There's a sentence early in YNAB's new book that stopped me.
Getting good at money means getting good at spending it.
The first time you read that, it sounds wrong. It sounds backwards. Everything we've ever been told points the other way.
But I'll be honest. My reaction wasn't to recoil. I got excited.
I spend a lot of time thinking about money psychology and about the YNAB method, and one of the sticking points people hit all the time is savings. What about saving? Saving isn't spending. Except that saving money is really just money you're going to spend later. So even that, the one thing that feels like the exception to the whole idea, turns out to be spending too. Just spending later.
Think about someone you'd call good with money. What is it, exactly, that makes you say that about them? That they seem to have a lot of it? That they own a lot of nice things that take money to buy? A big investment portfolio?
Notice that every one of those is about having. Accumulating.
That's not an accident. It's the water we swim in. A penny saved is a penny earned. Live within your means. Save for a rainy day. All of it quietly trains us to believe that being good with money means piling it up.
And honestly? I'm as susceptible to this as anyone. The version that gets me is the big one: that being really good with money means having so much of it you never have to work again. I want that. A lot of us want that.
But here's the problem with all of it. Every one of those measuring sticks ties "good with money" to a benchmark. A number. A finish line you have to cross before you're allowed to feel okay.
And it's not even a stable line. I've tried to use net worth as the yardstick, and mine goes up and down constantly, with the markets, with a car purchase, with a vacation, with a house down payment. So how much is enough? Does it just have to keep going up, forever? That can't be the answer.
If being good with money is a number you reach, then almost none of us are good with money, and the few who are can lose it on a bad Tuesday.
So here's what I love about defining it as spending instead.
It scales. It works exactly the same for someone making very little and someone sitting on millions. You don't have to wait to hit some benchmark to qualify. You don't have to arrive anywhere.
You just have to practice the skill of deciding how to spend what you've got.
That's it. That's the whole reframe. Good with money stops being a place you get to and becomes a thing you do, today, at whatever income you're at, starting now.
I know the muscle analogy is overplayed. But it's overplayed because it's true: you've got to exercise a muscle if you want it to get bigger.
So I started asking myself, and asking my clients, a simple question. What's the financial muscle? What's the actual thing you exercise to get good at money?
As far as I can tell, it's this: making decisions about what to spend your money on. That's the muscle. And it lines up perfectly with the book, because deciding how to spend your money just is being good at spending your money.
Which means you have to put in the reps.
You have to consciously decide, over and over, many times, what you want your money to do. And it matters that you practice on the small stuff. Taco Bell, or make a sandwich?
(Okay, Taco Bell might genuinely be cheaper than making a sandwich, so maybe that's a bad example. You get the point.)
The point is the rep, not the burrito. Every time you actually feel the trade-off (this dollar can do this, which means it can't do that), you're working the muscle. Every dollar only gets one job. Money is finite. That's what forces the choice, and the choice is the exercise.
Do enough small reps and something changes. When the big stuff comes (the car dies, you need a new place to live, something breaks that costs real money), you're not starting from zero. The decision that would once have crushed you and sent you spiraling? You make it with confidence, because you've made ten thousand tiny versions of it already.
I'm not making this argument from a book. Well, I'm making it because of a book. But I believe it because of twelve years of experience.
Take me, before I found YNAB.
I wasn't bad with money because I was broke, exactly. I was a newly minted graduate making more money than I ever had. I was bad with money because I had never once practiced the decision.
I had a severe addiction to technology. The newest phone, the latest gadget, iPad, Kindle, it didn't matter. I would get excited, go to the store, and buy the thing. And if I wasn't a hundred percent sure I could afford it? I bought it anyway. I just knew I could find a way to make it work. And I usually did.
Look at what's missing in that story. The decision. I never actually asked what the money was for. I never felt the trade-off. I never put in the rep. I just bought, and found a way to justify it afterward. That's a person with zero financial muscle. Not because I had no money. Because I had never practiced spending it on purpose.
That's the part I keep coming back to. The people I'd call good with money aren't the ones with the most of it. They're the ones who've decided, on purpose, what theirs is for. And they've done it so many times it barely costs them anything anymore.
So here's what I'd tell the version of me sitting over that first spreadsheet. No. Those first dozen spreadsheets.
You don't need to work so hard. You don't need to predict the future. And you don't need to be disappointed when your predictions are inevitably wrong. You don't need to know how much money you're going to make in the future to be good with the money you have today.
The book is Never Worry About Money Again by Jesse Mecham, and it's out August 11. Here's the pre-order link if you want it. (Not an affiliate link, and this isn't sponsored. YNAB sent me a copy free, but I earn nothing if you buy it.)