Match Your Spending with Your Values
Prefer to listen rather than read? Pair this post with Deliberate Money Moves Podcast: Match Your Spending with Your Values.
There is a lot of talk these days about aligning your investments with your values. But what about your spending? We are hard wired, it seems, to pay little to no attention to our spending.
Perhaps in the moment of payment or a time of later regret, we might think about where our money is going. But during regular daily life, it seems our money flows away from us with little check against what we truly want.
Don’t Expect it to be Easy
This is not an easy challenge to address, but the payoff is huge. When we align our spending with what we truly want from life, we know we are efficiently using our resources to live the best life possible.
The Best Way to Align Your Spending & Values
Simply track and look at your spending.
If you know for a fact that you spent $2,000 on dining out last month and $1,800 the month before, you will pause at the moment of determining what’s for dinner and consider whether going out is what you truly want to do.
If it is, then great, you are aligning your spending with your values.
If not, well that’s also great because you are also aligning your spending with your values.
It’s when we don’t know what our spending is that it tends to drift away from what we truly want.