Merging Into Life: How to Stop Emotional Spending and Break the Impulse Buying Cycle

[00:04:12] Cara Nicole: That distinction is so important to me because you’re right, you shouldn’t have this black-or-white thinking where, OK, you’re never going to spend any money or, hey, I’m going to go crazy, and I’m going to go buy a Lambo the second my bonus hits. That’s not sustainable either direction. And so conscious consumption is something I’ve been thinking a lot about for myself, and it’s something I promote on my channel which is this idea of you’re not rejecting consumerism as a whole, in part because I just don’t think that’s sustainable from an economic standpoint, but it’s also just an unrealistic expectation to put on ourselves. We’re setting ourselves up for failure and disappointment. That’s going to breed shame, and that’s not going to be helpful for you in the long run. So, instead, conscious consumption asks us to think about Intentionality behind every purchase that we have. So, instead of mindlessly consuming and spending money, no plan of what you want, you just know you want to do something, so you’re going to go buy a $100 of stuff. That’s mindless consumerism. Conscious consumption is saying, you know, my workout set is getting old, or I don’t fit into it very well anymore, I want something new. Here’s the kind of thing I want, and I’d ideally like to spend this amount. And then you have a plan, and you’re more intentional with your money, and it’s easier to budget that way, but it’s also a healthier emotional relationship with money that you have.

[00:05:27] Sabrina Pierotti: Yeah. That really kind of goes into anything in life, right? Being conscious or being unconscious or like what you said, mindless. And when you look at a lot of the spending habits of people, what is the biggest driver behind that mindless spending, that overspending?

[00:05:43] Cara Nicole: Yeah, there are definitely deeper reasons. And I’ll say, obviously, not everything is individual. I think there’s also systemic issues, and those other conversations that I like to bring into my channel too. But on an individual level, something I like to tell my audience is that personal finance is mainly an emotional game. There are rules that you can learn, there’s vocab that you could learn, but the biggest thing and the thing that really takes a lifetime to learn, and you never really accomplish it fully is that it’s an emotional thing. And so that is where I think people get caught up with overspending is they don’t realize how much emotions are playing into this. I can speak for myself when I used to overspend. I used to go and just purchase things all the time. It was because maybe I was bored, I was stressed, maybe I was feeling insecure, maybe I was just feeling lonely. There are all these other kinds of emotions that can come into play. And the way that we process them isn’t always the healthiest. I don’t think we’re in a culture that’s always set up to process things as healthily as possible. Those negative emotions cause us to be more reckless with our money, which is unfortunate because it just creates the spiral, because now when we’ve overspent, we know that we feel shameful, or when we have less in our bank account, we’re going to feel more stressed. So, it amplifies, and it turns into this really toxic cycle.

[00:06:56] Sabrina Pierotti: Something else, too, I think is important is when you were talking about the cycle of like when you spend on something and you get so excited, and then that kind of always like your brain remembers that and then, that is just something that continues to happen over and over and again if somebody isn’t conscious about that. So, when somebody is struggling, what are like basic steps to overcome it, but maybe can we even back up and say, before we try to tackle this, what can we remind ourselves about the situation?

[00:07:29] Cara Nicole: Yeah, I think it parallels so much our addiction to our phones right now and scrolling, because this is something I’m still working on, right? I’m trying to scroll less, and the same type of emotions pop up. Why do we turn to our phone to TikTok or to YouTube to start scrolling? It might be because of all those negative emotions I described earlier. So, I think in order for us to stop that urge to overspend or to scroll, we have to allow ourselves that vulnerability to be aware of our emotions. So, before we go and we click that checkout button on Amazon, or before we open up TikTok, take 10 seconds to breathe and ask ourselves, why are we opening up this right now? Why do I want to buy this? Why do I want to scroll right now? And just name that emotion a little bit. It lets you pause, but it also helps you build that connection in your brain, that yeah, money spending is an emotional thing. I’m having an emotional reaction here. Or if it’s because you actually need something, you can build that, and you can reinforce that. That is something that I need right now. I should be spending money on this. I think that’s the really helpful thing to do is just to become more aware and more comfortable naming those emotions.

[00:08:35] Sabrina Pierotti: Honestly, another sad reality of just like overspending too, is that after we buy something pretty quickly, that excitement fades and on to the next thing. You had mentioned earlier on how to spend more consciously and intentionally. For people who might feel shameful that they overspend in their lives or whatever hard feelings they may be feeling, I want to level set and just like let people know that this is an environment that we live in, a world that we live in, especially consumed by social media. That is a huge driver for mindless spending, overspending. How much of social media is actually about the content that we consume versus just like the way our phones are designed to keep us shopping?

