It took a hefty dose of reflection to finally answer a question my ex-girlfriend asked on our couch years ago.
We were sitting on the couch in our apartment, having the same conversation for what felt like the sixth or seventh time.
The topic: plants. Our balcony looked like a waiting room at a dentist’s office: bunch of chairs, empty corners, zero life. We’d moved in a year earlier and both agreed the place needed greenery. Not like a jungle, but enough to make it feel like humans actually lived there.
I’d graduated two years ago and had a steady, well-paying job, especially for someone my age. She was still finishing her Bachelor’s degree, so we both knew who’d be paying for the plants.
“It’s not going to cost hundreds of euros,” she said. “We’re not buying a statement piece. Just some basic plants to make the place feel more alive.”
She was right. The total would be trivial, the kind of expense that shouldn’t require a single thought.
And yet here we were, again, having postponed the garden center trip a couple of times already. Each time I’d agreed we should go, but didn’t make haste to actually push through with it.
Her frustration finally surfaced.
“Honey, I know what you’re roughly making. I know our monthly costs. You can easily pay for this and you even agree we need it as well, so why do we keep having this conversation?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but nothing came out.
Not because I was hiding something, but because I genuinely didn’t know. The question was simple and completely valid, and I had no answer that made sense, even to myself.
The Plants Weren’t Alone
It would take until after the end of that relationship before I finally understood what had been happening. The plants hadn’t been an isolated case and it also hadn’t just been my ex who’d called me out on my spending behavior, my friends and family had done so on more than one occasion as well.
I’ve often been told that my clothing follows a lifecycle that would horrify anyone who pays attention to fashion. New items almost always start off as work clothes. Once they’re no longer presentable enough for the office, they become weekend clothes, and errand clothes after that. By the time I finally replace an item, it’s usually one rainstorm away from disintegrating.
My shoes tell the same story. I’ll notice a pair is worn out, acknowledge I should probably replace them, and then somehow still not get around to it for months. It’s not even that I forget, it’s just that something in my brain simply refuses to prioritize it.
This isn’t standard frugality. My parents are frugal and they certainly bought those things when needed. What I was doing clearly was something else, with a pattern I couldn’t name and rules I couldn’t consciously articulate.
And the even stranger part? During those same periods when I couldn’t commit to upgrading my interior or the stuff I was wearing, I was happily spending money on trips with friends, dinners with family, and experiences that cost multiples of what the garden center would’ve charged for those plants.
From the outside, this makes no sense at all. And I would absolutely agree if I hadn’t eventually discovered the hidden principles that guided my actions underneath.
What Everyone Else Could See
The people around me could see my job, our apartment, and my lifestyle. They could make a reasonable estimate of my income and form calculated expectations about what I should and shouldn’t be able to afford.
So when someone who’s earning a decent salary suddenly agonizes over small purchases, it reads as strange. Stingy, maybe. Neurotic, possibly. Financially anxious, despite visible evidence to the contrary. When comparing spending to my income, everything I did looked inconsistent. Big trips, yes. Plants, no. Expensive dinners, absolutely. New shoes, apparently not.
But eventually I realized people couldn’t see the other part, the invisible part. Judging my spending against my income is using a measuring stick that only makes sense when you can’t see all sides of someone’s financial situation. Others could only see what roughly came in, but not what I also actually tried to keep in.
And that’s when I realized that I wasn’t spending based on my income at all. I was spending based on my wealth.
The Three Invisible Buckets
Even my friends and family don’t see all the money moves that happen when my salary arrives, like the money directly routed to savings and investments before I can touch it. They couldn’t see the buffer I was building, the targets I was working toward, or the specific numbers I’d assigned to “enough”.
I don’t officially maintain a budget on paper because I’ve found that daily banking app checks, basic arithmetic and anticipating for larger expenses help me stay in control of my financial situation without much effort. But when money arrives, it doesn’t stay as one undifferentiated pile. Instead, I split it into three buckets without even actively thinking about it.
The first bucket is immediate. Rent, utilities, groceries, transportation. Non-negotiable, exits immediately, doesn’t require thought.
The second bucket is medium-term. This is the money I allocate for things that truly matter to me, like those trips, experiences, and dinners with the people I love. It accumulates deliberately, and then gets spent freely when those purposes arrive. No guilt, no hesitation.
The third bucket is long-term. This is wealth-building money that leaves my accessible accounts immediately and goes somewhere I deliberately make it harder to touch, primarily investments. It’s not for spending, but for compounding and for freedom that arrives later.
What’s left after these three buckets is the actual cash available for discretionary day-to-day spending, and it’s deliberately small. Self-imposed artificial scarcity to work with less than I technically could, and that simple constraint is what makes all of the other buckets possible. Unless someone is paying for my shopping spree because they involved me in a divorce scheme, this is where the money for clothes and shoes comes from.
The plants were a discretionary expense that was competing with that third bucket. Not directly, but psychologically. Every euro that stays in daily spending is a euro that doesn’t compound toward the future I’m building. And my brain, without my conscious permission, had decided that plants weren’t worth slowing that down. Not at that moment, at least, because the value of that expense relative to my gradually growing wealth at the time was still quite significant.
The trips, however, weren’t competing with that third bucket at all. They came from the second bucket, which existed specifically for exactly that purpose. Different pool, different rules, different feelings. But when you take all of it together, it certainly leads to a picture of difficult to understand spending behavior.
The Invisible Scoreboard
Looking back, most people around me couldn’t see my internal wealth-building scoreboard or simply weren’t really interested in it when I told them about it. They could only see my hesitation, which looked irrational because it was being compared to the wrong baseline.
They would say things like “What’s the point of having money if you don’t spend it?”, and I understand the objection. Life is short, tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, and you can’t take all of that money with you.
But I expect to be alive tomorrow, and a bit after that as well, which means I need to find a balance between enjoying today while building a foundation for a future I’ll enjoy even more. A future that hopefully doesn’t include just me, but also a partner and children that should be well taken care of.
Today, I’ve stopped trying to explain and justify my spending behavior to people who aren’t interested in it or aren’t playing the same game. From their perspective, I’m just cheap about some things and generous about others, with no apparent logic connecting them.
From my perspective, I’m following a single principle with perfect consistency: protect the long-term bucket, fund the medium-term bucket to sufficiently enjoy life, live within whatever’s left, and accept that this will sometimes look strange to anyone who can’t see the full picture.
What I’d Tell My Ex Now
If I could go back to that couch, here’s what I’d tell my ex:
“I know we’re not trying to go all out on the balcony and I’m not avoiding the plants because I can’t afford it. I’m avoiding them because, in my head, they’re competing with something you can’t see: a future I’m trying to build that matters more to me than how our apartment looks right now. I know that sounds crazy and I know it’s just plants, but the same instinct that makes me hesitate here is the one that’ll let me say yes without thinking when something actually important comes along. I’m not trying to be cheap, but I’m being selective in a way I can’t always fully explain, even to myself.”
I didn’t have those words then. I do now.
The trade-off is real. I look inconsistent to anyone who can’t see the scoreboard. I occasionally frustrate people who don’t understand why easy decisions feel hard.
But I also sleep well. I don’t have to worry about money most of the time, especially now that those choices from years ago have steadily started compounding. And when I spend, I spend without guilt, because it fits within a system I’ve built and trust.
If this story gave you something, feel free to pass it on!
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