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I deserve a treat

The longer range your vision, the better your decision.

—Pastor Mac Hammond

When Marco graduated from college in May 2006, it was cause to celebrate. See, he is a first-generation immigrant who arrived in the U.S. with $500 in his pocket, with limited English ability, and not knowing a soul. He came from Brazil to get a college education at an American university.

His path to accomplishing that dream had some road bumps. After getting a two-year degree at a community college in 1995, he went on to the local university. By day he drove a school bus and by night he studied. Then he experienced a divorce and some personal setbacks, then dropped out.

When I met him some eight years later, he still talked about his dream of getting a B.A. from an American university. Much to his surprise, it turns out that he needed only three additional classes to complete his program. We agreed that he’d take them during the 2005–2006 school year, and in May 2006 he walked across the stage and received his hard-earned diploma. It really was a dream come true for him.

For weeks leading up to graduation, Marco told me about his desire to buy a class ring. I agreed, in theory, that it would be nice to have one. I didn’t agree on the timing. We had a trip to Brazil planned right after commencement. I felt financially stretched thin. I wanted him to delay the purchase.

On the afternoon that he was fitted for his graduation robe, I got an email from him at work. It read something like this:

Sweetie,

The coolest thing happened when I got fitted for my robe. They gave me a very nice frame for hanging my diploma on the wall. It has the school’s name on it in gold, and the colors will match the décor in our living room.

Wow, that’s great, I thought. He had also expressed a desire for a nice frame to hang his diploma, and I’m glad he was able to get the frame as a gift. But I was puzzled about why they were giving away frames. Maybe it was the school’s gift to each graduate. Or maybe it was a gift from the international student society. Marco had said something about an award ceremony for international students. I settled myself on that idea and kept reading.

All I had to do to get the free frame was buy a class ring. So I did. I felt like I deserved it after having worked so hard for my degree. I’m excited for you to see the frame when you get home from work tonight.

Love you,
Marco

We’re Justifying

When you hear the words I deserve it run through your mind, know this: You are justifying. You are being tempted to make an impulse purchase and need a justification in order to pull the trigger. It’s an impulse decision driven by a desire for some sort of emotional fix.

Making decisions based on emotion is not bad. In fact, it’s been scientifically proven that we need emotion to decide anything.[10] Without an emotional impetus in one direction or another, we’d experience constant paralysis by analysis. We’d endlessly spin, weighing pros and cons into eternity. Emotion is what tips the scale and causes us to choose one option over another.

I’m not talking about eliminating the emotional element from your spending—you need it. But I am going to talk about giving your emotions a different role in your decision making. Consider this example to illustrate the point.

A Classic Example

Jenny has had a rough day. Really, it’s been a tough week. On Monday afternoon her boss said she was disappointed with the quality of Jenny’s recent work. That caught Jenny off guard, since she’s always been a high achiever. Then again, she and her husband haven’t been getting along very well in recent months. It’s like they can’t agree on much of anything. There have always been issues between them, but their oldest daughter has gotten into trouble at school recently and the situation has highlighted their inability to communicate. When Jenny quiets down and is honest with herself, she’s not too surprised that her work has been impacted. It is hard for her to focus. She’s been staying up late arguing with Brad, then worrying about her daughter and her own future when she lies down to fall asleep.

Finally, Friday comes. On her way to work she fills up with gas and gets a coffee and donut while she’s there. On her way to the car she has a fleeting guilty thought about her coffee and donut purchase, reflecting on a recent conversation with Brad. Things have been tighter than normal financially since his overtime hours were cut. It’s an insignificant purchase, she tells herself. Plus, I deserve this pick-me-up at the end of such a crummy week.

At lunchtime she steps out of the office and heads to the food court at a nearby mall. After a quick bite, she takes time to meander through her favorite department store, eyeing the new spring fashions. Her eye catches an adorable dress that she’d love to wear on Easter. She tries it on and, wow, it’s a flattering number. Jenny smiles as she admires herself in the mirror. On a whim she decides to buy the sixty-five-dollar dress. Approaching the register, she has second thoughts about it, since she hadn’t discussed the purchase with Brad. A voice inside her says, You need something to wear on Easter anyway, Brad can’t argue with that. Plus, it has been a tough week and this helps make up for it. Deciding that those things are true, she charges the dress and heads back to work to finish out the week.

Why Do We Do It?

