Chapter 10
Triggers and Your Money Personality
A trigger is defined by Dictionary.com as anything, an act or event, that serves as a stimulus and initiates or precipitates a reaction or series of reactions. Many overspenders documented in my survey identified their triggers as:
In order to stop spending money, you have to learn your triggers and how to stop them before they cause you to spend.
The majority of the women who reported their triggers also stated that they need help sticking to a budget from someone who has been through it before, and that they would like more help from a spouse to keep things on track.
Spenders like spending money, but they often do not feel great about it afterward. If you as a Spender can identify the triggers that lead to guilt, you can stop the guilt from happening before it starts.
I know this from personal experience. After I charged the $12,000 on a credit card in a single night and won that free car, I didn’t feel that bad. But over time, the guilt and shame of it started to creep up on me. I stopped recruiting people into my unit, because I stopped believing in the lies of the company.
I saw many other stay-at-home moms who wanted to make a little extra cash by doing a home-based business, but what they didn’t see was that they were the first customer to the company. As long as they bought product, the company didn’t care how much they sold or how much money they made. Such companies (and many other home-based business models) prey on the stay-at-home mom to make extra cash, then load them up with products and debt and promise them a better future for their families.
I started to become jaded in this business model and angry at the company that I had gone into severe debt over. I eventually walked away from them, gave back my “free” car, and apologized to many of my unit members, who were also drowning in debt.
So why does the pattern continue to happen to some? Maybe because the Spender does not identify themselves as having a problem? Maybe you are not sure if you would be considered a Spender in need of recovery?
To help you to diagnose your spending personality, here are the seven types of behaviors common to compulsive shoppers. These seven behaviors were identified by the Shulman Center for Compulsive Theft, Spending, and Hoarding.
1. Are you an emotional shopper?
You are an emotional shopper if you shop to distract yourself from how you are feeling. You often shop when you are depressed or anxious to help alleviate some of the uncomfortable feelings.
2. Are you a trophy shopper?
Trophy shoppers often shop because they need just one more item to complete an outfit. They typically look for high-dollar items.
3. Are you an image shopper?
If you are an image shopper, you shop to look good. You often pick up the tab at the bar, drive a nice car, and wear expensive clothing. That is because you have to look like you have a lot of money.
4. Are you a bargain shopper?
Bargain shoppers get into trouble because they can’t pass up a good deal. Extreme couponers and hoarders would fall into this category, as well as people who love to shop for deals.
5. Are you a codependent shopper?
You shop to gain approval. If you are out for a night with your girlfriends and they want to stop and shop, you buy because they buy.
6. Are you a “bulimic” shopper?
If you buy things, then return them, then buy and return another item, you may be what is considered a “bulimic” shopper.
7. Are you a collector shopper?
Do you buy things to complete a collection? The thrill of having a complete collection, or various dresses in the same color because you love them, would put you into the collector shopping category.
If you fit into one of these seven categories, you have a shopping problem. If you never admit to yourself that you have a problem, you will never be able to break the cycle of spending.
I fall into many of these categories, and although I am now in recovery, I still find myself thinking about sales at thrift stores. I fit into three categories at different points of my life. While I was in the home-based business I was a trophy shopper. Before that I was an emotional shopper, and afterward I became a bargain shopper.
To make it worse, I was completely uneducated about my finances. I had no idea what compound interest was or how to save money. I hadn’t thought about how my spending reflected my values, and I was just too passive to look at the other side of the credit card bill where the interest rates were explained. I wasn’t taught anything about money in school, and felt totally unprepared to handle it in the real world.
I had to learn what my triggers are so that I could avoid them. Here is a list of some of my triggers and the boundaries I’ve set up for myself over the years.
I do not go to home-based product parties—Thirty-One, Tupperware, Pampered Chef, or any others. I say no, because I know I will buy something that I don’t need and/or wouldn’t be able to afford. I also do not support their business model, so I prefer not to go to their parties.
I do not go shopping at the mall alone.
I only use cash, and do not use credit cards for personal expenses. I do have one credit card for business transactions so I can earn airline miles to fly.
I shop for my kids at thrift stores and online consignment websites. I have no self-control when it comes to little sparkly girls’ clothing. I have three young daughters and cannot control myself.
I do not buy anything from someone who is having a fund-raiser or selling cookies. If you come to my front door and ask me for money, I will say no 100 percent of the time. Not because I don’t care, but because it is one of the triggers for me to overspend.
I do not do expensive or elaborate birthday parties for my kids.
I do not go into home decorating stores, because I would feel that my home was not pretty enough. I tend to be more minimalist because I can often feel “less than.”
Learning my triggers and getting emotional about where my money was going was a huge part of my recovery process, but it wasn’t an overnight success. Getting the hang of this for yourself will take a few months, but it is much easier to say no before you are triggered than when you are stuck right in the middle of an emotion.
Once you have your triggers identified and your boundaries set, you are on your way. Just yesterday I was asked on Facebook to attend a book party. My exact words to the person inviting me were, “I don’t attend at-home parties. It is one of my triggers, and in order to stay out of debt and not overspend, I say no to every one I am invited to.”
Anytime you get asked to one, feel free to use my response, subbing out the appropriate words. It is freeing to already have a response prepared, and the person asking should now understand why you had to say no.
