Buy What You Love Without Going Broke: Transform Your Spending and Get More of What Money Can't Buy
By Jen Smith and Jill Sirianni
Harvest; 208 pages; hardcover, $25.00
Jen Smith and Jill Sirianni are the co-hosts of the Frugal Friends podcast. Smith is the personal finance expert who has written for Forbes, Money Magazine, and Business Insider. Before becoming a sought-after writer and speaker helping people live for today while saving for tomorrow, she and her husband paid off $78,000 of debt in two years while battling unemployment and buying a house. Sirianni is a licensed clinical social worker who has experience in doing a lot with a little, from starting small businesses to downsizing to an RV, all of it leveraged to pay off $60,000 in debt, and cash flow her masters degree. Helping others is Sirianni's highest value, and integrating her mental health perspective with personal finance is how she supports others to identify, and live out, what they value most.
In this debut book for Smith and Sirianni, Buy What You Love Without Going Broke, they offer a holistic approach to reshape the way you think about spending money. There are insights that will transform how you view finances with value-based spending advice. With their practical advice, it helps you keep to your budget and pay off debt, without the guilt and shame often associated with traditional financial advice.
There's a lot of noise about how to spend, or not spend, your money, but the Frugal Friends add the personal touch as they say you should make financial decisions based on what you value. There can be value placed on anything, from a daily latter to fancy dinners out to vacations.
Smith and Sirianni share a plan for how to sift through what's not important to find the things that you truly love spending money on. They will teach you how to analyze your current spending and identify what you value, prioritize your values when you can't afford everything, identify the root causes of your impulse spending, and make the changes to your habits stick over the long run.
From credit card debt to the rising costs of childcare and homes, Smith and Sirianni show how to do it in a way that's healthy, while exploring topics like overconsumption, self-worth, and the insidious history behind our consumption-obsessed culture.
In this excerpt, Smith and Sirianni give a taste of how they came to a realization on how they wanted to give personal finance advice: "Like most good books, we wanted to start this one with a captivating story. But instead, we're going to start it with an email. It's the email that changed the course of our lives and set the wheels in motion for the book you're now holding. It came to us from a listener of the Frugal Friends podcast who said:
Hi,
I'm just starting out and feel like I'm failing miserably at any frugal journey. Maybe my problem is that I have too much fun buying things. Not just things but experiences too. Recently, you mentioned being frugal can be really fun, but I'd love to know HOW? I have student loan debt, no real savings, and I'm thinking more and more that just owning a home might be an unattainable goal. I love my job as a teacher, but there are no prospects for any significant pay increases so I NEED to be more frugal.
But I also don't want to stop living my life just for the sake of saving. I'm sick of feeling like wanting to shop is a bad thing and that all my financial shortcomings are my fault. I don't think being better at budgeting or buying fewer lattes is the answer, trust me I've tried that. I want to enjoy my life, but I do fear I'm screwing myself over in the long run.
Do you have a podcast episode about ways to be frugal is fun, or ways we can make it as fun as buying things is? I've learned so much from you and have put a lot of your advice in place, but I can't say I find being frugal fun. And I need it to be.
Thanks!
Amber
This email highlighted pain points around money so many of us experience. And it challenged us to take a deeper look at some of the difficulties we face in getting the things we want and need while still enjoying our lives. We knew that like Amber, people don't typically see frugality as a fun lifestyle - if anything, it's the opposite. They see it as a lifestyle of deprivation, exploiting resources, and mooching off people. And for years we thought we were addressing this misconception on our podcast by teaching people how to save money on this, spend less on that, and ways to avoid buying home decor. (Here's the best hack: Take it away from its beautifully curated display and look at it next to a trash can to determine if it still looks good in an unaesthetic environment.) But we were looking at the 'how,' not the 'why,' and definitely not the 'who.'
Amber's email served as a reminder that number in a bank account is a good short-term motivator for cleaning up your spending habits, but it doesn't last. We are people. Not bank accounts. Any real chance we have at achieving our financial goals is going to take time. They say 'It's a marathon, not a sprint,' but it's way more than a marathon. A marathon is still something that can be run in a day. Financial goals can take decades to achieve. And who wants to live decades without having any fun? The pandemic showed us that you can work hard your whole life to save or build a business and still lose everything due to circumstances outside of your control. So, what's the point in trying so hard? These are the questions our listener was asking. We knew them well because we've asked them too. And when we look to authorities in the world of finance for answers, they all seem to fall short.
Typical personal finance advice has long been a tool that out-of-touch financial experts use to give the rest of us just enough illusion of control that we continue to buy their books and courses and pay them commissions to manage our money for us. But most of the traditional finance advice given is for people who already have money. It's full of math, numbers, and spreadsheets. And any money-saving advice is typically a list of 100+ things to do to save a dollar here and a dollar there. We're told a budget is the solution to all our money problems, and if you can't stick to one, it's not the budget's fault, it's your lack of self-control. If you can't stop eating at restaurants or getting lattes, it's a self-discipline program and someone saying 'If I can do it, you can too.'
But in reality the math ain't mathin'. And maybe it's because none of these experts had the math teachers we did. Ours always required us to 'show your work.' In every other class, simply having the answer was enough. Not in math class. Having the answer only provided partial credit, if any. If you wanted full credit, you had to show your work. Sometimes it was frustrating. If I did the work in my head, why did I have to write it all out? If showing my work was essential to getting to the answer, what was the point of the end result? It wasn't until we started reading all these personal finance books and articles that we realized how essential showing your work is. Because we'll admit, when presented with the details of today's economy - student loan debt, underpaid workers, high inflation, and a $700 per month cost of living increase in the last two years - the answer you might be tempted to jump to is 'Yeah, forget thriving, surviving will do.'...
It took us some time to figure out the words to use in response to Amber's email about 'making frugal fun.' But here's what we said: 'Frugality isn't just about shopping less but realizing that shopping isn't what's actually 'fun' or making you happy. It's a temporary dopamine hit that so many other things can provide. The things that make us truly happy cannot be bought. We use frugality to get more of those things. To an extent, the chips are stacked against us and there are very real barriers to affording the things we need and want. Anyone saying anything different is gaslighting. But just because the playing field isn't level doesn't mean we can opt out of the game. Being frugal for frugal's sake is a lifestyle that very few people enjoy. But when you're doing it to get more of what you really love, in a way that works for you, then you'll find the results are very fun.'"
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