Let’s look at what was going on with Jenny. Like many of us, she is in the midst of a life full of stressors and is faced with multiple disappointments. Handling stress and disappointment is a complicated and multifaceted issue for everyone. This chapter is not intended to oversimplify something that may have deep and strong roots in us; it is intended to show us how we translate stress, disappointment, and even accomplishments, like Marco’s graduation, into justifications to impulse shop.

In our example, Jenny made a series of impulse purchases. Her goal at each step was to feel a little better about herself, her life, and her circumstances. The truth is, nothing she can buy—large or small—will change her marriage, her daughter, her job, or her life for the better and the long term. What does change as she spends on a whim is her own temporary emotional state and, therefore, her perception of the challenges before her.

Impulse buying releases a chemical in the brain called dopamine. Dopamine is responsible for pleasurable feelings. Dr. Gregory Berns, an Emory University neuroscientist and author of Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment (Henry Holt, 2005), calls the role of dopamine while shopping “a fuel injector for action.”[11] A study of rats showed that when they were placed in new surroundings, they experienced higher levels of dopamine.[12] It’s not surprising, then, that when we try on new clothes and buy things—large or very small—we experience a pleasure surge.

It isn’t just the buying and trying on that release dopamine; the very anticipation of making a purchase causes dopamine to be released in the brain too. Thinking about buying something makes us feel good. In one study, Dr. Berns and his colleagues found that volunteers who had drops of Kool-Aid trickle onto their tongues in a random pattern had higher levels of dopamine than those who had drops trickle at predictable intervals. That study shows that the anticipation of an event—whether Kool-Aid drops, new shoes, or a mocha on the way in to the office—is almost always more climactic than the event itself.[13]

Back to Jenny and our story. As she got ready on Friday morning, she started thinking about picking up a treat at the gas station when she stopped to fill up. In her mind the thought sounded like this: Jenny, you deserve a treat this morning. As she embraced it, ruminated on it, and anticipated it, the dopamine levels surged. Long before she made that simple purchase, she had masked the pressure of her daily life with a dopamine surge.

Like any chemical or drug-induced high, it wears off. By lunchtime, when she heads to the mall, Jenny gets a new surge of the happy-making dopamine as she stands among the racks of beautiful spring-like merchandise. In the high of that moment, the thought of owning a dress that looks so good is irresistible to her. She felt good at the checkout, but by her drive home she was regretting her choice. That’s not unusual, as almost every impulse purchase is a letdown, according to impulse-shopping expert Dr. Berns.[14]

Another Way to Get What We Want

Starting each January, Susan sets aside fifteen dollars per month to use toward new spring and summer clothes. She loves boating and being on the lake, so it’s important to her that she have nice clothes to wear as she enjoys the water. She modestly saves, and just before Memorial Day she heads to the mall with seventy-five dollars in hand. Knowing she is on a budget, Susan has prioritized the new pieces she wants for the summer and is familiar with the sales at all the major stores. Susan and her daughter enjoy a leisurely day of trying on clothes, visiting, and scoring some great bargains. She’s proud to come home with three new articles of clothing and a pair of earrings, plus two dollars and change to spare.

Susan starts her shopping experience already feeling good. Jenny, on the other hand, bought things so that she would feel good. When you feel angry, stressed, guilty, or bored, you need to be particularly watchful for this deceptive attitude. You may find yourself with thoughts like these:

It’s the impulsivity of this attitude that makes it dangerous. It destroys the best-laid budgets and convinces us to work against our long-term goals. Yes, this attitude also includes an element of entitlement thinking, which is something we cover in-depth in the chapter “I’ll Fake It ’Til I Make It.”

It’s the Leaky Toilet

Imagine you open your water bill one month and find that it is sky high. Instantly you know that something, somewhere in your house has to be leaking. There is no way that you could rack up such a bill yourself, apart from a leak. If this happened to me, I’d start on a quest to find the leaky culprit. I’d check every faucet, every showerhead, every pipe until I found the problem’s source. Then I’d set my mind to fixing it.

In this case, you discover a silent leaky toilet. It’s not like it was running and you’d been ignoring it, but it was stealthily leaking day in and day out to the tune of a couple hundred bucks in this last water bill. Immediately you fix it. You see a huge decrease in your bill during the next cycle.

For Marco and me, I-deserve-a-treat purchases were the leaky toilet in our finances. We couldn’t see exactly why we didn’t have enough money. We couldn’t pinpoint a single purchase that pushed us over budget and prompted us to carry a credit card balance. But all the while, money was leaking out of our life in two-dollar, five-dollar, and seven-dollar increments. We really believed that our treats of choice—a pumpkin muffin and hazelnut coffee for me and an iced tea and sandwich from the gas station cooler for Marco (yes, he really eats and enjoys those sandwiches)—weren’t impacting us financially. I mean, no one pays the mortgage with a three-dollar coffee, right?