[00:09:25] Cara Nicole: Hundred percent. Social media is a huge part of that. That’s why, even though I create content on social media, I myself have a very weird relationship with it, where I’m trying to move away from it, and I’m trying to make sure that the content I do put out is intentional and helps people in that way. Because it worries me what it’s doing to us, and there’s a quote about if something’s free, than you might be the product. In social media, that’s so true. You’re getting this access to like incredible content constant entertainment, and it’s completely for free. It’s really hard to resist. And so, I think anyone who’s been finding themselves scrolling all the time or buying all the time and overspending, give yourself grace. That’s the first thing to do, because this is hard. It’s really, really hard.

[00:10:07] Sabrina Pierotti: You talked a lot earlier about how people, if they are feeling a heavy emotion, like, they’ll turn to shopping to get that quick dopamine fix as a way to numb themselves. If this is something that could be playing out in somebody’s life, but they’ve never thought about it from that angle before, before they even get into the tactics on how to get better, how can somebody recognize that pattern in themselves?

[00:10:33] Cara Nicole: To recognize the pattern in yourself, you need to monitor your emotions. And that’s where it is really hard, because I think, we are also in a culture that kind of numbs us in general. We just sort of let stimuli after stimuli come, whether it’s shopping, whether it is food, whether it’s entertainment. And so, being aware of, OK, I bought this thing, I’m feeling some kind of way, like I had a little bit of a dopamine spike, but I feel bad about this after. That’s a piece of education right there. That’s the signal to you of what, what’s happening. The other easy signal is honestly just seeing that your bank account is going down and that your credit cards are getting harder to pay off, and that’s a very easy metric to see, and that is the nice thing about personal finances. Even though a lot of this is emotional, there’s also some very easy cut-and-dry ways you can see if you’re living beyond your means, and if you have specific savings goals, if you’re not quite hitting those. So, start there, I like to recommend doing a monthly money date with yourself. And take yourself out to like a nice coffee or get a cookie out and go over your finances, go over spending for that month. There’s a lot of different applications that you can use. You can manually input into a budget based on your spending. But look at what you’ve been spending on, and then maybe even let yourself journal a little bit about that. Explain to yourself why you bought certain things, whether you feel good about that, and it’s totally OK to feel really great about certain purchases. But if there’s ones that you don’t feel great about, why he has that and try to dig a little bit deeper into why that is, and I think that’s a great place to start.

[00:12:04] Sabrina Pierotti: And then once somebody has done that self-reflection and realized those patterns, then they can utilize these tools that we’re about to talk about and take back their power. And I want to share a personal tool that my mom, actually, I observed her doing when we would go out shopping as a kid. We would be out shopping, and she wouldn’t buy something. Of course, there were exceptions, but most of the time she wouldn’t buy something if she didn’t know where it was going to go or what she was going to do with it. And now I shop that same exact way, because I just hate inefficiency and waste, and I’m like, if I don’t know what I’m going to do with this item, whatever it is, I know it’s just going to add clutter to my home, and I don’t want that. Are there other filters that somebody can use in their mind when they go to impulse buy something? Are there other like quick things like that, that somebody can filter through their mind and really check in with themselves?

[00:12:59] Cara Nicole: Yeah, I love that your mom taught you that, especially because money things are hard, and we do absorb those money lessons from our parents or the people around us.

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[00:13:44] Cara Nicole: One thing I like to do is I like to carry an item around with me throughout the store until the end to see if I really still like it, and if I have to carry it around with me the whole time, do I care about it enough to really lug it around? And I’ll keep looking at it and be like, am I really going to use this? No, no, no. Am I really going to use this, though? Because most likely I’m not. And I’m more just, I feel like I’m in this store, so I need to buy something. So, that’s one, am I really going to use something and do I really need it? The other thing would just be give yourself a window to wait. This is especially true with online shopping, because it is so frictionless. They make it so easy to buy things nowadays. So, instead put it in your cart and wait at least 48 hours, and just say that if I really want it in 48 hours, I’m still going to want it, and I’ll still remember it. Most likely you’re going to put it into your cart and you’re going to forget it’s even there. And so that’s the signal that you don’t really need this.

[00:14:37] Sabrina Pierotti: That’s such a good point is adding that little bit of friction. Now, another interesting approach that you talk about is when thinking about spending it’s not just looking at it as a dollar amount, but also in hours of your life. Can you explain what this means?

