What is emotional spending? 

Emotional spending is when the way we feel dictates our spending. It’s usually when we buy things as a ‘pick me up’, to help us feel better whenever we’re feeling low or as a reward for when we’ve worked hard. 

It doesn’t help that we are constantly bombarded with social media ads telling us that buying something new will solve all our problems. So, it’s not surprising that when life gets a little overwhelming, or we get overexcited, we sometimes can’t help but see spending to help us get through it or as a reward. Whether it’s after a bad day, going through a rough patch in a relationship, or having achieved something at work, we’ve all been guilty of seeing it as a shortcut to feeling good.  

Here are some examples of emotional spending that you might recognize:  

• It’s payday, our bank accounts have been temporarily replenished, and everyone is going out for a drink to celebrate surviving until the end of the working month. 

• Booking a summer holiday after a particularly cold winter could be classed as emotional spending. 

• At the more serious end of the scale, experiencing redundancy, losing a loved one, or going through a break-up could cause extremely distressing feelings that can lead us to spend 

Emotional spending can be serious depending on your financial situation. If it becomes a habit and you’re spending money on things you can’t afford, it can be a very slippery slope. For example, if you have debt, emotional spending can prevent you from having choice and flexibility in your life.  

What can we do to control emotional spending?  

We’re all human and one way to control emotional spending is to limit the temptation as much as possible and make it more difficult to shop!   

This could be trying to stay off your phone just before bed to stop you from browsing shopping apps, turning off notifications from your phone, deleting certain apps or removing the ‘one-click’ buy functionality from your Amazon account – anything that creates more friction between you and your potential purchases could help you stay away from emotional purchases. And unsubscribe from all those marketing emails! 

Another method is to pause before you buy. Could you leave something in your online basket and return to it a day or two later? If you’re an emotional spender, the ‘stop and think’ method could help you take a step back and potentially return to the item you were going to buy with a different mindset. When you do, check in with yourself – do you still really need this or were your feelings driving the need a couple of days ago?