“Thank You, Caribou”

Shortly after we got serious about eliminating our debt, Marco had a breakthrough in his thinking about his treats. As a backdrop, you have to know that Marco has Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). Impulse control is really challenging for those who have ADD. Although Marco has had ADD since childhood, he wasn’t diagnosed until 2010. That means he was untreated for it while we got into debt and during the years we got out.

In the early days of getting out of debt, we built a weekly allowance for Marco into our monthly spending plan. It was our mutual acknowledgement that resisting impulse buys was hard for him—especially on bad days, hard days, and exceptionally good days. We created a place in our finances for him to indulge a bit and get his fix but not throw us off course. We allocated twenty dollars each week for him to spend however he’d like without having to answer to me for a dime of it. Typically he spent his twenty dollars at a coffee shop and bakery on mochas and croissants or on lunch out with those gas station sandwiches.

Marco started to get fed up with his habit and wondered if he could put that twenty dollars to use elsewhere in our lives. Without telling me, he quit buying his mochas and deli sandwiches and stashed his twenty-dollar bill. He kept this up for a few weeks and finally told me about it one Friday night. It came up when he suggested that we take an impromptu trip to beautiful northern Minnesota. “Maybe we could rent a cabin or something,” he suggested. Prudent, non-spontaneous Carrie wasn’t keen on the expense of an unplanned trip—even if it was just a single night away. Then Marco remembered his stash of twenty-dollar bills and pulled them out, exclaiming, “Hey, we can use this money that I’ve been saving!”

So we did. I went online and found a cabin on a lake within our price range. We packed our bags and hit the road. It was a wonderful four-hour drive, much of it weaving and winding through the gorgeous scenery of the Chippewa National Forest.

Our cabin had a stunning view of a lake, towering pines, and birch trees. Since it was off-season, we negotiated for their largest cabin at the price one normally pays for the smallest. It was peaceful and relaxing. We enjoyed some walks through the woods, quiet reading time, and sitting on the porch looking at the water.

At one point I was sitting on the couch reading (which is one of my favorite pastimes), and Marco came into the living room. In a singsong voice and almost twirling around, as if doing a silly dance, he started saying again and again, “Thank you, Caribou! Thank you, Caribou! Thank you, Caribou, for this cabin!” If you aren’t familiar, Caribou Coffee is a Minneapolis-based coffee chain. It’s the chain where Marco always bought his mocha.

Marco’s declaration in that cabin was the moment he first realized that the money he spends on impulsive I-deserve-a-treat purchases could be used for larger, better, more satisfying things. Yes, he and I had talked plenty of times about how his four-dollar-per-day mocha habit required us to set aside eighty dollars per month for him. Talking about eighty dollars per month was not nearly as powerful as experiencing something that eighty dollars could buy.

That very day in that cabin Marco changed his mind. He replaced “I deserve a treat” with a phrase we use to this day—“I work too hard for my money.” It was the day we decided to start plugging the leaky toilet in our finances.

Creating a Larger Context

I love jigsaw puzzles. My mom and her family love jigsaw puzzles. I remember spending hours (maybe it was just a few minutes, but it seemed like hours) at the table with my grandmother. First we would empty the pieces from the box and turn them all right side up. Then we’d display the puzzle’s box top somewhere on the table so we could see what the completed image our thousand pieces would create. Then we’d assemble the exterior frame—corners first, since those were easiest—and go to work on the interior of the puzzle.

My grandmother’s puzzles weren’t meant for kids. They were thousand-piece images of fall foliage where every. single. piece. of the puzzle contained similar shades of red, gold, and brown. Our saving grace was the box top. We’d find a piece, then examine the completed image on that box top, looking for where the piece fit. That was especially critical with the first pieces we put in place. As we completed more and more of the puzzle we could make judgments based on our work, but the box top was all we had to start with.

In our financial lives we need a jigsaw puzzle box top too. For Marco, an overnight at a cabin resort was a box top. Prior to that weekend, he’d seen his simple indulgences as insignificant to our overall financial goals. When he realized that foregoing those indulgences could create something much larger—like a thousand little cardboard puzzle pieces fitting together to make one beautiful image—he realized that seemingly small insignificant financial decisions can compound into something meaningful.

