It’s a month after the holiday season and looking at your credit card bill probably makes you cringe. All that money, gone. Sure it was to buy presents or go out to dinner with out-of-town guests or send your yearly holiday cards, but the amount still makes you feel hungover. Why is it so easy to spend so much money? 

I want to acknowledge the very real effects of capitalism and consumerism on our brains. We’re bombarded with messages of what we should buy and have to be successful or happy. Meanwhile, someone who makes $30,000 a year is considered in poverty in any major city. In addition, inflation has skyrocketed in the last year. We’re seeing the price of everything go up and more of us are pulling money from our savings just to get by. So of course we’re spending more money.  

My question comes from an existential yet playful place of wondering about our relationship with money. No matter what the circumstances, it seems like it’s easy for us to spend but difficult for us to save. But it turns out that our brains may be wired to do exactly that.

Our attention and motivation drive our spending

In his book, Money Mammoth, Brad Klontz writes, “The majority of us are not wired to save… In a 2018 study published in Nature Communications … noted that “savings are for future use, are currently inaccessible, and are abstract, which decreases our attention and motivation (italics mine) to save. In contrast, we are wired to focus more on earning or gaining money and possessions now, which is more concrete. Not only are we wired to pay attention to immediate concrete gains versus long-term abstract savings, our ancestors survived by sharing what they had when they had it.” 

I emphasize “attention and motivation” because those reasons are the crux of the issue. What are we paying attention to when we spend money? Why are we spending the money? This helps explain that the very human impulse to spend and share is part of our evolution. When our ancestors were in survival mode, sharing (spending) had immediate consequences that were linked to whether they survived or not.  In addition, “the sharers survived and so they passed on their sharing genes and became the dominant group with the trait of sharing.”  Spending was positively reinforced with survival. Contextualize that trait in  our consumerism culture and it’s easier to understand why we spend so much.

Making empowered decisions about your spending 

This perspective helps us understand our behavior and why working toward another financially beneficial behavior (saving) is so difficult, but so important. In many ways, it’s like investing. We’re wired to be terrible investors – our herd instincts, for one, make us that way. And we know that we are doing the right thing in investing when we lean into what feels unnatural to us. Same with spending and saving. 

Empowered with this knowledge, here are a few things that could be helpful: 

• Protect your future self by saving before you spend. Get your money out of the account before you can see it or spend it. Save what you need to and treat it like a fixed bill similar to a mortgage or car payment.
• Put your savings somewhere where you can’t see or touch it easily. For example, put your savings in a different bank than you use for transactions or in an investment account.
• Try to let go of budgeting so strictly (which, in our opinion, doesn’t work so well consistently over time.) Instead, make sure your needs are taken care of such as saving an amount like a bill and paying your fixed expenses and credit card bills in full each month. Then let yourself spend whatever money you have left over with the comfort of knowing you’ve taken care of your current needs and your future needs (saving). 
• Slow down the process. The beauty of online shopping is that you can see an item, save it to your cart, and come back to it a few days later. Or write a list of what you want and come back to it later. By slowing down, we can help ourselves understand what we truly need or want and make more thoughtful choices. Oh, and I’ve found unsubscribing from your favorite stores also very helpful. 
• Think more deeply about what you spend your money on. Here’s a terrific thought piece about this prompt. 

If you have a tough time saving your money, but not spending it, you’re not alone. In fact, you have it in your DNA! Let this information empower you to change your spending habits and become more mindful of your motivations for spending. Even if your end goal isn’t to save (because, like our ancestors, you’re just trying to survive!) clarifying your motivations can at least put you in touch with why you spend so much in the first place.