Why Doing a Spending Summary Helps You to Subconsciously Spend Better

Dave and Shaun Maslyk discuss a powerful (and easy) way to spend more intentionally: Track everything for 3 months. No pressure to change — but change often happens anyway.

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So over the last five years, I was probably weak at this early as an educator, I’ve really gotten people pushed to do spending summaries. So for a three month period, they’ll write down everything they spend kind of monitored, and they can learn a lot about where the leaks are and where they’re spending without getting the appropriate joy units, et cetera.

But the most interesting aspect of that to me has been that they often make changes after doing the spending summary, without consciously deciding to do so. So this isn’t them taking all of that data, sitting down or redoing a budget or sitting down with someone like me and saying, help me to do this.

They tend to subconsciously start doing better things and allocating the money to where it gave them more joy or closing off the leaks. How does that whole thing work? Why is that happening?

Carl Young, fantastic psychologist, he said, until we make the unconscious conscious, it will continue to dictate our life and we’ll call it fate.

Right.

Going through that exercise of documenting, it’s very similar to looking in the past at our money stories. What influenced us, what we’re doing is we’re just making the unconscious that is dictating us conscious there.

And in your example, these people are now bringing light to, oh shoot, I was spending like $500 on, skip the dishes or whatever. And maybe they aren’t like consciously now making a decision. I’m not gonna do that. But that awareness now informs us on our decisions of what we, we, we don’t want to do. And so, you know, until we turn the lights on, we don’t know what’s in the room.