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Why Do We Impulse Spend – Ep. 149
In this episode, let’s dive into the heart of impulse spending and peel back the layers on the emotions driving our unplanned purchases. Let’s discuss the importance of tackling our money mindset and understand the triggers behind our spending habits. Ready to transform your relationship with money? Let’s go!
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- Grab the pdf guide : https://aimeecerka.com/impulse
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Podcast Key Points:
0:00 – Episode Overview
2:29 – Constantly a Struggle
7:03 – What is Impulse Spending
8:32 – 4 Ways Impulse Spending Emotions Come Up
10:53 – Money Mindset Explained
12:38 – Action Step
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Why Do We Impulse Spend?
Today we’re kicking off a five-part series on guilt free impulse spending. And we’ll have to start really simple like why do we impulse spin? Make sure to stick with me though because this is like karate kid wax on wax off it all belts. Here we go!
This is the Your Money Your Life podcast. I’m your host, Aimee Cerka, a money confidence coach for female entrepreneurs on the path to six figures. After over 10 years in the personal finance industry and multiple personal financial and medical crisis.
I was fed up with the lies that are being shouted from the rooftops by the Gurus. And the media said I help you simplify, solidify and scale your money. By blending tactile money strategies with mindset work, you can create unstoppable finances together, you’ll finally figure out the money thing.
So you can make more money in less time without living off of beans and rice, or sacrificing your lifestyle. Episodes here on the podcast are short and sweet. Being married, having four kids at home, homeschooling being the CEO running the household, I’m kind of busy. And I know you are too. So let’s keep it simple and get to the point. Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.
Discovering Why We Impulse Spend
Welcome back to another episode in the Your Money, Your Life Podcast. Today we are kicking off a series on guilt-free impulse spending, because there is a right way to impulse buy and you should be impulse spending. Yes, we’re going to get to all of that.
But we have to start at the basics at the core. Before we dive into that though, I want to make sure that you know, there is a PDF guide that goes along with this. So if you are somebody who is visual and likes to go to go back and reference that, you can grab that that link is going to be in the show notes below. It’s aimeecerka.com/impulse.
But let’s talk about why we impulse spend. And since we are kicking off a new series, I feel like this is a really good time for me to kind of introduce myself, maybe you’re new to the world. Maybe this is the first time like you’re hearing me, we need to know like, “Who the heck is this person?” All those things? Right?
So let’s go into a little bit about that. Who the heck am I? I’m a money confidence coach helping you to make money simple. But you know, I wasn’t always wasn’t always this way.
Reflecting on Past Experiences
I wasn’t always here. And we only have to start with like growing up, even this was showing up. So maybe you’re like me, maybe you feel like things constantly have been a struggle. And I have felt that through most of my life.
And even like silly stuff. You know, for example, math, my brother was really great at math, it came easy to him. And I made decent grades. But I had to work for it. And I remember like just being so upset and being frustrated and telling my mom like it’s just not fair.
It comes easy to him when I have to work for it. It’s such a struggle for me, and I just I don’t like it. And I carried that with me to the point that I was in the insurance industry. I was a very young single mom, my eldest was born a couple days before my 18th birthday.
And I had started out in a new industry because I had to go to work when my son was in daycare, right? Your, “Nope, I was an insurance, Life and Health Insurance originally and then was working for an agent with State Farm doing all the insurance things”, you know, Auto Home, banking, life and health, all those things, and I loved it. But I wanted to be there in the everyday moments for my family.
So it was about the same time that I ended up that I started my entrepreneurial journey. And I started with a network marketing company that was focused on personal development and financial literacy. So I was working on myself improving who I was as a person improving my skills at work, you know, conflict resolution sales skills, getting crazy raises at work.
But the goal always was to be able to be there with my family, right. So then I had met and married my husband. We were three months pregnant with my second I made the decision that I got to leave my job.
I was going to be home that I could spend time with my oldest before the baby was born. I was dealing with a lot of morning sickness, all the things, right? And there was some craziness that happened there.
We had a business deal go bad with my husband’s trucking company and we went to zero income over three days and then took a 50% income cut when we figured something else out. So there was already like struggle and struggle. Yeah, well, just it was struggle. There was already struggle going on.
But when my son Wyatt was born, he was a full-term baby. We didn’t know anything was wrong. The pediatrician came in to do their check on him there at the hospital. He turned purple on the table, and they took him back to figure out what was going on.
