The psychology of overspending. (3 habits to curb)

Planning seems to be easy before execution. In planning your finance, it is easy to make good intentions but still end up making mistakes when executing your plans. You might find a reason to spend beyond your plans and you feel- “I just have to do this.” Well, we are humans and things can always be adjusted.

However, at a point, you may feel bad about the fact that you had intentions and budgets and you still spend beyond. You may say, “I will take only a bottle of coke at the event” and end up taking a bottle of wine. You may plan to always save $100 monthly after your expenses, but you save as low as $30.

Well, nobody can really help you reduce your spending, but you can get the best of advice and understand the thought process, plus the psychology of why you overspend. This way, you will know where the problem is and solve it if you want to.

Feeling Among

The reason you plan for a coke and end up taking wine could be because you are trying to keep up with your Joneses (trying to achieve what your neighbour has achieved). Most of the time, we are thrilled by what we see and we are driven to achieve something nice. This is part of the feeling of being human. If you are driving a Toyota 2018 model and your friend gets a Tesla, we feel the drive to get something similar or more.

Visibility spending is the key to knowing how much and things we spend money on. If your friend buys a Tesla from a bank account loaded with $30,000,000 is not the same as you, that has $1,200,000. They might have planned properly and had a lot of funds for emergencies and safety sakes.

Willpower

I wrote a post about willpower some time ago. In the post, I explained how willpower works and how it raises and reduce. Willpower is not someone we possess, and that is why we make poor choices sometimes. Willpower will not help you fix overspending. If you place everything you do around budgeting, they will work for you for a while and after sometimes you would like to compensate yourself for following your budget. You may name this anything in your language but you are just spending beyond your plans.

Budgeting should be like a once in a while thing. Like planning major events, because budgeting doesn’t really work for a long time and it makes you feel bad when you can’t keep up with them.

Understanding delay gratification

We want the best now. We want to drive the best car, wear the best clothes and live in a magnificent house. There is nothing wrong with those, but if these cause us to ignore or put less emphasis on the benefits of the future, there is everything wrong with it.

Delay gratification is not a new topic really, there are hundreds of contents about it on the internet but many people still fall into the pit of spending to fulfil the urgent urge. The future or retirement seems far and people feel there will be always more chances to keep things for the future, they find tiny reasons to spend on unnecessary things. Some would say - “I have to make myself happy”. Staying happy for 2 years isn’t the same as being happy for your lifetime. Many people prefer instant pleasure over long time benefits.

The Solution (Keeping it simple)

The solution is to keep your spending habit with your mind.

Use rules over plans. Budgeting is just a fractional rule to limit your spending and can make you unhappy over a short period. You can use deliberate rules that help you maintain your spending.

Try as much as possible to get over all the three highlighted points above.

My name is @tykee (Balogun Michael), a software engineer/content writer and the founder of Meshboc Limited. I use my content to share my opinions on tech, lifestyle, and finance.

Contacts Twitter Instagram Discord: tykee#8770

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