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How to stop emotional spending · Cash Confident with Brie Sodano

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Cash Confident podcast.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: I'm Brie Sedano, your fearless host, personal finance expert and the visionary behind the revolutionary Cash Confident community.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Get ready to embark on an electrifying journey where we redefine the rules of money and empower women to harness the immense power to craft a life they truly, truly desire.
• 0:22
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• 0:32
  Speaker 1: We leave no stone unturned as we delve into the depths of money management, mindset mastery and the undeniable influence of emotions on your financial decisions.
• 0:43
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• 0:55
  Speaker 1: We believe that true financial power begins with knowledge, and that is exactly what we deliver.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: So buckle up, my fierce and ambitious friends, as we embark on this transformative journey to becoming Cash Confident together.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: Hello, hello.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: Today we are going to get into how to stop emotional spending.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: It is one of the topics that people bring up inside the Cash Confident community all the time, and basically the goal when we're spending money is to spend our money intentionally, to buy us the lifestyle that we actually really want to create, and when we're doing a lot of emotional spending, that can be derailed, right.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: So in this episode, i want to teach you how to identify and, kind of, how to break out of emotional spending and just how to think about it differently so that way you actually get what you need from your money, all right?
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: So the first thing I want to teach you is that spending runs in a habit loop, if you will.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: So there's the trigger, the routine and the reward, and this, for some habits, is much more clean, cut and dry, right.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: It's like when I wake up in the morning, that is the trigger for me to immediately go pour myself a cup of coffee.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: The routine is drinking the cup of coffee and the reward is the sweet, caffeinated feeling of my heart just pumping, right.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: So when it comes to our spending, we do the same thing.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: So when we are spending for emotions, we have to look at all three of those things, because sometimes the emotion can be the trigger, right, like spending money, because we're stressed out.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: Sometimes we can get our emotional need met in the routine, or sometimes our emotional need is the reward, and it just depends Every single cycle.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: Every single person, every single example is different.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: So, when it comes to emotional spending, some of the things that you're going to want to start to notice are maybe the time of day that you're doing a lot of shopping that, when your statement comes, you feel like a little regretful about, or notice the emotional state that you're in when you're shopping.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: Stress, hunger, you know, being pressed for time, being exhausted those can all be trigger states.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: I will tell you, i had a client once who, when she would avoid tasks at work, she would just be wanting to avoid her tasks for a little while, you know, she had reports that were due or things like that.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: She would go to Macy'scom and she would just buy stuff.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: And it was just procrastination, it was just avoidance.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: She didn't really want or need these things.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: But that emotional, you know, not wanting to do her work or feeling frustrated in her job, that stuff was kind of coming up And then she was just buying something to numb the discomfort of what was going on for her.
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: So that's the first place that you want to start to notice is noticing, like, all right, so if I'm spending money on these things, that I'm, you know, feeling a little regretful about, or feeling like I don't actually want or need them, or wishing that I had the money to do some other things.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: We want to start to notice.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: You know, what are the, what are the triggers?
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: And it could be really things like as sometimes it's just as simple as time of day, right.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: I had, i had another client who would go shopping from her phone in bed, right, so she would be in her bed, it'd be the end of the day, her all of her mental energy already spent And she was just using the time on her phone to wind down.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: But she would end up buying like hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of stuff on a very regular basis I mean, we're talking tens of thousands of dollars a year and stuff that she had that she would buy, that would show up at her house and she didn't really want or need, it, didn't bring any lasting, you know, joy to her life.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: She was really just doing it as a, as a method to wind down.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: So that was her emotional need, right?
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: So once you start to notice the trigger, the routine and the rewards around these spending, then that helps to you to start to understand, like all right, well, what am I getting out of this emotional purchase Or what am I avoiding out of this emotional purchase?
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: Right, And I'm going to tell you two stories.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: So I had a client who was buying mass quantities of high end like makeup And when we were talking about it, she says to the something, to the effective.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: When she's feeling a little low with herself, when she's not feeling so confident, she goes and she buys this makeup because it gives her momentary boost, right, and that's so.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: She gets a momentary feeling of confidence.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: All right, now, in the long run, that doesn't.
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: You know, high end makeup doesn't actually provide confidence.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: Like it's they're not the same.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: It makes your your lips a different color, makes your eyelids a different color, but it doesn't actually provide any level of confidence in the long term, although you, you may feel slightly more confident if you're, if you're feeling, you know, like you look top notch.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: But she wasn't putting the makeup on, she was just buying it.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: And I want to say that because there's a very big difference between applying makeup and buying makeup.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: They are not the same, right, all right.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: And I had another client who was she was going to the bar regularly after work and she wasn't spending a lot of money.
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: She wasn't doing a lot of big drinking, but she would just go and she would have a happy hour snack and a and a beer.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: And when we got into it we realized that she was avoiding feeling lonely.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: She was recently divorced, her kids, she was an empty nest, her kids had moved out And so she just didn't want to go home and be alone.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: She was avoiding some loneliness, and so what she was doing there was she was going to the pub and getting a snack and a beverage and scrolling the interwebs and not really having a very fulfilling social interaction.
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: But it was just enough numbing, if we will, to make her feel like you know, she wasn't.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: She wasn't so lonesome, right.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: And so when we look at the things that we're actually getting, then that kind of opens up the door to well, what would we actually need to have or avoid this state more permanently, right.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: And so the client who's buying the makeup we started to look like well, what would actually really make you feel more confident?
