“I know, I know – I should save – but what do you think of my $250 highlights?”

“We told our friends not to buy us any presents for our engagement party; we’re better off than they are and they couldn’t afford what we wanted anyway.”

“I know it’s outside my budget, but I NEED that new car.”

“I can’t live any cheaper; I mean if I cut everything out, then why even bother?”

We often pretend that money is some external object, unrelated to internal self-definition, but how you spend your money tells you everything about how you view yourself. Do you give yourself expensive treats that you can’t afford? If you have a lot of money, do you spend it on things you don’t really care about, disposable items, like shoes you wear once for example? Do you fail to return things you dislike figuring it’s not worth the effort? The way you spend money translates to the way you live your life.

STEALING FROM PETER TO PAY FOR JEAN-PAUL

“I make six-figures a year. I bought a $700 sweater – so what? I go out to dinner all the time; I treat myself to a several hundred dollar spa treatment; my hair costs $400. I have the money so big deal!”

While this cash hemorrhage may look like you’re just enjoying the benefits of a high-paying job, you may, in fact, be mortgaging your future. The way to know is to look at the areas of your life that have nothing to do with money and see if your spending reflects a pattern that goes across all areas of your life.

Food: Do you tell yourself you want to lose weight but you’re just going to eat this cupcake then go back on your diet?

Love: Do you have “empty calorie” relationships that you kind of know are going nowhere, letting time keep drifting by without finding anything real? Or do you kind of dodge dating/relationships altogether, telling yourself you want to be in a relationship but you’re just too tired (or something) to date now and you’d rather spend time with your friends?

Work: Are you miserable at your job and keep talking about getting a new one but somehow stay at the same place anyway? Do you get irritated with your friends when they say things like, “Well maybe you should get a new job” like they just don’t get how complicated it all is? Do you procrastinate at work, doing a lot of things last-minute rather than organizing your schedule better? Do you dicker around on the internet all day at work or maybe spend an inordinate amount of time picking through Zagats to plan your overpriced evening meal?

Conflict: Do you tell everyone about your conflicts except the person you’re actually having the conflict with? Do you get upset with other people and complain rather than doing something about it? Or get all passive-aggressive on them? Or simply pretend you’re fine?

The commonality here is that you’re giving yourself a “gift” in the present in the hopes that the underlying issue will all just kind of magically work itself out in the future. You are, in effect, putting a band-aid on a gaping chest wound. Your belief is that, somehow, in the future, you’ll be this different person, this new person capable of dealing with the problem you’re failing to deal with now. You won’t. The way you change the way your future self will deal with problems is by changing the way your present-day self deals with problem. Your spending pattern, then, tells you everything you need to know.

LIVING SMALL

“Look, I have rent, car, insurance, my daughter’s school, clothes, etc. I’ve pared myself down to the bone. There’s no fat left to give up!”

Giving “everything” up is often a justification to spend big in some area unrelated to money – like you’ve made this big financial sacrifice so that should somehow “pay” for your choice to pursue an acting career. You’ve given up seemingly everything but you still can’t afford your life. There’s nothing else you can do! But, of course, there is. Living small is based on the belief that if you pull nourishment from other parts of your life, you’ll be able to heavily nourish the one part of your life that truly matters to you and that that is somehow all worth it.

When you really get down to it, when you examine your “small” life, you will see that there are many places where you’re not living so small – you’ve invented this world in which there are certain things you “can’t” give up and have organized your entire life around maintaining those. To pick the “I wanna be an actor” example:

Living Small:

· You live in a craphole studio with a roommate to cut back on your expenses.

· You shop only at thrift stores.

· You buy second-hand furniture.

· You never go out or only to places that are free.

· You have no health insurance.

Living Big:

· Your cell-phone bill is in the hundreds because you “need” a cell phone so your agent can call plus you got rid of your landline so that’s economizing right?

· You need new head shots.

· You need a great haircut – you’re an actor and you’re being judged on your looks plus you have to go to this art opening later and you know you’re going to be seen.

· You turn down “extras” work because you need to be perceived a certain way by the industry.

· You can’t take a day job because how would you audition?

· When you do do outside work, it needs to be arty because you’re an artist – like it’s okay to do costumes for a puppet show but it’s not okay to temp at an investment bank.