[00:14:55] Cara Nicole: It’s kind of that whole, it’s your money or your life. There’s a great book by that title. And I think about that a lot, and that’s what really helped personal finance click with me. I think it started clicking with me when I worked at Disney World right after college. I took the Disney College program. You made $10 an hour. And it was a very fun experience in many ways. It was also very hard work. And I would see some of my coworkers, you know, after a long day of working, go and spend money on a night out eating or buying Disney merch. And so, every time you do that, if you spend $100 at Disney after a 10-hour shift, you just spent your entire day’s worth of pay. And so, that helped really make that connection of this really is my money or my life, because every time I say no to one of those things and I choose a cheaper option, I have more of my hours to me. I have fewer hours I have to work in the future. And that really compounds when you start thinking about investing, too. If you were to take some of the money you saved and you invest, in the long run, you can start building a nest egg that you can retire on fully, and you can draw from that. And so, I want people to start thinking about that more, because it can feel very distant. It can feel like you’re going to have to work forever. But if you can be strategic with your money, if you could be a conscious consumer, you can take back your life so much more, and you can have a lot more agency. And so, every time you spend, you do have to think about this is a little bit of my life that I’m giving away now, and is it worth it?

[00:16:28] Sabrina Pierotti: Absolutely. And I want to talk about the person on the other end of the spectrum who does not like to spend money, whether they just feel like they need to save every little bit, and even to the point where they don’t want to spend stuff that they need to spend on. What do you say to that person?

[00:16:46] Cara Nicole: Yeah, I would say extremes are bad on either side. You don’t want to be the person who’s spending recklessly all the time and never thinking about your future, but you also don’t want to be the person who is forever living in the future and sacrificing to the point where you’re miserable now. There’s different personalities. But I think you have to find your own balance, and that’s where that self-reflection is so important. That’s where figuring out your own values and your own vision for the future is so important, but it has been with trying to allocate a certain amount of money that is completely guilt free. That is for vacations, that is for spending on new clothes or something. And then telling myself that is money that is meant to be spent, you have to spend it. And it really does make it easier, because it feels like a line item in the budget now that I have to get done.

[00:17:49] Sabrina Pierotti: Now, I love what you just said, envisioning the life that you want to live. And you mentioned something earlier too about how money is your tool to live that life. And as I’ve also been kind of getting more into personal finance over the last couple of years, that’s something that I’ve picked up as well. Personal finance gives us the tools that we’ve always wanted for our lives. And so, your videos do a great job in framing money as a tool, not a goal. Can you share more about what that means? What does it mean to really use finance and money as a tool to create your dream life, and what does that look like for you personally?

[00:18:32] Cara Nicole: Yeah, I think the problem people get caught up in, that people are very critical of, is when money is the goal and not a tool. So, if your only goal is to achieve X amount of money, million dollars, billion dollars, and you are finding status and fulfillment and ego in that goal, that’s where I think that problem is, and that’s why I like a lot of greed and other problems can arise. But if you see money as a tool to live a life within your values, and you have those values that you’ve thought about, I think that’s a really phenomenal thing, and it can create a lot of great opportunities for yourself, but also your community and your loved ones. If your values are that you want to be able to give back and take care of your family and take care of your community, well now having money allows you to host big get togethers where you feed people and you can donate to the schools near you and there’s so many opportunities. I think seeing money as inherently evil is a problem and it can be a very limiting belief, and so I do want people to think about for themselves, if they have money, if they have these kinds of resources, how would they want to live their life. Once you have that clear vision, it can start working backwards for how can I get there? How much money do I need to be making? How much do I need to be saving and investing? I think the better path forward that’s going to be a lot less negative to your mindset and also more productive for yourself and the world.

[00:19:55] Sabrina Pierotti: We talked about filters earlier, and that’s such a great way to filter a purchase that you’re considering. It’s like, does this really feed that vision that I have for myself, or is it just going to add clutter to my life? Now, a lot of people feel that when they have the intention of not overspending, that they have to choose between being financially responsible and saving for that future or investing or whatever it may be versus actually like enjoying their life now. And you talked about that balance a little bit earlier. So, how can someone work backwards really if they’ve never done this before? Maybe it’s journaling, maybe it’s self-reflection, but really evaluate what those values are, and then identify like what you said, work backwards and how money can serve those values.

[00:20:40] Cara Nicole: Yeah, think about the things that make you happy. The moments where you felt kind of beyond yourself, where you’ve felt fulfilled, you’ve felt seen, you felt recognized, and you feel energized. I think that’s the feeling that you want to chase. And I would suspect, I don’t know for sure, maybe this is just me, I suspect a lot of those times it’s not very tied to money. For me, a lot of the times where I feel the most seen and the most energized is when I’m spending time with friends out, like, outside. I play soccer, like kicking a ball around and stuff that doesn’t cost much. It’s very very cheap. We’re hosting friends for a potluck where we all make meals that are under $10. That’s also very cheap. I think, if we’re really real with ourselves, and we think about that, we don’t need as much money as we think to be fulfilled. It’s kind of that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs thing. So, obviously there’s like the food and shelter and whatnot, but after that we do have to think about how much is social media, or marketing, or just the general comparison trap infiltrating what our actual wants are.