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: Right, and we would find things.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: Like you know, her waking up and going outside made her feel more confident.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: Her taking care of her animals would make her feel more confident.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: This same client when we were discussing it.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: She was doing two things.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: So she was buying the lipstick, but she was also buying wine, like a kind of a lot of wine, like where she was drinking wine regularly at night And then that was numbing something else that was going on in her life, and then she would wake up and she wouldn't feel super beautiful or confident, right, i don't know, i don't feel my best after waking up after a bottle of wine.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: And so it opens up these doors to like, well, what's actually going on, what actually would need to change for me to feel confident?
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: And so this client in particular.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: She decided that she was going to stop drinking after work.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: She decided that she was going to wake up and spend time outside with her animals before she did anything else, and that was enough of a change for her.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: It didn't take long.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: She lost like 30, 40 pounds.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: Not that my work with her had anything to do with that, but it was just her habits changed, right, she wasn't drinking the bottle of wine, and then she was more active in the morning and doing that sort of things, and that made her feel better, feel better in herself, taking care of herself and not numbing the activities And then sometime later her relationship with her spouse changed and it was so, so much better, and that level of change really comes from addressing the underlying issue.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: If all I said to her was well, stop buying that makeup, stop doing that, right, because that's what the practical solution would have been, i'm like, well, you already have enough makeup, so stop buying it.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: Dumb, dumb, i feel like when you get over a simple, a fine advice, it always comes with this like silent, dumb, dumb.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: You know she would have had the money, but not these other changes, and I think the thing to know that's really important to know about emotional spending is that it's us getting our needs met And sometimes, if we're not doing that consciously, we will pick band-aid solutions, but at the end of the day, we're just trying to get her needs met.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: There's nothing wrong with us, right?
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: The other client what we did for her was so she realized that she actually needed more friends, that she had friends, but they weren't on a growth pattern.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: They only wanted to complain about their spouses or their kids And she just wasn't there for that.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: She just didn't want that.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: So what she really found was she was going to the pub to numb herself just enough to the fact that she actually wanted new friends.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: She wanted a whole new friend group.
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: She wanted local connection.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: And so for that client we put in, she was started going to local meetup groups And the thing that she picked was who were talking about real estate, because that was the thing that she wanted to do.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: She made friends at that local meetup group.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: I think she ended up with a lover, she ended up with a banker and she bought her first piece of property like a rental property about a year after that happened And that took her retirement age from 69 to 62.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: She saved seven years of working with that piece of property because it generated that much cash flow that it adjusted her whole retirement plan.
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: And that wasn't even exactly the goal, it was just, it was just to change what was going on.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: And the thing is is the meetup group still costed money, so she didn't immediately save money per se, she just started spending it on different things.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: But I think that's important to notice.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: It's because a lot of times these emotional needs that we're filling with money sometimes it will still cost money to solve them, and that's okay.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: But we do want to be looking for a sustainable solution that's actually going to solve the problem at the level that it actually needs to be solved.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: So the third thing once you know what emotional state you're trying to get or you're trying to avoid, this is the place where you can evaluate and look for deeper solutions, and I just went through this with these two stories.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: But this is the place where you can ask yourself like, well, what state am I trying to achieve or avoid, and does this solution that I've been picking, does this sustainably solve that problem, or is this problem going to be back again tomorrow?
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: And what would it take to actually really solve the problem And what needs actually really need to be met, and can I meet them by doing this Or are there other ways?
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: And I think that's the key here.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: That I want you to take away from this is that emotional spending doesn't happen because you're bad or you're wrong or you're bad at money or anything like that.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: It's just because we all have emotional needs And when they're not in our conscious awareness, when we're not thinking about them as emotional needs, sometimes we're just looking for the fastest solution to get our needs met, in whatever capacity.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: We can do that today, right, Like immediately.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: Today, i'm feeling a little low on myself.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: Let me go buy that lipstick.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: And it does take a little bit of effort and it does take a little bit more self-awareness to look at these deeper levels.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: But when we look at the deeper levels we can find solutions that are longer lasting And I would also venture to say, find solutions that actually enhance the quality of our lives.
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: So that way it doesn't feel like a sacrifice to stop doing the thing that we were spending the money on, because we're actually getting our needs met, right.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: So if I had said to my client that was going to the bar, stop doing that, just stop doing that, have a beer at home.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: You could have a beer at home and throw a chicken wing in the oven and call it a day, save a ton of money.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: That would be true, but it would have left that need unaddressed.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: And if we had done that, her needs would have been less met than they were being met at the bar.
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: Going to the bar to sit by herself to scroll the interwebs, right.
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: So she was settling for a really low quality solution to her problem when there was a higher quality solution available to you.
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: And so I think emotional spending is one of those things where, when we really look at it, there's so much opportunity to have a more abundant life And I mean abundant in the fullness of the word like more friends, more beauty, more wonder, right Like the other the first client I was telling you about the lipstick like her life is so much better because she's got this connection with herself, she's got this connection with her animals and she'd been drinking because her relationship, her relationship with her husband, had been tense And her stopping to do that opened up all of this space for communication and really really just wonderful changes.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: And so when we're looking at our emotional spending, i think sometimes we can kind of look at it for places where there's opportunity to just really have much more abundance and gratitude And just like all sorts of just good feeling shit in our lives, and not make it out that we're wrong or we're bad or we're bad at money or things like that, because that's, i mean, it's just unhelpful, like it's just an unhelpful way to look at things.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: So anyways, i hope that you took something from this, that you that you have a framework to look at some emotional spending and to solve those emotional needs on a deeper level so that way, you can actually have a truly wonderful and abundant life.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: All right, i love you.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: I appreciate you.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: I will talk to you next week.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: It was my pleasure and joy to talk with you today.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening.
• 15:41
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• 15:48
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• 15:53
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• 16:02
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• 16:27
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