Our entire story of getting out of debt is a story about the power of creating a larger context. Creating a budget, tracking our spending, and living within our means were not new concepts to Marco and me in 2006. I’d gone through some financial literacy–type courses, and a marriage class we attended talked extensively about how to operate family finances in a healthy way. We’d heard all these things but didn’t put them into practice in our life until June 2006, because we didn’t have a reason larger than ourselves to do it until then. We had a desire to move to Brazil.

During a trip to Rio de Janeiro in May 2006, Marco and I dreamed of a life where we could move to Brazil one day. Our finances were a huge roadblock to the fulfillment of that dream. Brazil is primarily a cash-based society. People pay cash for cars and houses and big-ticket items. We couldn’t get to the end of a month without our credit card, let alone pay cash for a car. That seemed a million miles away.

We got introspective. Did we want the life we had? Did we want the debt we were carrying? The cost of that life and that debt was tremendous. It meant that living in Brazil would never be an option for us. Or we could adjust ourselves, pay off the debt we had, learn to stay out of debt, and start saving money for things we’d need. If we did that, then one day we could move to Brazil and fulfill that dream.

Our desire to move to Brazil created a new frame, a new lens through which we looked at all our financial decisions. Suddenly every decision had meaning. Suddenly the sum of the parts was larger than the whole. Suddenly we had a deep and lasting motivation to actually do the things we’d known to do all along. All we had to ask ourselves was “Which do I want more?”

Creating a Positive Frame

Now we understand what lies underneath I-deserve-a-treat thinking. There’s a component of entitlement, which we’ll discuss more, and an element of impulsivity and an emotional thrill at the point of purchase. We’ve learned that there is a bona fide physiological reason we get an emotional kick from shopping and buying, albeit short-lived. One way to rein in these impulsive purchases is to create a larger-than-ourselves goal or dream to remind us of why we are foregoing our impulsive treats.

There are as many unique goals, dreams, or as I call them “frames” as there are readers of this book. But each one will fall into one of two camps. It will be gain oriented or focused on pain avoidance. Think about what this might look like where weight loss is concerned.

If you struggle with your weight, you might set out to lose thirty pounds. You could decide that your afternoon treat from the vending machine is your problem and decide to give that up. Those are loss-based goals and will be met with minimal results.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that if you decide to give up an afternoon snack and don’t frame it within something positive, something you hope to gain as a result, you’ll experience junk food cravings like never before. All your mind will have to think about is the junk food. Yes, you want to avoid it, but like a broken record your mind will play and replay an image of the thing you want to give up. Playing that image over and over will stir a desire in you, and that desire will eventually become unbearable and you’ll yield to the temptation.

Instead, what if you set out to lose thirty pounds so you’re comfortable wearing a swimsuit on an upcoming vacation? You’d have to give up your afternoon junk food snack as a step in that process. Certainly you’ll think about a chocolate bar at 2:00 p.m., just like you have every day for the last six years. But this time you’ll replace the thought of the candy bar with the thought of sunning on a beach with your family. Your resilience to the temptation will be stronger.

Your gain-oriented goal—beach and swimming time with your family in St. Thomas—supplants the short-term craving. It’s not hard to cultivate a stronger desire for the larger goal than the short-term desire you’re currently facing. If you lacked the ability to overcome the temptation simply by replacing the thought of junk food with the thought of the beach, you could take things further. You could put a Caribbean screensaver on your computer. You could read travel books about your destination and generate a positive expectancy for the trip. You could go so far as to tape a picture of your it’s-a-smaller-size-than-what-I-wear-right-now swimsuit to the vending machine. (Your co-workers might have some questions about this one, though.) So even if all the other imagery failed, you’d look at that goal, the thing you hoped to gain, in the seconds before you chose to sabotage that future for a short-term thrill.

The statements have to be positive because we’re inherently created to desire. Goals stated in the negative are often focused on suppressing behavior, dwelling on things we want to avoid: “I will no longer do x, y, or z.” We have an insatiable need to desire, whether we use it for good or bad. When our goals are stated in the positive—how we will participate in the future, not what we will avoid—then we put that desire to work.

