Why “Responsible Spending” Feels Better Than Frugality

Last month, Ramit Sethi tweeted a few common pitfalls he witnesses from people who earn more than $150,000 per year and “stop carefully tracking expenses.” One jumped out at me in particular: “Because they stop tracking, their costs increase substantially on eating out and travel. I’ll ask them about travel. Their response: ‘It’s not like we travel all the time!’ But if they dig into actual spending, they took 6 vacations, including mini-trips, and because they make more, they didn’t track spending on any of them. These add up.”

While I still track all of my spending and can tell you—to the dollar—what my husband and I dropped on each category in any given month over the last five years, I’ll be the first to admit that earning more has definitely loosened my grip on the spending habits I worked so hard to sharpen when I earned far less. 

And as always, on the journey to financial freedom, there are two crucial sides to the equation: income and expenses.

Unfortunately, most of us can’t decide to inflate the income side at a moment’s notice (although I’d argue increasing your income is probably more within reach than you’d expect), and as Ramit points out, sometimes increasing your income doesn’t actually power any progress—because the “expenses” side rises commensurately.

The good news? Most times, you are the gatekeeper of the “expenses” side. 

And I get it: Another article telling me to spend less money? Snooze, Katie. Next! But there’s no denying that savvy money management and intentional spending are skills we have to hone, so they’re worth revisiting every once in a while—particularly because some of these changes can actually make your life better. 

Transitioning gradually to responsible spending

If you’re trying to spend more responsibly and you’re not in a dire financial situation, you can slowly change your habits so they stick—hell, you might even enjoy the changes. There’s no need to go from cold brew to cold turkey immediately—that’s not very sustainable, after all, and only increases your chances of backsliding if you’re not totally bought into the benefits. 

(I am confident, however, that once you see the effects in your bank account over a few months, you’ll be sold.)

Our personal spending habits are emotional. They’re intertwined with our sense of self and the lifestyle choices that make us “us.” Our identities are informed by our habits, and our habits are just the choices we repeatedly make. 

By that measure, any change can feel threatening to our identity at first. So how do you shift your identity? You start tweaking some of your habits.

It starts, unsurprisingly, with an awareness of your weak spots. How do you home in on your spending red flags? Take a page from the Marie Kondo playbook and simply identify what you own way too much of. (If you’re more of a “travel and dining” spender, you can do this via forensic accounting in your credit card statements. I did this with a reader once who discovered she was spending more than $1,000 per month on Amazon when she finally sat down and tallied it up.)

My weakness is lululemon. My personal financial discipline seems to dissipate in the rare retail air of a lululemon store. Slap a purple markdown sticker on something my size and—nine times out of 10—I’ll be in a semi-hallucinatory state in the dressing room, picturing myself gallivanting in and out of a cycling studio or walking the dog in said gear, blasting the subliminal message to everyone around me that I, Katie Gatti Tassin, am fit, chic, and in-the-know.

While you might have an incredibly niche weak spot, most people’s common financial pitfalls fit rather predictably in a few categories: retail, food, and travel. But the reasons these are common weak spots vary (as do the remedies for improving them), so let’s unpack them individually. 

Retail

Retail can be a trap door—it was an uncomfortably common experience for me to forget about impulse purchases entirely until I saw the $50 line item on my statement at the end of the month as I anxiously reflected on why I didn’t save more, reminding me of my window shopping fail. 

My unscientific opinion is that part of the reason retail purchases have a habit of sneaking up on us is because a common pastime in big cities is wandering around shopping centers, boutiques, and other marketplaces for entertainment—and the more you put yourself in physical proximity to interesting things to buy, the more likely you are to slam down the AmEx. The same goes for the ease and ubiquity of online shopping and two-day shipping. Less friction = more transactions. 

This is, in many ways, the entire Target business model: Big retail brands have made a concerted effort to turn shopping into an experience in itself. Why? Because getting you in the store is step #1.

