s make it cheap so that way you get hooked. And so that was the first thing. I was like, Ooh, I should get it because it’s like only $55. Then I didn’t get it. I was like, whatever, Keina, you don’t need it. Then it starts coming up in my ads and it’s telling me I need it. And so it starts coming up in my ads, it’s $77, but they’re like, you can get it for free if you subscribe to oils for an entire year. And I’m like, oh, but here’s the thing, the oils, let’s just call them about 20 or 40 bucks a month because you’re going to need to buy two vials a month.
So 40 bucks a month. So really this diffuser is like $480. It’s not really free because I got to buy the oils. And I’ve had this entire conversation with myself, I’m like, you don’t actually need it. If you decide you want it at some other point in time, that’s a different conversation. But you have to recognize that you just want this right now because it’s in front of you. You fantasized about it so you think that you need to add it into your life. And I don’t need to add it into my life. So I didn’t let myself buy it. And could I have afforded it? Yes. But I’m asking myself, do I actually need this? And the answer’s no, I don’t need it. When I actually go back home to DC, I have diffusers at home. And I also know that when I make purchases from this place of immediacy and like kind of graspy neediness, they’re never as satisfying as I want them to be. There are things that I end up not using and so it doesn’t actually add value to my life.
So instead, I just kind of filed this diffuser into the like, let me come back to this list. And there might be a point where I actually say, like actually, I want to change out how I’m scenting my home and I’m going to go ahead and pay the $80. I’m going to subscribe to some oils. I’m going to buy a couple of oils and use it like I want to, but I want to actually feel good about the purchase. I don’t want to make the purchase out of a place of urgency. And that’s what like being able to actually have the recognition and be able to have a response for myself lets me calm down long enough. And it also, I’m talking to myself about the reason for my decision making. It’s something that’s actively going on in my head while the urge part of me is like, oh, you need it Keina, you need it. Like, they kind of go back and forth, think about it as like good angel and bad angel on two different shoulders.
I mean the urges can happen anywhere. It’s like, this is an example that I’m telling you about the diffuser. There are also times that I go into TJ Maxx and I will be in line to the journal section and I’m thinking like, Ooh, let me see what notebooks they have. The funny thing that I tell myself is like, put your hands in your pocket, you don’t need anything because I truly don’t need another journal. And sometimes it’s really good for me to practice saying no to myself because we say yes to ourselves so many times that I think our mind and our body just get used to hearing yes. So it’s also really good to say no or not right now to ourselves because that muscle needs to be just as strong because then our yeses are going to feel so much better over time.
And you’re not going to be in this place where you always feel like it’s about deprivation. You’re going to feel like, no, my no is a no right now. And it’s an intentional no, it’s not a deprivational no. So the other thought that I had about this was the grocery store. There could be a new flavor. You guys are probably like Keina, you are so lame. But there’s a new flavor of like sparkling water. I could tell myself no to getting that in the moment because I don’t always have to have that right now. I can wait until next time. It’s a great opportunity for me to practice delayed gratification because I don’t actually need it in that moment. It has nothing to do with affordability, but it’s about being able to practice that delayed gratification with myself. And recognizing that my priorities might actually shift and I might change my mind.
And if I give myself a no, then it could leave an opportunity for other priorities to be able to rise to the top. And then the third thing is reflection. And this is about learning your patterns over time. So as I’m talking to you, and I’m trying to be as descriptive as possible., this conversation is going on in my head in real time, like when I’m thinking about it. But the reason it can go on in my head in real time is because I have learned my patterns and I have been able to develop a relationship with my spending urges and call myself out and sometimes successfully, sometimes not successfully on when I want to spend money and when I don’t want to spend money.
So in your reflection stage, I want you to think about, maybe you’re reflecting at the end of the week, maybe it’s at the end of the month or just if you’re new to this type of practice, you can just think about like, let me think about the last 30 days and what are the spending urges that I have had this week, if you’re thinking about this week or what are the spending urges that I’ve had in the last 30 days? What did I notice myself wanting to spend money on? What are some of the things that were pushing me to spend or encouraging me to spend? You could ask yourself, how many times this week did I feel a strong urge to buy something? Or what was I doing or feeling right before each of those urges? Was I scrolling Instagram? Was I stressed at work? Was I bored? What urges did I act on? What did I let pass for the ones that I let pass? How did I feel an hour later? How did I feel a day later for the ones I acted on? Do I still feel good about that purchase?
So it’s being able to have this open dialogue with yourself because your spending urges are normal, but what we also have to be able to do is integrate how we talk to ourselves. And what I really want you to understand is the cumulative impact of the urges. One urge isn’t a problem, but the cumulative impact is whether it’s saying no to urges or indulging in the urges. Both of those have an impact for us. If I’m saying yes to every urge that I have, then I’m going to unintentionally spend money that maybe I didn’t want to spend, or I won’t have the money for something that I actually wanted more because I’m saying yes just to these little moments without giving myself the opportunity to really think about what I actually want.
When you’ve never actually allowed yourself to be in that space, to decide what you really want. And you’ve only gone for the small urges, you’re going to miss the bigger opportunities to say yes to something that feels more satisfying. But then there’s this other practice of when you’re saying not right now strategically and when you are strategically saying not right now, you end up in a sweeter spot where you’re more satisfied with the things that you buy. You learn to filter yourself in such a way that the things you bring into your life you’re actually really excited about. And you also start to create more space for the other things that maybe didn’t feel as attainable for you at one time. Like when I think about the things that might not feel as attainable, like you can become the person that’s like, I have a five figure savings account now.
I never thought that I would actually have $12,000 in the bank, or I never thought that I would be able to fully contribute to my retirement. But those are some of the benefits that maybe you don’t see right now. But when you say not right now to the diffuser, that’s what’s happening. You are giving yourself permission to say yes to other financial goals that are going to become things that are actualized in your life. So what if those small urges throughout the year that you are saying no to add, up to $3,600? That is your fully funded emergency fund. That’s you wanting to start contributing to your Roth IRA. And that’s something that maybe you have thought about wanting, but maybe you’ve never realized how you can obtain that and being able to work with your spending urges and being able to change how you speak to yourself about your spending urges is going to create more opportunity and more space for you to realize some of your financial goals.
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.
