I read a great post recently on intentional spending on The Fioneers blog (if you haven’t already, check them out, they are fabulous). In the post, Jess described intentional spending as making intentional decisions to spend money on things they value. In 2021, they spent more than double what they spent in 2020, and they were 100% happy about it because it was 100% intentional.
I think what I love most about intentional spending is that, by nature, it is a very personal thing. Intentional spending is tied directly to a person’s or a family’s values, and values are inherently personal.
Intentional spending is huge for me because, as you may know by now if you read my first post, I have always hated spending. I have always been a saver.
I’m frugal by nature, but because of that, I have always felt so misunderstood. Friends and family would call me cheap, which would crush me, but deep down I always knew that saving was going to get me somewhere, even if I didn’t know where at the time.
It wasn’t until I stumbled across The Frugalwoods blog that I finally felt like I belonged in a community. Mrs. Frugalwoods’ posts made so much sense to me, and I realized there was a whole group of like-minded people who felt very similar to me – I had just never come across them in my daily life up until that point!
Learning that spending more wasn’t a bad thing if it was intentional
It wasn’t until very recently that I started to come around to the idea of spending more. Not necessarily spending more in general, but spending more on things that are aligned with my values and that are going to bring me joy.
I have always been a big proponent of spending on what you need, but only spending a little bit on what you want – not too much and not too lavish.
I have recently started spending intentionally on 2 things that I would never have considered before. I can give some credit to myself, but I have to give a lot of the credit to my husband and my accountability partner.
House Cleaning
The first area where I have started intentionally spending is house cleaning.
My husband and I have lived together for 4+ years now, and we both really hate to clean. We do it, and we do it well, but we hate that it takes up so much of our precious time.
I already feel like I clean on some level every day. My husband does the majority of the cooking, and because of that, I take care of keeping the kitchen tidied and clean on a daily basis. I also do the laundry. These are things I actually like to do and I’m happy to contribute to our household by doing them.
On the other hand, there was the cleaning of the rest of the house. Before we hired our house cleaner, we were spending at least half a day, on at least 1 weekend day of our precious weekends a month, cleaning the house.
We did all we could to make it fun. We blasted music. We set up something as a reward for when we were done (ice cream, anyone?). But it never really felt worth it. We would end up exhausted and bummed that we wasted half a day of our precious 2-day weekend.
My husband had brought up the idea of hiring someone to clean our house basically since we moved in together. It was something he had always wanted, and he felt it would be worth the money to buy back our time.
I, on the other hand, was adamantly against it. I pushed back hard. I felt strongly that hiring someone to clean the house went against all my morals, just because it was something we could do. Why would we pay someone else to do what we could do ourselves? So what if we lost a few hours here and there – it was worth it to have that money going in the bank instead.
It wasn’t until a conversation (let’s be honest, multiple conversations) with my accountability partner that I started to really question these “morals” I thought I was going against (shocker – they were mostly passed-down morals I had learned from my family and from society, not actually what I truly felt).
I slowly started to consider hiring someone.
My accountability partner knows all my goals, hopes, and dreams. She helped me see some of the potential extended benefits beyond just the fact that I wouldn’t have to clean as much, and it was helpful to talk to someone about it with whom I did not have an emotional romantic relationship.
She was able to get me thinking about how that time I got back from hiring someone to clean might actually help me achieve some of my goals. If I hired someone, I’d have more time to take hikes on the weekends that I didn’t have time for on the weekdays. I might have more time to read and write (and perhaps work on my idea to start a blog!).
She reminded me that I did have the money. It wasn’t like I was going to go into debt by hiring someone to clean my house. I had worked on the numbers, and we could easily afford it (especially now that I was making the most money I had ever made).
And, maybe most importantly, she also got me to see: what’s the harm in giving it a try? I could always go back. This decision didn’t have to be final. I could think of it simply as an experiment to see if it was worth the money.
After nearly a year of having these discussions on and off with my husband (they would get heated when we had cleaning sprees, and then they would die down during the “in between” time), we decided to actually give it a shot.
Lovely readers, I cannot tell you how life changing this ended up being for me. Oh folks, I was so stubborn, and so wrong!
Is it a lot more money than I would have considered spending on cleaning? Yes. It is absolutely, 100% worth it? A thousand times, yes.
I almost cried the first time our cleaning person came and, at the end of the day, I walked downstairs (I work from home) and saw my house. I bought back my time. I bought stress relief. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made for myself.
Monthly Massages
The second big intentional spending decision I have made, right around the same time that we hired someone to clean, was to treat myself to monthly massages. Oh yes, it felt like a treat.
This is another decision I give my accountability partner all the credit for.
Massages are one of my favorite things. I had been getting them on and off since I was young, thanks to my mom treating me from a young age, but as an adult, I never got them on the regular. It was something I treated myself to once in a while, or for a special occasion.
I had been starting to notice how much stress I carried in my body. Even when things were good in my relatively low-stress, remote editor job, I noticed that when I took a vacation, the jaw pain and stomach issues I had been experiencing miraculously went away.
Then, I was going through an actively, obviously stressful time: it was mid-pandemic, I had a toxic job that I hated and was actively trying to move away from, I was trying to decide whether to go ahead with our wedding plans during a global pandemic, the list goes on.
My accountability partner knew how much I loved massages and recommended I treat myself to one monthly, just to see how it felt. It could start as just an experiment. She also reminded me that not only could I afford it, but it was for my health, which I’m very serious about – did I not see a therapist, go to the doctor, buy medications when I needed to?
Once again, like the house cleaning, this felt extravagant. It was something I would never have considered in the past. I could hear that nagging little voice in my ear: monthly spending should be on necessities, not wants.
But it somehow felt better to know that I was just giving it a try, just experimenting.
Much like when we hired a house cleaner, I felt the effects immediately. My body felt so good from the monthly massage in ways I never thought possible because I had never had them regularly before. In addition, my massage therapist was working with my body on a monthly basis. She could help me keep track of any ailments, and give me great tips to help with tricky areas (eg, my neck and jaw).
Now, monthly massages have become a priority for me.
In summary – what intentional spending means for me going forward
These intentional spending decisions felt like a huge deal at the time, but I now know that they were just baby steps.
I have felt the ripple effects in my general spending.
Since implementing these “big” intentional spending decisions in my life, and seeing the power of aligning my spending with my values (time and health, in this case), it is now so much easier and more refreshing to think about purchases, big or small.
I don’t feel the guilt and agony I used to feel over making decisions surrounding every purchase. It’s so much easier to just think about whether something aligns with my (or “our” in the case of me and my husband) values and goals.
What do you think? Do you align spending decisions and values? How do you intentionally spend? Let me know in the comments, or send me an email – I’d love to hear from you!