Sometimes you do actually need to buy something. While the ultra-frugal approach is to avoid buying anything, here’s my middle-ground solution: Try avoiding the “shopping for fun” or “shopping as something to do” paradigm for a little bit. See if only navigating to websites or stores armed with an intention to buy a specific item cuts down on mindless retail spending. (We recently covered our favorite method for taking the air out of wanton desires in this Rich Girl Roundup.)

It’s not like you’re doing a “no spend” month—you’re just limiting your exposure to external temptations that don’t arise from your legitimate needs. And while some people are spoiled with way cooler places to walk (I’m looking at you, Coloradans), non-commercial spaces are usually a better option for “Hey, wanna grab a beverage and go walk around X?”-style plans.

Speaking of buying a beverage…food, drinks, and coffee

Without a doubt, the category I’ve overspent on the most (and had to work the hardest at cutting back) has been food. I used to spend $750/month on restaurant food (for just me!) in a medium cost of living city in 2018 with ease. And while I somehow managed to get my total food spending regularly under $200 per month for a couple of years, it’s an area that quickly became troublesome again when I let my foot off the gas.

After realizing my food spending got out of control in 2022 (to the tune of roughly $2,000 per month—I know), I managed to wrangle it again. Even after all the food inflation of the past few years, my “half” of our restaurant spending is now around $330/month on average.

Allow me to paint a picture:

You buy your Starbucks (or other boutique coffee shop) cup every morning. A few days a week, you grab lunch from a local spot. You get apps and drinks during happy hour shenanigans after work with friends, and you almost exclusively eat at an overpriced brunch spot on Saturdays and/or Sundays—lest we forget the Friday and Saturday evening drinks at the bar and the inevitable late-night pizza or tacos!

When you list everything like that, it sounds like a lot. But when you’re living it, with many of these relatively low-value purchase decisions sometimes 12 or 18 hours apart, it feels completely reasonable (particularly when everyone else around you is doing the same thing). And it’s not just you: “Food away from home” spending relative to “food at home” spending is at an all-time high. 

Still, the solution isn’t a prison diet of seven nights per week of unseasoned chicken, rice, and beans. After all, money is meant to be enjoyed—and there’s a middle ground.

Here’s what worked for me: I weaned myself off the $5 daily morning cold brews by switching to the (still overpriced) jugs you can buy at the grocery store (I realize the coffee example is so tired—but when I was making $3,000 per month, $150 felt like a lot for caffeine). When I got sick of that, I got a Nespresso machine (each pod costs roughly $1), which is still far more expensive than making it yourself, but only about 20% as much as my former habit. 

By choosing a grocery store brand or a product that still excites you, you’re more likely to stick with the plan instead of bagging the whole thing and blacking out three cars deep in the Dutch Bros drive-through.

(The other bonus here: Now, going out for a specialty coffee is a treat, because it’s no longer my norm.)

The takeout trap is slightly harder to escape, since it preys on our perception of convenience…or so it seems! Stopping at a restaurant or ordering takeout is overpriced, but it’s also fairly time-consuming if you’re driving around town on a daily basis to do so. (This is why my takeout habit got so bad in 2022: I wasn’t even going to pick up my own food. I was getting everything delivered via Uber Eats, which means you can add another 15%–20% markup on everything I bought.) 

Last year, it morphed from a special occasion weekly purchase to a baseline, near-daily habit. Still, quitting your takeout routine and cooking all of your own food might feel like a huge, daunting jump. 

The middle-ground alternative? Buying pre-made food from a grocery store’s deli section or using a meal delivery service. The trick is actually getting to the grocery store regularly and establishing the habit. 

Most grocery store chains carry pre-packaged goods: rotisserie chicken, mashed potatoes and salad by the pound, even robust sushi offerings—it’s all at your local grocer for a fraction of the price of the restaurants down the street. What we want to avoid is the exhausted Wednesday night after work when there’s no food in your fridge and the siren song of the DoorDash app ropes you into a $60 delivery. 

