You know that moment when you’re standing at the grocery store checkout, and the total comes to $47.82? Even though you’ve got thousands in your checking account, you still find yourself putting back the nice olive oil for the cheaper one.
I caught myself doing this last month. There I was, a grown man with a solid income, mentally calculating whether I “really needed” the $12 bottle when the $7 one would work fine. The kicker? I’d just dropped $300 on noise-canceling headphones without blinking because they help me focus while working.
That’s when it hit me. Those four words from childhood were still running the show: “We can’t afford that.”
If you grew up hearing this phrase regularly, you’ve probably developed some interesting money habits that stick around long after your bank balance stops requiring them. Your brain got wired for scarcity early, and rewiring takes more than just earning more money.
Here are nine things you’re probably still doing, even though your financial situation has changed.
1) You still check your bank balance before small purchases
Remember checking your account before buying lunch in college? You’re still doing it, except now you’ve got plenty of money sitting there.
You’ll pull up your banking app before grabbing coffee. Before ordering takeout. Before buying a book. Not because you need to, but because that childhood programming says “check first, always check first.”
The weird part is you already know what’s in there. You checked this morning. And yesterday. But that voice in your head needs confirmation that yes, you can afford the $5 latte.
This isn’t financial responsibility anymore. It’s anxiety dressed up as prudence.
2) You buy the cheaper version first, always
Need new running shoes? You’ll spend 45 minutes comparing prices online, reading reviews to justify why the cheaper pair is “basically the same” as the ones you actually want.
Then six months later, when the cheap ones fall apart, you finally buy the good ones. Except now you’ve spent money twice and wasted half a year with subpar equipment.
I did this with luggage for years. Kept buying $60 suitcases that would break after three trips. Finally bought quality gear that’s lasted five years and counting. Do the math on that one.
Your brain still treats every purchase like it might be the one that breaks you, even when your emergency fund could handle a thousand pairs of shoes.
3) You feel guilty about convenience spending
Grocery delivery? “That’s for lazy people.” Hiring someone to clean? “What a waste when I can do it myself.” Taking an Uber instead of the bus? “The bus is perfectly fine.”
You’ve assigned moral value to inconvenience. Somewhere along the line, you learned that doing things the hard way makes you virtuous and spending money on convenience makes you soft.
Meanwhile, you’re burning hours every week on tasks that you could easily afford to outsource. Time you’ll never get back, spent proving to nobody in particular that you’re not “too good” for the hard way.
4) You hoard free things you’ll never use
Conference swag, hotel toiletries, promotional pens. Your closet has a stash of things you grabbed because they were free, not because you needed them.
You’ve got 17 tote bags. Drawers full of tiny shampoo bottles. Branded USB drives from 2015. You don’t even remember what half this stuff is for, but throwing it away feels wrong because someone paid for it once.
This isn’t collecting. It’s scarcity brain convinced that someday you might need that fifth phone charging cable from a trade show you attended three years ago.
5) You still compare everything to hours worked
“That jacket costs eight hours of work.” “Dinner out is two hours of my time.” Your brain automatically converts prices into labor time, even though you’re salaried now and those calculations don’t even make sense anymore.
This mental math made sense when you were making $12 an hour. Every purchase had a direct trade-off with your time. But now you’re doing it with things that barely register in your monthly budget.
You’re not actually making financial decisions anymore. You’re just torturing yourself with arithmetic that stopped being relevant years ago.
6) You wait for sales on things you need now
Your winter coat has a broken zipper. You need it fixed or replaced. But instead of handling it, you’re waiting for the end-of-season sale in March.
So you spend four months fighting with a broken zipper every morning, getting frustrated every single day, all to save maybe $50 on something you use constantly.
The mental energy you’re spending on this broken zipper costs more than the price difference. But your brain can’t compute that because it’s still running Depression-era software.
7) You keep mental tabs on who paid last
Every dinner, every coffee, every shared Uber. You’ve got a mental spreadsheet tracking who owes who what, down to the dollar.
Your friend bought lunch last week ($32), you got coffee yesterday ($12), so you owe them $20 or maybe you should get the next dinner but what if it’s more expensive and then the balance is off again.
This isn’t about fairness. It’s about the deep programming that says every dollar out needs to be matched by a dollar in, or else something terrible will happen. Except nothing terrible happens. You can afford to buy your friend lunch without keeping score.
8) You fix things that should be replaced
That laptop that takes 10 minutes to boot up? You’ll spend a weekend trying to fix it. The shoes that give you blisters? You’ll buy insoles, padding, special socks, anything but new shoes.
You’ve turned “use it up, wear it out” into a religion. Every replacement feels like failure, like you’re giving up too easily, like your grandparents would be disappointed.
But your time has value now. The hours you spend nursing broken things back to semi-functional life cost more than just buying something that actually works.
9) You still hide purchases from yourself
You’ll leave things in your online cart for weeks. Move money between accounts to “earn” a purchase. Pay cash so it doesn’t show up in your transaction history.
You’re playing psychological games with yourself, creating friction and guilt around spending money you’ve earned on things you can afford.
This isn’t budgeting. It’s self-punishment. You’re trying to trick yourself into feeling like you’re not really spending money, when the healthy thing would be to make peace with the fact that you are.
Bottom line
Those four words from childhood carved deep grooves in your brain. “We can’t afford that” became the background music of your financial life, playing on repeat long after the song stopped making sense.
Here’s what actually works: Start small. Pick one of these patterns and run an experiment for a month. Buy the good olive oil. Stop checking your balance before small purchases. Get the thing fixed instead of limping along with the broken version.
Pay attention to what happens. Spoiler alert: Your world won’t collapse. Your bank account won’t suddenly empty. The sky won’t fall.
The goal isn’t to become reckless with money. It’s to update your mental software to match your current reality. You’re not betraying your roots by spending money you have on things that improve your life. You’re just finally using the tools you’ve worked hard to earn.
Your childhood taught you to survive scarcity. That was useful then. But you don’t live there anymore, and it’s okay to act like it.
