the spending muscle
September 17th, 2025 at 07:51 amtabs said of course people like spending money. Yes and no. It's hard to explain but when you live frugally your entire life it's really hard to change. What do I mean? When you are raised and it naturally fits your personality to be frugal you live that without seeing it as a hardship.
By nature I'm a saver and so is DH. Our first instinct with our first job was to save the maximum and live on the rest. Then we got bonuses and stocks and never touched them. They went into our savings. Then as our income increased we increased our life a little, but really not much. our first 10 years working the life we had was just a little more spendy than the first 5 together as grad students. Mostly we just bought a more expensive house. Then we moved and bought a more expensive house, but the same saving habit continued.
The spending muscle needs to be exercised too. When you hit the point where you will never spend more than you have saved. We've crossed that point and i think many on here did too. How? It's the idea that you've managed carefully during the earlier harder times and now you have this natural instinct to save. But it's time to spend. It's time to enjoy the fruits of your labor. It's time to realize that you have been prudent and frugal.
But if you don't exercise the spending muscle you'll never be able to spend. I still struggle with seeing i "only" save like 25%. But now i'm like I'm okay saving 10%. we crossed the line of enough and I still save because it's what you do. But I could not save another penny and still be okay. But it's hard to spend that extra money. Suddenly you do have more since you aren't saving at the same rate as before.