Eventually you may find yourself feeling more confident about learning to cook regularly (by the time I finally did, I realized it was a lot less challenging than I had been expecting). 

To figure out how much you’re averaging per meal and determine whether this is a problem area for you, simply combine your credit card statement(s)’s “groceries” and “dining out” categories for a month and divide by 90 (30 days on average, for three meals per day). The 2024 Money with Katie Wealth Planner has a new “Year in Review” feature that makes this relatively easy. Our average worked out to about $9/meal per person this year, compared to last year’s average of roughly $21 (I warned you it was bad).

Travel

Travel is a challenging one, because it’s one of those expenses that people often point to as being worth it regardless of the cost. (Ask anyone what they’d do if they had more money, and I’ll bet the vast majority of people would tell you they’d travel more.) It’s also something that’s become a bit of an aspirational status symbol in the age of social media, but we’ll set that aside for the time being. 

The only way I was able to go on trips semi-frequently while earning around $60,000 per year was (a) working for an airline, and therefore having access to free standby flights, and (b) playing the travel credit card game such that I was paying in points more often than not. 

While the first isn’t super achievable without firing off job applications to United Airlines, the second is mostly replicable, and we broke down our favorite strategies in this episode of The Money with Katie Show. But if you’re not in the mood to spend the energy and time overhauling your entire credit card suite, I think Ramit Sethi’s advice goes the distance: Simply track what you’re spending. 

I plugged my own data into the 2024 Wealth Planner so I could use its new Year in Review tab  to see what we’d spent on travel (airfare, hotels, ground transportation, airport parking, etc.) in 2023 so far, and it came out to around $11,000 for two people. It feels like every month we have to fly somewhere new for a wedding (we’ve both been to Florida, Dallas, New York, London, Houston, San Antonio, and Scotland this year for someone’s nuptials). I also personally went to visit family in Tennessee and see a football game in Alabama…but if you’d asked me to estimate how much we’d spent this year in this category, I would’ve way underestimated it (still, we often pay with points or miles, which illustrates just how out of hand things have gotten). 

The reasons for our trips (visiting family, going to weddings, etc.) lead to a disconnect in the way we think about our frequency of travel or whether or not we’re “taking a lot of trips,” because none of them feel like vacations. This can lead to all sorts of weird dynamics, wherein we’re spending a lot of money on a category that we don’t actually feel is generating a ton of value in return. I have a theory that this happens a lot for young people in this season of life. 

Still, airfare is quickly outpacing inflation, and it’s led me to reconsider my go-to sentiment that I must go far away to experience a true “break” from life as I know it. Now that we live in Northern California, we’re trying to plan our next vacation for an area that’s within driving distance (like Yosemite, Tahoe, or wine country) rather than catapulting ourselves across the globe. 

While the ultra-frugal option might be forgoing travel altogether or only using points, the middle ground option might be saving the points and dollars for the trips we have to take (because let’s be real, there’s a lot of that right now) and leaning into trips that don’t require two overpriced round trip tickets for our discretionary travel. 

At the end of the day, I’m actually having fun with getting back to basics

I used to feel resentful of suggestions like the ones I listed above—I figured a better life was always associated with spending more. More trips to restaurants, more outings to Nordys, and more international jet setting. 

But recently, I’ve been embracing the urge to simplify: to relish the opportunity to make my own food, enjoy how much mindspace is freed up by not owning unnecessary heaps of stuff, and exploring the interesting things that are right under my nose in my own town or state, rather than assuming I can only have valuable experiences in another country.

It’s a much less “rat race-y” way to indulge in the world around you, because it doesn’t require an ever-increasing stream of income (sometimes the “don’t spend less, just earn more” discourse can be self-defeating in that way). 

And it’s funny: After my year of experimenting with deploying a higher income toward constant takeout, business class trips abroad, and a few big luxury splurges, I ended up craving the very thing I figured I’d never want again: a return to the basics. My retirement accounts are thanking me.