Why “Just Spend Less” Is Bad Financial Advice

Capacity, values, and the overlooked work of building spending guardrails you can actually live with.

Telling people to cut back is easy. Helping them understand what they can safely spend—and how to do it without anxiety—is much harder. This piece looks at why spending feels unmoored for so many people, and how one client found a better way forward. Photo credit: MTStock Studio

The hardest thing about managing money isn’t math: It’s not knowing how compound interest works or how much more you’re allowed to save into an IRA this year. It’s something subtler and more persistent: figuring out how to tether everyday spending decisions to a real sense of what you can afford, what you care about, and what you’re trying to make possible over time. Most people don’t experience that connection intuitively. Day-to-day spending happens in the present tense; goals, values, and long-term capacity live somewhere fuzzier and more abstract. Bridging that gap is where a lot of financial stress actually comes from.

I was reminded of this recently while working with a client whose situation will feel familiar to a lot of people I work with. She earns a good living relative to her core expenses. She’s responsible, thoughtful, and generally cautious with money. She’s not carrying problematic debt. She’s funding her retirement accounts. From the outside, nothing about her financial life looks reckless or out of control. And yet, she found herself increasingly uneasy about her spending—not because it was objectively threatening her goals, but because it felt unmoored. She couldn’t quite tell whether she was spending “too much,” and that uncertainty was starting to weigh on her.

This is where it’s useful to distinguish between two different lenses for evaluating spending decisions. One is what I’d call a values lens: does this purchase actually add value to my life? Is it something I’ll use, enjoy, or appreciate? Does it align with how I want to live? That lens is often easier for people to access. Most of us can tell the difference between spending that feels nourishing and spending that feels hollow. The other lens is a capacity lens: what impact does this spending have on my ability to meet my obligations and pursue the goals I care about—now and later? That lens is much harder to apply in real time, because it requires a working sense of how much you “need” to be saving for things that are distant, irregular, or abstract.

This client had been using what she described as a vibes-based approach to spending. She had a general sense of what felt reasonable and stayed within it. And to be clear, that approach was working in several important ways. Her credit card balances weren’t creeping up. She wasn’t draining savings to cover everyday expenses. She was making the savings contributions we’d identified as necessary to support her long-term goals. Those are meaningful signals. If you’re meeting your obligations, funding your priorities, and not digging yourself into a hole, that matters.

But there was another test the vibes-based approach wasn’t passing: how she felt. Even when purchases clearly passed the values test—high-quality items she’d wanted for a long time—she felt guilty afterward. She found herself replaying decisions, second-guessing whether she “should have” spent the money, and defaulting to a kind of internal scolding that didn’t actually correspond to any real financial danger. That emotional friction alone is worth paying attention to. A spending system that technically works but leaves you anxious or self-critical is still a system that deserves revisiting.

What made this particularly interesting is that the discomfort wasn’t triggered by financial strain; it was triggered by change. Her income had recently increased after years in a field where she never expected to earn much more than she did. The extra money felt, in her words, like “found money.” And because she didn’t have a clear framework for what that money was for, she oscillated between enjoying it and worrying she was doing something wrong. When she came into our conversation, she framed the issue as a need to “cut back.” My question to her was simple: why? What, specifically, was breaking?

When we looked at the numbers together, nothing alarming emerged. Her plan still worked. Her projected retirement timeline was intact. Even with room for travel and discretionary spending, there was a surplus. The spending hadn’t undermined her goals; it just hadn’t been named or contextualized. And without that context, it felt excessive simply because it was visible.

My instinct in situations like this is often to introduce more structure: separate accounts for different jobs, automatic transfers for future expenses, clearer partitions between money meant for now and money meant for later. That approach works well for many people. It makes capacity visible by physically moving money out of reach. But here’s the thing I’m continually relearning: structure only helps if it fits the person using it. In this case, the client noticed that the behaviors I was suggesting kept falling to the bottom of her priority list. She didn’t forget them accidentally; she avoided them. And she made a sharp observation that I think applies far beyond personal finance: when something repeatedly fails to happen, it’s often not a discipline problem. It’s a signal that the system itself doesn’t align with how you operate.

So instead of forcing a framework she wouldn’t use, we shifted the question. The goal wasn’t to spend less by default. The goal was to spend with confidence at a level that made sense for her life. That meant finding guardrails that were concrete enough to govern behavior, but flexible enough to respect her values and temperament.

One of those guardrails emerged almost casually, but it turned out to be powerful. As she reflected on her recent purchases, she mentioned that her closet had become so full she’d needed to buy more hangers. That detail mattered. It moved the conversation from abstraction to reality. Rather than debating whether a given dollar amount was “too much,” we could point to a physical constraint: the space was full. From there, we landed on a simple rule that didn’t require constant math or moralizing: no more clothes hangers. If something new comes in, something else has to leave. That rule doesn’t cap spending explicitly, but it introduces enough friction to slow accumulation and force conscious trade-offs. Getting rid of something you once chose carries an emotional cost, even if you donate it, and that cost does real behavioral work.

Around the same time, she articulated something else that stopped me in my tracks. Part of what bothered her about her recent spending wasn’t the total amount: it was the pattern. Buying a handful of expensive items meant a few intense dopamine hits spaced far apart. She realized she might actually prefer spreading that enjoyment out over the year through smaller, more frequent purchases, even if the total spend stayed roughly the same. That insight matters because it acknowledges something financial advice often ignores: shopping is, for many people, a source of pleasure and stimulation. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make it go away. If someone’s obligations are met and their goals are funded, I’m far less concerned with where their dopamine comes from than whether their spending habits are coherent and intentional.

That reframing also softened the guilt. Instead of asking, “Should I be spending this much?” the question became, “How do I want this spending to show up in my life?” That’s a much more productive place to stand. It allows for adjustment without shame and for experimentation without panic.

We did still introduce some structure, just not the kind I initially had in mind. She has a recurring annual payment from side work, and we decided to treat that as her dedicated travel funding for the year. That accomplished the same clarity I usually aim for with monthly transfers, but in a way that didn’t create a sense of ongoing scarcity. The money she sees day to day is largely available for present-tense living, while her future travel is funded by a known, separate inflow. Different mechanism, same underlying goal: a clearer picture of what’s actually available.

Will this approach work perfectly forever? Probably not. No spending system does. The point isn’t to find a single “correct” method and lock it in. The point is to build a framework that helps someone relate to their money with less anxiety and more agency, and then revisit it as circumstances change. If we find that the numbers we’re using underestimate her real spending, we’ll update them. That’s not failure; that’s accuracy.

What this experience reinforced for me is that spending problems are often misnamed. The issue isn’t excess so much as ambiguity. When people don’t know what their money is for, or what it can safely do, every decision feels heavier than it needs to be. The work of financial planning, at least as I see it, isn’t about constraining joy or eliminating impulse. It’s about helping people build enough clarity that they can spend, save, and give without constantly interrogating themselves.

And no, the “no more clothes hangers” rule was not covered in the CFP® curriculum. But it turns out that sometimes the most effective financial tools are the ones that translate values and capacity into something you can literally see and feel. If it helps someone spend with confidence while staying on track for the life they want, that counts as good planning in my book.