[00:21:42] Sabrina Pierotti: No, that’s great. Now before we wrap up, you’ve provided so much great advice on like how people can have more agency in their life over this. But at the end of the day, we just live in an environment and in a world that really kind of feels against these great intentions that we might have. And people listening might know, yes, I do need to spend less money on things that ultimately don’t matter to my values or don’t feed that like grand goal I have for my life. But the path to spending is way too easy and frictionless like you said. How can we block out the noise?

[00:22:16] Cara Nicole: Yeah, I would say it’s not so much about blocking out the noise but honing in on the right kind of noise. Yes, there is absolutely there’s social media posts and there’s influencers and there are TV shows and all of that, that glorify buying lots of nice clothes and nice cars, and the biggest house, and XYZ, other kinds of spending. There’s also a lot out there that glorifies going outside, being with your community, being minimalist, not spending money, and that’s the type of stuff I would challenge people to try to go and seek and surround yourself with, because it’s kind of like the whole, we are the product of the five people we spend the most time around. Think about the people you spend time around in your real life. But also think about the type of media and messaging that you’re absorbing on a daily basis, because that shifts your reality. And so, taking back the control in your own media appetite, your own media diet, and then again, the people that you surround yourself with, making sure you’re around friends that also value things the way you value. If they’re off constantly spending and shaming you for not having this and that, maybe they’re not the kind of friends you want to be around and you want to build a life with. I think that’s where we have to sort of take that control. And it is tricky, but it gets easier, because every step you take towards cultivating that new reality for yourself, the more you’re encouraged by that new reality to keep moving forward.

[00:23:32] Sabrina Pierotti: It’s a habit. I mean, you send these new fresh signals to your brain and over and over, it really does become a new habit and then as a result, a new reality for your life.

[00:23:42] Cara Nicole: A hundred percent.

[00:23:45] Sabrina Pierotti: All right. Now, we are headed into our mailbag segment. And this is an exciting segment where listeners of the podcast and AAA members have a chance to ask their questions. They say: My childhood friends all make a lot more money than I do, and they love making expensive plans that are way outside my budget. They often cover my share, which is really nice. But I always end up feeling guilty, because I can’t really repay them. I don’t want to lose these friendships, but I also can’t afford to keep up. Should I start sitting these plans out or is it OK to accept their generosity without feeling like I owe them?

[00:24:19] Cara Nicole: That is a really tricky one, because friendships and money gets very complicated, and there’s a lot of emotions that are going to be brought to the table. I don’t think it’s a bad thing if your friends want to cover you, but I also think that it’s important to have hangouts where money isn’t going to be the core thing, where you don’t feel like you’re always having to keep up. Because that’s not fair to you either to feel like you’re always behind. And I think it is really helpful if you’re able to talk to your friends, maybe one that you really trust and say, Hey! This is how I’m feeling, and I want to make sure that I’m feeling equal here, that I’m contributing, and I don’t want to feel this guilt. And if they’re a good friend, they should understand that and be able to work with you to figure out some type of solution. And that solution might not be, you know, them not covering you anymore, but it might just be, like I said, adding on hangouts like a potluck or a picnic or something that is more affordable to the mix so that it’s not always like, OK, we’re dining out of the fanciest things, we’re going to these crazy vacations. Because that is going to be a hard reality to sit in, and it’s going to make you feel bad, and you want to be able to have that open dialogue with your friend.

[00:25:25] Sabrina Pierotti: You have given me, and hopefully, every single listener like the power back. So, thank you so much for sharing everything. And where can people find you and get more information and connect?

[00:25:34] Cara Nicole: Well, thank you for saying all of that. I appreciate it. And I do hope that this helps people feel like they have more agency in their financial lives. But you can find me at the Financial Freedom Girl on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. I do long form video essays, where I really dive into some of these topics. But I’m also doing these shorter videos as well where I dive into different financial concepts and ways to de-influence your mind. It’s been such a pleasure to chat with you on this.

[00:26:00] Sabrina Pierotti: Overspending is rarely about the thing you’re buying. It turns out a lot of our purchasing habits are actually about how we’re feeling. And yes, the tools help. Like the 48-hour cart rule, adding friction, doing a monthly money day with yourself. But none of that really sticks until you get honest about what’s driving you to the checkout button in the first place. So maybe the real work isn’t cutting back. It’s figuring out what you actually want your life look like and letting that do the filtering for you. What Cara reminded us of today is that it really comes down to one question: Is this worth it to me? Not to anyone else, not to the algorithm, not to your group chat, to you. And if you found this episode useful, please leave us a rating or a review to help others discover the show.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast do not constitute financial advice and are not necessarily the views of AAA Northeast, AAA, and/or its affiliates.