Learning How to Spend Money (While Enjoying Every Dollar Spent)

Financial Independence Podcast

The Mad Fientist

Taxavoidance, Business, Geographicarbitrage, Investing, Tax, Earlyretirement, Travelhacking, Entrepreneurship, Travel, Personalfinance, Stocks, Minimalism, Realestate, Frugality, Retirement, Financialindependence

4.8 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After decades of saving/investing, it's hard to immediately flip a switch and go into spending mode.

Spending is a skill that you should develop on your way to FI, so that you're better at it when the time comes to really do it.

Here's what worked for me over the last few years!

Highlights

How to reframe expenses and recalibrate how you value money (e.g. College Calculation, 0.01% Rule, etc.)
Why you should expect inefficiencies/waste as your net worth grows
The benefits of splurge accounts and forced annual-spending targets
Balancing the idea that "everything is free" with the benefits of incremental improvements
The importance of prioritizing "now" over "the future", while still spending/saving for both
How to give more while increasing the personal benefits of that giving

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, what's up everybody? Welcome to the Financial Independence Podcast. I know it's been a while
0:10.1	since I've been in touch, but as I mentioned in my last post, things have been busy around here
0:14.6	with two small kids. But this episode is a long time coming. I know I've been promising this for
0:20.6	at least a few years now,
0:22.3	and it's a topic that I've been actively focused on since 2019, and it's getting better at
0:28.4	spending money, and I realize that's a crazy thing for some of you out there to hear that
0:33.8	this is a problem, and I completely admit it's a great problem to have but I think it's a
0:39.4	very real problem with people that pursue five because we're so good at saving and we've saved
0:44.6	all our lives and we've built an identity around saving and then all of a sudden you're just
0:50.6	meant to flip a switch and change ever to spending. And it's a lot harder than it
0:54.7	sounds. So this is something I've been working on since 2019 because that's when I first asked
1:00.1	Ramit Setti from I Will Teach You to Be Rich.com to come onto the podcast because I figured he was
1:04.9	the ideal person to help me become a better spender. And he was. It was a great episode. I asked him back on to the podcast in
1:13.7	2023 to catch up again and review my progress and answer a few other questions I had with
1:19.0	regards to spending. And both of those episodes are great. So if you haven't heard those,
1:23.2	I'll link to them in the show notes. But this is something that I've been focused on since
1:27.7	2019. And even though I've been making gradual progress, it's not fast enough because I'm 43 now
1:33.9	and your peak spending years are 40 to 60. So I'm already over 15% of the way through my peak
1:40.2	spending years and I'm still talking about getting better at spending like it's some future
1:45.1	thing that I need to do and actually I need to do it now. And this really hit home over the last few
1:50.7	months because we sent our three year old off to nursery, which I guess in America is preschool.
1:56.5	And it was a shock and I took it way harder than I expected to.
	...

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