Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can fall into this trap of describing our financial behaviors in one of two ways, good or bad. Spending becomes irresponsible while saving is virtuous. Accruing debt is seen as a failure, but investing means we’re smart and successful. When we think about our money decisions in black and white, we make them more personal, like they say something about who we are. But financial behaviors are just numbers and information that have an effect on our lives, not character traits that we should be embarrassed or proud of. And I think that that distinction really matters because the more personal weight we give to money, the harder it becomes to make clear decisions with it. 

So let’s look more closely at debt, because I think it’s one of the easiest places to see this. I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that people have really strong emotional reactions to debt. We get the message that debt is bad from everywhere, family experiences, media, marketing, the little financial education we do have. We may have learned from someone in our life that debt is very stressful because they had a lot of it, or they had to declare bankruptcy. A common experience I often hear from clients is about signing up for a credit card when they started college, and they racked up a ton of credit card debt, which either spiraled out of control or took them a very long time to pay off. And understandably, they never wanna be in that position again. They see debt as their personal failure and something to be ashamed of. But when we take out the judgment, we can see debt for what it really is, a useful tool. For those people who are afraid of being judged for being in debt, this can be a really revolutionary way of thinking about your financial behaviors. 

Debt can give us the freedom to access something that may not be possible otherwise, like buying a home or building a business or paying for an education. And of course, debt can also destabilize our lives, like a cycle of credit card debt that seems impossible to get out of. But I think we’ll feel better about debt and ourselves if we spend less time questioning whether debt is good or bad and instead asking about what role it’s playing in our lives. Ask yourself, “How am I choosing to use my debt to my advantage? Is my debt giving me more choices or flexibility or time, or is it boxing me in? Am I seeing it as a tool or rather a reflection of who I am?” These questions are much more nuanced than just saying debt is good or bad. We can see, though, how personalizing debt can really hinder the decisions we make around it. 

Spending is another place where I think money gets personal really quickly. I can speak for myself here. I know I’ve had a weird feelings of guilt or shame when I spend money on certain things, and sometimes that’s a signal for me to look deeper. But most of the time, it’s just noise. I shouldn’t be overthinking why I’m choosing an entree at dinner that’s five dollars cheaper so that I don’t spend the extra five dollars on the thing I actually want, when that doesn’t actually change anything about my life. 

I also see this kind of thinking when I work with clients to start building awareness around spending. They sort of hesitate to share what they’re spending out money on because they’re afraid of being judged. But like debt, tracking your spending is just another tool to gather information and data about what’s important and what’s not important in your life so that you can make better financial decisions. And I think that spending is also really correlated to the season of life that we’re in. It doesn’t have to be or take on as much meaning as we think it does. There are times in life when life is simply more expensive. You might be in school and spending money on food, housing, and books. I think about myself right now raising two young children, and it’s certainly one of the most expensive times in my life. You might be caring for another family member or moving or starting over, building a house or a business, or dealing with medical problems. Those decisions don’t mean you’re irresponsible with your money and you’re doing something wrong. Like debt, there are better, more useful questions that we could ask about our spending like, how am I spending this money? How is this spending aligned with what’s important to me or what I need to do in my life right now? And then there’s the flip side of spending, which is saving. 

And I think saving is really interesting because it’s almost always treated as virtuous behavior. You’re responsible if you save, you’re disciplined, you’re delaying your gratification, and the more you save, the better you’re doing. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a good person, right? It just means you have a smart financial behavior that supports some current goals. And I think sometimes savings is easier at different points in life when your income is high and your expenses are low, like when you’re in a two-income household and living within your means or don’t have kids at certain points in time. 

Sometimes it’s the opposite because you’re dealing with a period of underemployment or unemployment while raising a new family. It’s gonna ebb and flow. But just because you can’t save money right now doesn’t mean that you’re not a good person. I think if saving money is taken too far, it also ends up delaying a kind of life that you actually wanna live in the present. For example, I’ve talked to clients who’ve experienced the loss of a partner or a friend, particularly when someone has died young, and those experiences can leave you with very real questions like, why am I saving so much right now and not taking that trip? Or why am I not pursuing the career I really want to? Why am I delaying gratification when I can actually make my life better now? Now doesn’t mean that I think saving is a bad idea, but there are extremes here, and most likely it’s somewhere in the middle. So the goal is not to save as much as humanly possible because it’s how we feel like a good person, or it means that we’re good inherently. The goal is to use money intentionally over time to support the life you actually wanna live. 

So debt doesn’t make you a failure, spending doesn’t mean you’re irresponsible, and saving doesn’t make you good or virtuous. And I think once we realize these are just behaviors, we can start to build awareness of how and why they are happening. You can ask, “What’s actually going on? What are you trying to build? What type of life are you trying to have? And what beliefs about yourself and your relationship with money might be holding you back?” 

Ultimately, making the choice to spend, save, or go into debt doesn’t mean your decisions, and by extension, you, are good or bad. Instead of seeing things in black and white, treat your financial behaviors as a set of tools that can unlock the full spectrum of possibilities for what your life could be like.

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