· You keep people in your life that you hate – your agent, other industry types – because you need to maintain connections for future work.

· You have to live in Manhattan; you cannot move to Brooklyn or Queens (well, maybe Brooklyn, but NOT Queens).

This list could go on. For someone who lives small and has given “everything” up, you sure seem to have a lot of requirements. The issue is not about wanting to pursue a career in a risky, generally low-paying field; the issue is about wanting to do it YOUR WAY. What you’re unwilling to give up is a very costly self-definition. “Starving artist” has a sort of nobility to you that “auditioning legal secretary” doesn’t. Or, even worse, “I’m 35 and it didn’t work out for me and I need to do something else with my life.” And you are paying a dear price to maintain your self-delusion. Your whole life if defined by what you’ve given up for whatever it is you claim you really want – and the more you’ve given up to get that thing (that relationship, that gig, etc.), the more it has to payoff the next time when it fails to pay off this time. Living small life=living big lie.

BUDGETING YOUR LIFE

In order to properly budget your life, you first need to detach money from meaning. Money doesn’t mean anything; material objects don’t mean anything. The problem, in fact, is your effort to derive meaning from objects. If you want a $700 sweater, by all means go get one – just realize that neither the money you spent nor the sweater itself actually means anything. If you believe they do – like if you find yourself talking to people about your $700 sweater – then you need to start examining what it is you’re using “$700 sweater” to convey. What does the object mean to you and what kind of response are you looking for from other people?

Budgeting your life doesn’t mean spending more or spending less. It means spending your resources on what it is you really want instead of purchasing alternative objects or emotions. Overspenders sabotage their futures by the way they spend in the present, i.e. they purchase things they don’t need instead of investing themselves in getting the things they do. Underspenders unequally distribute their resources; by being self-sacrificing in the present, they can justify maintaining something in their life that clearly isn’t working (job, relationship, etc.) because they’ve “paid” for it by what they’ve given up. Things can be different if you want them to be. Here’s how you do it.

If you’re an overspender:

Look at your credit card bill at the end of each month. For each $10/$100 (depending on your finances) you judge yourself to have bought unnecessary items, spend that many minutes per day thinking about what it is you really want and how you plan to get it. In other words, if you spent $1500 last month and decide that $1000 of it was for unnecessary stuff, make an agreement with yourself to spend 10 minutes per day thinking about where you are your life, what’s missing, what the money might be substituting for. If you already know these things (or once you figure them out), spend 10 minutes a day figuring out what you’d need to do to get what you want. Once you’ve done that, spend 10 minutes a day implementing your plan. This isn’t about saving money; it’s about saving you.

If you’re an underspender:

Do the reverse of the overspender, i.e. figure out how much you’ve deprived yourself of and agree to spend a minute for every $1/$10/$100 you would have spent in various aspects of your life if you had the money (or, if you’re well-off but miserly, if you’d chosen to spend the money). Would you be living in your current cheapass apartment? Would you own a house? Would you be out there dating more because you wouldn’t be so hung up on the cost of going to a bar or restaurant? Now spend your underspent time really thinking about whether everything you don’t have in your life is worth it. Did you always want kids but you’ve lived so small that you could never afford them without giving up your dream? Is it YOUR dream or the dream of some past version of you? Are you holding on because you want it or because you’ve given up so much for it that it HAS to pay off or your sacrifice won’t be worth it? Then, if you decide you want things to be different, start thinking about what would need to change in order for you to get other things in your life. Then start implementing those things.

Both the overspending and underspending examples amount to the same thing: understanding yourself via the way you spend (or don’t spend) your money. If you look, you will find parallels. If you’re financially generous with everyone but yourself, then you can be sure that there are many other areas of your life where you’re putting yourself last. If you buy off your guilt – like by paying rent for someone you dumped or by buying chocolates for someone you’ve wronged – then you are, in all likelihood, making emotional purchases in multiple different life areas.

Money is a metaphor for your life. Worth, value, earn, deserve, spend – these are all words that apply to cash transactions as well as interpersonal ones. Your money is a mirror of you. If you’re willing to look at it and see what it’s telling you, then you will find your time investment paying dividends in the only coinage that truly matters – that of being true to yourself.