How to Align Your Spending With Your Values – EP 274

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Values-based spending is not new in the Frugal Friends Club as you may have heard us mention it innumerable times before. In this another foundational episode, allow us to take you through the deeper aspects of values-aligned spending such as knowing how to identify it, putting them into practice, and making sure your spending is truly aligned with your values. 

When you’re trying to figure out your values, keep it focused on YOU and how YOU interact with people.

Sponsors:

  • Frugal Friends Club! To celebrate the new year new you hype, we are offering a sale on Frugal Friends Club! We know motivation is high in January and falls off around Feb and March, we want to help you stay motivated all year long. FFC is a community specifically for our listeners who are paying off debt filled with courses, challenges, and expert interviews that will help you pay off debt faster and figure out what to do after. We also have an amazing community with monthly accountability groups and several members are even going through our book club selections. It’s so lovely. So if this sounds like something that could help you stay on track this year head to frugalfriendspodcast.com/club to see everything in the club and join us! Today is the last day for the discount.

How to Define Your Personal Values

WikiHow shared in this article some ways that will help us identify our personal values by giving out different scenarios and doing things we can try. 

What Jen + Jill have to say:

Jen advises everyone to go through their last 90 days’ transactions and list each one of them out. Make a note of every single one of them then you will start to see a pattern that is going to tell you a lot about what’s most important in your life. You should also try listing things you really want in life. From there, rank the top 10 core values you have identified but be really honest with yourself about what you truly value and not what you think you should value.

Along with the list, you should also try to identify 3 to 5 experiences wherein you truly felt alive and engaged at the moment. Think about your loved ones and the people around you whom you admire. Jill also briefly mentions parts 2 and 3 wherein it can be applied to the list mentioned by looking through it and rating each one of them. This can also help you determine if your career is aligned with your values.

Tips for Spending Based on Values

In this article, CNBC covers three ways to avoid mindless spending so you can start buying things that actually matter to you and it perfectly ties everything we have raved about values-based spending. 

What Jen + Jill have to say:

Jill loved the quote from the article, “Improving your finances doesn’t necessarily mean you have to stop buying non-necessities altogether—you just have to make sure you’re avoiding frivolous, mindless spending so you have room to make purchases you genuinely love and care about”. One of the things she does is by keeping a pulse of her spending by looking at the transactions and spending and continuing to assess each one of them. 

There are going to be various and deeper reasons as to why we are spending but we don’t have to automatically recognize those reasons right off the bat. We just need to start identifying them so that when we do have those epiphanies we can recognize them for what they are and not just brush them off. We should also allow ourselves to be flexible just like how Jen plans for it as that’s when she feels fulfilled. 

Our spending values and how we found them

 Jill stays on top of her transactions as they tell a lot about her spending behaviors which she discovered by finding beauty in everything, being in a community, and having generosity. Jen relates to finding her spending values through her community, achievements, and flexibility (this allows her to create plans with her community while she achieves her goals). 

Bill of The Week

Thank you Stefanie for sharing your bill about taking a course on night nanny-ing and how you paid down student loan debt. AND ability to pay down medical bills!

Thanks so Much for Listening!

Thanks so much for listening! Just a reminder that the Frugal Friends Club sale is ON! If you want to know what kind of success our members are having here’s one of our favorite wins that we saw last year:

✰✰✰✰✰
Impulse Spending Down 75%

I just went through my Amazon orders for 2021 and compared it to my Amazon orders for 2022. I haven't completely irradicated impulsive spending, but I have cut it by 75%. YAY!

The primary thing I have stopped doing is (dun, dun, dun) - cruising Amazon's "Today's Deals" for things I "need."

SHOUT OUT to the whole FFM group and my accountability group, the DEBTONATATORS for the support which helps me stay on track and *off* the internet (for impulse buys).

Congrats! Thanks for listening and if you want to check out our monthly challenge community head to frugalfriendspodcast.com/club to see what challenge we have coming up next.

Keep leaving us reviews on iTunes or Stitcher, and sending the screenshot to reviews@frugalfriendspodcast.com. And don’t forget to share your favorite quote from the episode by using the hashtag #FrugalFriendsNote. 😉

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