Rediscovering the Fun of Spending Money
What? Learn how to spend money?
Yes! And you will be surprised that most people actually don’t know how to spend money in a fun way. Spending for fun means you don not need to justify the purpose of spending, nor worry about how to pay for it! Fun simply means enjoying life.
Spending money gives you a place where you can relax and enjoy, essentially this is what life is all about. You can spend on anything be it a cup of latte or some outrageous purchases. You spend it to make yourself happy. No questions asked, no one to answered to, no justifications.
But money is such a funny thing, most often than not, we are mixing money and emotional together. When that happens, spending money no longer a fun thing, but rather a “responsibility!” How do you know if you inadvertently mix-up the two together? You know when these happen to you:
- I spend money when I feel lonely or depressed
- I spend money on nice thing so that people see highly on me
- I spend money to make myself look good
- I spend a lot to make my loved ones happy
- I spend money on things that people expected on me
You probably have known this. But the real take away is we simply just can’t “buy” our way out from the emotional vulnerabilities like loneliness, guilt feeling, affection confirmation, feeling insecure by spend and spend. To be sure, it is hard to escape from these emotional feelings. But the problem is, the more we mix up our spending with our inner emotional, the more ‘no fun’ it is. Instead, it became a “responsibility!”
More importantly, these emotional vulnerabilities are the culprit that make havoc in our personal finance. They make us “spend” way too much!
Therefore, to better manage our personal finance and have real fun in spending, we need to keep those “emotional spending” at bay. The best way to do this is first understand you own emotional vulnerabilities and then take steps to protect yourself. Secondly, if you having such a emotional spending problem, avoid using credit card. Credit card is a constant source of temptation and will pounce the moment when it feels you’re emotionally weak. Lastly, spending for fun doesn’t mean that you spend all your money, and your future money (by taking debt/loan), but rather about allocating a portion of your income for it (needless to say, this is after deducted from saving , essential living expenses and other obligations). Even if your budget is tight, you should also have allocated some money to spend on whatever you want. Important, do not spend more than what you have allocated, keep that defense line tight.
Now, let the REAL fun begins.
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