What are you asking your purchases to prove? 🛍️

Welcome to Inner Equity - my weekly newsletter about building financial confidence on the path to the life you want 🏡

Each week, we break down one meaningful money concept and leave you with an exercise that you can use to put it into practice.

This week, we’re looking at how the desire to feel successful or accepted shapes what we buy 👇️

You’ve just been promoted, and you buy a $3,000 watch to mark it. 

You’ve saved for it, your bills are covered, and you’ve liked this particular watch for years.

You picture wearing it to dinner with friends from college. Some of them got ahead faster than you did, and you’re looking forward to having something that says you’ve caught up (without having to say it yourself).

At dinner, one friend notices the watch and compliments it. You feel good, and then the conversation moves on.

Later, someone mentions buying a second property, and, like clockwork, you start doing the familiar comparison in your head, with the new watch still on your wrist.

The watch hasn’t disappointed you as a watch (you like it just as much as you did in the shop).

But you’d also hoped that wearing it would let you stop feeling behind. 

I think this is an easy thing to miss when we talk about spending. We ask whether we can afford something and whether we’ll use it, but rarely ask what we’re hoping it will prove.

A bigger house might be partly about space and partly about showing your parents you’ve done well. 

Picking up every dinner bill might be generous, while also making sure nobody thinks you’re struggling.

Those reasons can exist together (you don’t need to find a perfectly pure motive for everything you buy), but it helps to know when someone else’s reaction has become part of what you’re paying for.

If the pleasure depends on a particular person noticing, you’re making a purchase with an outcome you can’t control. 

They might admire it, barely register it, or show up with something more expensive. Even a warm response can leave you wanting the same reassurance again next month.

And sometimes you’re the person you’re trying to convince. 

You buy the clothes you associate with someone confident, then feel like you’re pretending when you put them on.

Clothes can help you feel prepared for a meeting. But if you dismiss your own experience before you walk in, a more expensive jacket may leave that doubt untouched.

Before buying it, try getting specific about the judgment you’re hoping to change. 

“I want to look successful” might become “I want my old friends to stop seeing me as the one who’s still figuring things out.”

Have they actually said that? Or is it a description you’ve kept applying to yourself?

In the watch example, you’ve already earned the promotion. You did the work before anyone at dinner saw what you bought.

You might still choose the watch because you love it and want to remember that moment. 

You might decide you’d rather keep the $3,000 (once you realize how much the imagined reaction/approval mattered).

Either way, try picturing the purchase without the reaction, and notice whether you’re still looking forward to wearing it.

Set aside 20 minutes this week and choose one nonessential purchase you’re considering.

1. Write down the item and its full cost. Then describe what you’ll enjoy or use about it in ordinary life, after the first week of owning it.

2. Finish this sentence: “If I own this, I hope I’ll feel _____, or people will see me as _____.” Name a specific person if one comes to mind (your own name counts).

3. Check the expectation. What are you hoping this purchase will prove, and what evidence already exists without it: work you’ve done, a relationship you’ve built, a commitment you’ve kept?

4. Make the choice with no reaction promised: if nobody noticed or complimented it, would you still want it at that price? Write down whether you want to buy it, wait, or pass, and why.

Keep that answer with you when you shop. If you catch yourself picturing someone’s reaction again, you’ll have your own reasons there to read.