‘I worry I’ve over-spent’: Here’s how to spend and not feel guilty

I have money but I struggle to spend it. There are times I do spend quite liberally; if I’m on a holiday, I might splurge because I do enjoy the feeling of freedom and abundance. But then I feel a lot of guilt and anxiety. I feel bad for wasting it. I question whether I really needed it. I worry I’ve over-spent – even though I know I have enough, there’s always this feeling of like “well, you never know what could happen in the future – it’s always better to have more”. How do I get over this?

This requires changing your psychological and emotional relationship with spending. Here are a few strategies I use to help clients create this shift.

If your goal is to keep growing your wealth, every time you spend money, it might feel like you’re going against that goal. This creates an internal contradiction: if the goal is always “more wealth”, then any amount of spending feels wrong. It makes sense to minimise all expenditure.

Maybe this is what you’ve been taught it takes to build wealth: you have to put every spare dollar to work – never spend it. Spending is something to minimise and even eliminate – never to increase. And there’s something inherently impressive in having a big net worth: $1 million, $2 million, $5 million – the more, the better.

But what if the goal isn’t just to grow wealth, or have wealth? What if the goal is to enjoy a wealthy experience of life? Now, you’re playing a totally different game. Now, you’re not just thinking about how to accumulate wealth – you’re also thinking about how to use your wealth to meaningfully impact your quality and experience of life. Now, spending money is no longer contradictory to your end-goal – it’s integral to its accomplishment.

Your beliefs about spending will determine how you feel about it. You can’t simultaneously believe spending is bad and then feel great about spending money. Even if you do manage to splurge, you won’t feel good about it – your negative beliefs about spending won’t let you.

So what are the beliefs you have about spending? Are they pretty negative? Maybe you think spending is wasteful, wrong, selfish, shallow, materialistic, irresponsible. Maybe you associate spending with loss – you’re more focused on what you’re losing (money) as opposed to what you’re gaining (the thing you’re buying).

Make a list of your beliefs and start to identify where you got these beliefs from. Maybe you borrowed some of these beliefs from your parents or learned them from social media. Start to question these beliefs – are they really yours? Do they serve you, and the life you want to live? Are they consistent with the experience you want, of spending money?

If you want to feel good about spending, you have to have positive beliefs about spending. You have to believe that this is a positive thing to engage in.

We don’t just have beliefs about spending; we also formulate beliefs about what our spending says about who we are.