And he had something that’s called esophageal atresia where The TEF fistula. So his esophagus wasn’t connected to his stomach. He was transferred over to the local children’s hospital at less than 48 hours old had his first surgery, and was in the NICU a total of seven and a half weeks.
And we had years and years of therapy later for feeding therapy or learning how to eat all those things. But during that time in the NICU, the seven and a half weeks in the NICU, I was able to be there with him the whole time. I love to take care of myself and to spend time with my oldest but I was able to be there with Wyatt when it really counted.
But it was during that time that I created a story that I had failed my family. Because I hadn’t hit the income goals that I had said. But it was never about the income goal. The goal always was to be there with my family when it counted. When I really needed me.
I mean, the everyday moments, yes. But when they really needed me. I was there. But I had created a story that I had failed my family. And it wasn’t something that I realized until years later working with a coach that we were able to uncover that. And that story that I was telling myself, we get into all the self sabotage that happens there with the money mindset and all those things. And we’re going to talk about that through this video, or through the next couple episodes of the series.
But that moment, and of course, you know, there’s been crazy stuff that’s happened since then. But that story, that belief that I created, there is the reason why I focus so much on creating unstoppable finances. Now, the reason that we create unstoppable finances is because we know that something’s going to come up.
What do you do when something happens? When the stuff hits the fan? What are you going to do? Are you going to get knocked down? Are you going to stay stuck? Are you going to get back up if you’re going to be unstoppable, and you’re going to get keep going? And you’re going to know without a shadow of a doubt, you’re going to be okay, because you have these things in place. It’s not going to stop you it’s not going to affect you. It’s not going to scare you as much. Because you know that you know that you know that you are unstoppable.
What is Impulse Spending?
Okay. So now that we’ve introduced myself, let’s talk today about why do we impulse been surface level like what is impulse spending, impulse spending is purchasing something that you weren’t planning on, this can be like a wide variety of things. This can be buying a candy bar at the grocery store that you weren’t planning on, you know, the checkout there, if you’re going and doing that, this can be impulse spending, maybe a food that’s not on your grocery list, that you’re like, “Ooh, that looks good.”
We’ve had like whole series that we’ve done about not going grocery shopping while you’re hungry. But hey, we’ve all done it. This can be going to the gas station, filling up and running inside, grabbing a drink, grabbing a snack, whatever, grabbing fast food when you weren’t planning on it. This could be browsing, like an electronics store and up that you come home with the TV, or you like go window shopping, looking at vehicles, and then all of a sudden you’re buying a vehicle.
There’s a very wide variety of things. Okay, Amazon purchases, Facebook ad purchases, doesn’t matter. The price point, when you’re impulse spending, you’re buying something that you weren’t planning on them. So now that we know what it is, why do we do it, and at its core, like simplify it down, we impuls been because of emotions.
Emotional Triggers: The Driving Force Behind Impulse Spending
And this is what we were talking about last week that we can’t necessarily give you always a cookie cutter thing because our emotions are unique, or we all experience the same emotions, but why we’re experiencing the emotions are unique to you.
So there are four main ways that we see these emotions show up. The first one is like retail therapy, you know, type thing, there’s trauma involved, these thoughts, feelings, emotions come up, and then you just have to go spend. Now these are really past experiences, you know, you have the thought the feeling shows up, this is all done.
Subconsciously, you’re not even aware of it. We’re just working on autopilot. And we’re gonna talk a little bit about like how to identify those things here in just a minute. Because there’s really three things, three key reasons that I see show up.
The second one is a feeling of “I deserve this.” You know, you’re working hard, you’re doing the things and you deserve to take care of yourself, right. So then you’re like, “I deserve to go do the spa day”, or “I deserve to go do this”, or I this and whether or not it’s true. There’s a justification there. And that can be your impulse spending, like a motion trigger.
And again, there’s not this is information. This is not guilt. This is not shame, we are creating guilt-free impulse spending, right. But we have to understand why we’re doing it to be able to create that guilt free impulse spending.
And the third one is you just buy it because it was a good deal. It’s that like, oh, I have to it could be because you want to save money. It could be because there’s FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out going On, but it’s like oh, it was a good deal so I had to buy it. Okay.
The Power of Money Mindset
So our emotions are what’s triggering the impulse meaning, “what is causing those emotions?” A lot of that comes from our money mindset. When your money mindset is your thoughts feelings and emotions around money okay?