Your New Financial Frame

It is exactly the same thing with our finances. For my family, we had a huge goal of moving to Latin America one day. That goal was almost too lofty for my husband until he experienced the short-term win with the overnight at the cabin. Your charge right now is to create a new frame of reference for yourself. The possibilities are endless:

In the first pass of creating a larger context, you might initially brainstorm loss-focused, pain-avoidance-type goals:

Don’t be discouraged if your initial thoughts are negative statements. Turn them around into something positive. Those same examples I made above could be turned around into these positive statements:

These statements are the flip side of a negative coin. It’s imperative that our new frame be positive because we have an incredible ability to tolerate pain. Think about parents who motivate their kids by yelling at them. Over time they need to yell louder and louder to garner the same result from the child. That’s because the youngster learns to tolerate the pain of yelling, and over time, higher doses of pain are needed to generate the same level of motivation. You don’t want to require an increasing amount of financial pressure to motivate you toward good choices.

Start with lofty life ambitions that seem beyond your reach today. Then step back into your current situation and create some midterm goals that can be achieved in the days and weeks ahead.

If You Don’t Know Where to Start

If you’re not sure where to start or can’t imagine anything positive for your future, there is hope for you. I am confident that you have desires within you. They may be buried deep, but they are there. With a time of thoughtful cultivation, I believe you will uncover long-lost passions, interests, hopes, and ambitions. Those things—even if they seem fanciful at the moment—are the seeds of your new frame of reference.

To unearth these seeds, think back to times in your life when you were enjoying yourself. Times when you felt alive. Times when you felt passionate about something. Times when you experienced deep satisfaction. These times may not have been prolonged seasons but rather just fleeting moments, afternoons off, or long weekends. I believe you’ve had those moments.

I remember a time when a friend of mine was longing for a glimpse into her future. She was in a place that felt meaningless. She longed for a larger-than-herself goal, but she couldn’t conjure up a single one. Then she did some soul searching and asked herself questions like these:

Over time she thought, prayed, journaled, and talked with close friends and family. She came to realize that the thing she loved and enjoyed the most in life was being outdoors. She loved camping, canoeing, rock climbing, hiking, backpacking, and every other high-adventure outdoor activity. But she wondered how a desire to be outdoors could translate into any sort of life goal. She compared herself and her desire with others’ life desires and felt inferior. While others may want to be stay-at-home moms or advance in their careers, she loved nature and the woods.

After she took some time to think about it, a solution did begin to take shape. My friend imagined how satisfying life would be if she could run an adventure camp for kids. This wouldn’t be a typical summer camp with crafts and “Kumbayah.” She imagined running a camp that would take city kids, who normally don’t get to experience the great outdoors, on week-long canoe trips, difficult hikes, or backpacking in mountain ranges so that they could experience the majesty of nature and also feel the accomplishment of performing the physical feats involved with the activities.

It had crystallized. My friend decided that one of her dreams in life was to run an outdoor adventure camp, so she pursued a master’s degree in outdoor education and gained volunteer experience at a relevant nonprofit.

My point is this: You do have interests, passions, and desires within you. At first blush they may seem silly, trivial, or meaningless. Don’t dismiss them. Cultivate them. Think about them. Develop them into a dream. Then keep that dream in front of you for the next time you’re tempted to short-circuit it with frivolous spending justified by I-deserve-a-treat thinking.

Quiz

Do you frequently spend money on things you didn’t plan to buy because you feel you deserve a treat? Here’s a quiz that may help reveal your own internal attitudes. Using the following chart, place a number after every statement.

scale

  1. When I’m having a hard day, a special treat feels more justified than on a typical day.
  2. I believe that I may never get out of my current financial situation, so I might as well enjoy the small things in life.
  3. I work hard for my money, so I deserve a latte/round of golf/new dress/new shoes a couple times a month.
  4. I pay attention to the big expenses so I don’t really need to worry about smaller purchases, even if they’re unplanned.

Tally your scores. Your total demonstrates how strongly you hold the attitude that you “deserve it.”

0–6:
 This attitude has minimal influence on your financial decision making. Other attitudes may need addressing first.
7–13:
 This attitude is part of your financial decision-making process. For your long-term success it needs to be addressed.
14–20:
 This attitude strongly influences your financial decisions. It is a priority to change this attitude.

Discussion Questions

Here are a few questions to help you think through your own financial situation, by yourself or with a small group:

  1. Do you have particular treats that you turn to in order to get through a stressful day? Write them down.
  2. When do you find yourself most tempted to get a treat?
  3. Go through the list of questions that my friend who was longing for that glimpse into her future asked herself, taking some time to really think about your answers and perhaps asking for input from the people who know you best.
  4. What is a big-picture goal you have that would require you to be in a different financial situation?
  5. How can you turn your craving for treats into a craving for your bigger picture?