Exploring money dials, seeking discomfort, and roadblocks

Welcome to the Intentional Dollar weekly newsletter — great work taking this small step to move your money forward. I’m Logan, a Certified Financial Planner™, and I’m excited you’re here!

What’s inside?

• One tool to experiment with

• Two quotes from others

• Three questions to dig deeper

• Four lines of poetry for the point

_{One tool to experiment with:}

Money Dials:

Have you ever heard someone tell you to spend more money on something?

Probably not.

The reality is that some variation of these word grenades are often tossed out:

• “Don’t waste your money, you need to save.”

• “But you can make cheap coffee at home!”

• “You don’t need more of X.”

• “Why did you buy X?”

• “Your monthly coffee purchases just cost your future self $5,000.”

The well-intentioned bearers of the bad spending news aim to persuade us to cage the fleeting dollars and preserve them like animals at the zoo.

There is beautiful irony when someone opines on how you spend your money —because they, too, have their own ways of spending money — we are all unique. The fact that I save $50/month from not visiting Target does not allow me to judge you because you spend the $50 there.

Unenjoyable to me, but not to you.

The problem seems to stem from a lack of self-awareness: from us not holding mirrors to our own actions and purchases, but externally lifting them to others and spend-shaming them.

If you spend $50/month at Target — I can see your purchases. If I spend $100/month on streaming subscriptions — you can’t really see mine. Further, if you called me out, I’d likely entrench my belief that my streaming spend is superior to your Target, subsequently assuming the role of a utility judge.

We have no right to be judgers of others’ utility.

This brings us to the idea of personal money dials. Ramit Sethi popularized this term in his bright book I Will Teach You To Be Rich. The idea behind the visual is to imagine your spending categories controlled by dials you can turn up or down. Different categories get different dials; different people will have different dials.

Here are some examples:

• Travel

• Restaurants

• Clothes

• Health

• Entertainment

• Coffee

Ramit implores readers, “spend extravagantly on the things you love, and cut costs mercilessly on the things you don’t.” So — conjure up the most creative (and clear) vision of what lavish spending would look like for your favorite category. If you love spending money on coffee, what does the perfect day of coffee consumption look like? What would it look like if you quadrupled your coffee spend?

Avoid a linear thought path. If you were to 4x your coffee spend, a linear path is one that takes $50/month for Starbucks and turns it to $200/month at Starbucks. A non-linear path might be buying an espresso machine and making your own perfect lattes.

Be specific when drafting these money dials; two cups of good coffee per day becomes two Kona Peabody Aeropress coffees per day. Specificity allows you to assign an accurate cost and construct an action plan.

On the other side of dialing up spending for things we love — we have to be ruthless in dialing down the things we don’t. In a bounded, constrained world this is a requirement — so what does this look like?

Maybe you spend $200/month on restaurants, but don’t derive much enjoyment from the spend — it’s a 5/10, or a “meh” on the enjoyment scale. What if you cut that cost completely and reallocated it to your coffee spend — something that is closer to a 9/10 on the enjoyment scale?

Focusing on how you love to spend your money — your money dials — is integral to living intentional with your dollars. This is not a push to abandon saving and investing; it’s a reminder to balance them out, to spend more on what you love and less on what you don’t.

Remember, your dials don’t have to make sense to other people, and their dials don’t have to make sense to you.

So what do you love to spend money on? How can you spend more on those things and less on others?

_{Two quotes on seeking discomfort:}

You improve your money and your life by consistently doing uncomfortable things — things that rest on the other side of your fence of norms.

_{Three questions on roadblocks:}

1. What are the roadblocks that are preventing me from making better money moves?

2. If I can’t move the roadblocks, how might I go around, over, under, or through them?

3. How have others in my position successfully circumvented these obstacles?

Which question stuck with you? Questions like these are spotlights for the mind. Reply to this email and let me know which one shined light on a previously dark cave.

_{Four lines of poetry for the point:}

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