How's That "No Buy Year" Going?
The Jesse Mecham Show
YNAB
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 4 September 2025
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Did you make a resolution to have a "no buy year" this year? How's that going? While Jesse loves the idea of a no-buy year, mainly because he loves to experiment with money and behavior, he admits the concept of it is flawed. A "no buy year" typically means you refrain from making any non-essential purchases so that you can save more money. As Jesse explains, though, saving money really means being good at spending money, and the way you get good at that... is to spend money! Spend money according to a plan, after asking yourself 5 essential questions about what that money needs to do for you.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, my name is Jesse Meekam with another episode of the Jesse Meekam show, |
| 0:16.5 | and I'm here each week to obsess out loud about you, never worrying about money again. How do we do it? |
| 0:23.1 | Well, there's a kind of popular approach that people take, and they call it a no-buyer. |
| 0:29.7 | And what you do, and there's a part of me that just loves these, you don't buy anything. |
| 0:36.8 | Yeah, no, you do. |
| 0:38.0 | But you maybe ask yourself, you know, or say to yourself, declare to yourself, you |
| 0:44.3 | cite yourself out, you say, hey, if it's not essential, I'm not going to buy it. |
| 0:48.5 | That would mean that I did not buy some resistance bands that I'm going to use to try and increase my range of motion. |
| 0:58.4 | That's the most recent purchase I made, I believe. |
| 1:02.1 | So yeah, no buy year would have meant Jesse does not have those resistance bands. |
| 1:07.1 | What does that mean? |
| 1:08.2 | Probably not a lot. |
| 1:09.1 | Were they essential? |
| 1:09.7 | No, so it checks that off. It's this way of like shocking the system. I'm gonna have a note by year. Um, unfortunately, well, no, actually, fortunately, it's not how you live most of your life. So while I love a good shock to the system, I love a good sprint to just kind of see what we learn. It's a little bit like seeing how long |
| 1:28.5 | you can hold your breath. Like you know, you know that the carbon dioxide's going to build up and |
| 1:34.9 | you know you're going to need to breathe again. But it is kind of entertaining to see if there are any |
| 1:39.5 | like tips or tricks like moderate hyperventilation to convince your kids that you, yeah, |
| 1:47.4 | that you can hold your breath for a terribly long amount of time. |
| 1:51.1 | Now, the idea with this system shock is to get, essentially it's to save money. |
| 1:59.0 | When people are saying I'm having a know by year, the direct result of that is they will have |
| 2:04.2 | more money at the end of that year because they only bought the essentials. |
| 2:08.9 | And what I would encourage you to do is think about the money you have not as, you know, |
... |
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