And majority of the work that we do inside Money Mastery Academy is this like I give you all the step-by-step, the setup, the budget setup all these things your debt payoff plan those things, but it’s the mindset work is the part that we really are we definitely never arrived with when it comes to creating unstoppable finances like you’ll set the budget up. And then like, the hardest part is the initial setup. So we had talked about the money mindset that comes their ongoing work. That’s where we have to continue to work on our money mindset.
Okay. So what the heck is your money mindset? Like we said, thoughts, feelings and emotions around money. Your money mindset is a formed about, by about the age of like seven to nine, there’s a little bit of discrepancy there between the experts. But regardless, I don’t know about you, but I did not have life figured out by the about the age of nine, I was raised by humans who are flawed, like I’m flawed.
We live in a fallen world with craziness media, affecting us. All those things we did not have life figured out. So we all have these stories. And it’s not even about the circumstances, okay? Because you’ve probably heard the story.
Uncovering Your Triggers
So there was, let’s say, you got two brothers that were raised by an alcoholic, and one of them becomes an alcoholic. And one, I’m sorry, one of the sons, yeah, one of the brothers becomes an alcoholic. And he’ll tell you, I had no choice but to become an alcoholic, because my father is an alcoholic.
But the other one is, like, athlete-driven, doesn’t touch alcohol, any of those things like a very successful person air quotes here for the podcast listeners, the and you can ask him and be like, Well, I didn’t have a choice, because my father was an alcoholic.
So the circumstances were the same, but our perception was different. And that’s the part that we have to work on. Because if we’re just limiting ourselves, and they’re like, I’m not going to spend and I’m going to do a no spin challenge. We’re not getting to the root of the issue.
The mindset portion are thoughts that we’ve created, who create the long term success and long term, be able to have the guilt free impulse spending in the right way and doing it correctly. All those things, we have to address the core root. Right? So your action step today, I want you to start to think about and uncover what triggers you’re aware of what causes you to want to impulse been okay.
Maybe it’s something your parents said, growing up around money. Maybe you’re one of the retail therapy shoppers, and you just don’t know why. Maybe you have the like, well, I deserve it feeling. Or your parents, maybe they were frugal, and you were like, I don’t want to be like them ever.
For I heard a story recently that somebody shared that her parents did the envelope thing, right. And she was like, I will never do that I will never do the envelope thing. So there can be. And because of it, she knows that she has a tendency to be a spender.
Perception vs. Reality: Understanding Your Financial Beliefs
Because she wants to avoid being like our parents. So there’s two sides, like if you want a lot of you can, we go emulate your parents, and do what they did. Or you can go the other way. And like I am this way, because I never want to see what my parents did.
Maybe your parents did really well for a while, and you made good money. But you saw them lose it all. And you saw the fear and the struggle that happened and you’re like, I never want to experience that. A lot of us create fear of success that way.
Or maybe they make good money. And they didn’t make time for the family. Their relationships were suffering. So you’re like, if sometimes just like, if I make a lot of money, I’m not going to be I’m not going to have good relationships. So then we again, self-sabotage in that way.
Regardless of what the circumstances are, again, it’s your perception. There’s no guilt about what you experience. There’s no shame, there’s no judgment, any of those things.
Join the Conversation
So I want you to figure out, start brainstorming at least if you know fantastic. Send me a message on Instagram @aimeecerka. What triggers you to want to impulse spin? What resonated from today?
Regardless, this is day one. Make sure you stay tuned. We got four more days of this. I’m not going to leave you empty-handed because you deserve to be unstoppable. Today, yeah, we covered when impulse winning is why we do it the core reasons and your action step.
Your Path to Financial Empowerment
You’re working on What are your triggers, and sending me a message on Instagram, letting me know what you’ve uncovered. You and grab that guide again, aimeecerka.com/impulse. That’s what we got for now. We’ll see you next time!
Your Financial Journey
You’re struggling with shame and guilt around your finances. Whether it’s debt impulse spending mistakes from the past, or the fact that you still haven’t hit your income goal, then it’s time for you to work with me. There are different levels of support and price points that you can use on the path to removing that guilt and shame so you can step into your unstoppable life.
After all, your finances are unique to you and your support should be too good to workwithaimee.com to get started with one of my most popular programs, or you can book a q&a call with me. We’ll figure out what your next step should be. And of course, all those links are hanging out in the show notes as well.