THE BRAIN OF A SPENDER
As I dug deeper to understand my emotions and spending triggers, I pulled out an old college textbook about drugs and the brain. Because of watching my brother’s life, I was inspired to help others like him who struggled with addictions in their lives. The funny thing is that after learning about addiction and what happens in the brain, I realized I wasn’t much different from my brother. I just had a different drug of choice.
In my research I learned what happens inside the brain of a Spender. I wanted to know—is spending addiction a real thing? In order to stop spending money, I thought it was crucial to truly understand what was happening in my mind when I spent. By knowing this, I hoped I could then halt the process before it began.
When you think about it, a purchase is simply an exchange that involves a trade-off for the pleasure of spending that money against the pain of losing the potential of whatever else the money could do. I’ll use the example from chapter 1 of my winning a car. When I put all that money on my credit card, I was saying that I valued what the car provided me more than I valued the money. I valued the prize of the car more than the idea of living debt-free. I found that surprising, because I had always thought my value system included providing for my family and taking good care of them. Spending $12,000 in one night on a credit card went against my core values, but at that moment I didn’t think about it as a trade-off.
In a “Spendthrift-Tightwad” study conducted by Scott I. Rick and colleagues, in the Journal of Consumer Research, researchers studied what happens in the brains of people with poor spending habits. They gave $40 to each subject, then used an MRI to record brain activity as subjects were shown pictures of various consumer items. Researchers saw that whenever one of the people they were studying liked an item they saw in a photo, the place in the brain responsible for pleasure, the nucleus accumbens, lit up. Have you ever touched a sweater in a store, said to yourself, “I love this,” then bought it immediately? Did you pause to think about how much money it cost or how you were going to pay for it? If not, then your nucleus accumbens took over and sent a signal to your brain that pretty much said, “Buy this now!”
The insula is the part of the brain that does the opposite of what the nuclear accumbens does. It is responsible for many things, including reading the psychological state of the entire body and generating feelings that can motivate actions. For instance, if you are about to slam your hand in your car door, the insula will alert your body and tell it to take action and pull the hand away. If you are hungry, it will tell the body to take action and eat. If you are broke and at a mall, it will tell you to take action and get out before you get yourself into trouble. The researchers found that when subjects were shown the prices of the items, the insula reacted and the person decided not to purchase the item. When the insula did not light up, the person got all of the pleasure from the nucleus accumbens and ultimately decided to spend their money.
The more stimulation inside the insula, the less likely you are to keep spending money. In other words, when it comes to money, increased insula stimulation can stop your spending.
So what does all this mean? Can we change the way our brain alerts us when we are overspending? The point of this knowledge isn’t just to say, “It’s my brain’s fault!” Instead, we can now make educated decisions about how to protect ourselves from overspending.
As a Spender struggling to get your spending in check, you have to get to the point where the pain of not spending money is less than that of dealing with the consequences of your overspending. As someone who used to have the hardest time resisting a new pair of shoes the second I saw them, this was a major challenge for me. I had gotten to the point where the stress and weight of the debt I was under was paralyzing, and I was finally ready to make a change.
NEW YORK CITY AND THE TODAY SHOW
Recently I was in New York to record a segment with Kathie Lee and Hoda on the Today show. I’ve wanted to be on Today ever since I was a little girl. I watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade every year and always thought it would be so glamorous to go on the show. Tomorrow would be the big day! I would be talking about how to make your next year $10,000 richer, using the tips and strategies that I had used to get out of debt. I consider it such a blessing to be able to teach thousands of people what I know. And I love the hustle and bustle of New York City for a day or two. After that, I’m ready to return to my humble home upstate with my family.
The first place I headed was Times Square. I really enjoy seeing what the new and upcoming entertainment events are, and all that is happening in the craziness that is Times Square. Did you know they have an entire store in the middle of the square devoted to Hello Kitty? Yes—an entire Hello Kitty store! My daughters would be in heaven!
In front of me was the famous Jumbotron filled with advertisements. I counted more than fifty TV screens all over the sides of the tall Manhattan buildings. In the background I heard people selling a tour bus ride or a ticket to the latest show, all over the sound of sirens, car horns, and the steady buzz of the crowds.
In the center of Times Square there are benches set up like bleachers at a high school football game facing the Jumbotron, and they are always filled with people stopping for a moment to take it all in. Around the bleacher-type seats are tables and chairs. All of the tables are always filled with spectators taking videos and pictures of their surroundings. Times Square is one place where you really understand you are being sold to (at least I hope you do). Your senses are bombarded with the enormous lighted signs and videos, but if you know what’s going on you can enjoy the experience instead of escaping through shopping.
As I scanned the crowds, I saw all sorts of people from all different walks of life. You can find police officers working hard to protect the city. There are people from every nationality imaginable, children and their parents, college students, professionals, the elderly, New Yorkers and tourists alike. I sat there wondering what was going on in everyone’s life. I wanted to know what their lives were like financially, because everyone looked successful on the surface.
That’s the way it is in life. You see so many people every day, try to keep up with what it looks like those people have, but do you ever stop to figure out what it really is that you are chasing? Are you chasing someone else’s dream? Did your neighbor get a new Lexus, and now you think you should have one? As I stood in the middle of Times Square, I was overwhelmed with gratitude that I had stopped running the rat race of trying to keep up with the Joneses. There are so many Joneses, but only one path for me and my family.