How Your Expectations Destroy Your Finances

By A Lawyer and Her Money  October 6, 2020

Being bad at math is often used as an excuse to be bad with money. Never mind that one still needs to learn about and manage one’s own finances. Still, no matter how badly one’s math grades were – money is not about math; it’s about emotions and expectations. This is how expectations destroy finances.

How to Be Good at Math and Bad with Money

We equate being good with money with being good with math because there are numbers involved. But with online calculators, banking and Excel, it’s no longer necessary to do one’s own addition or subtraction.

Even if you don’t do the calculations, your bank will tell you if you’ve spent more money than you have. And if you spent too much, you don’t need math to keep you from spending more.

 The problem is not knowing when the math doesn’t work out – it’s continuing to spend more than you can afford to. This is not a problem that can be solved with basic algebra.

 How to Be Bad at Math and Good with Money

In high school, I was very good at calculus but I tended to (and still tend to) make egregious errors in arithmetic. Self-awareness goes a long way though. I  knew that the only reason I would need to use math in my finances is if I spent more than what was in my account. It didn’t matter if I got the end number right or not – it only mattered that the account had money still left in it.

I could have learned to be great at math and always spend just shy of what was in my account. Instead, my secret was that I spent far less than what I had in the bank. That way, I wouldn’t have to use any math at all. Lots of money minus not a lot of money equals no problem.

 What Really Destroys Your Finances - Expectations

A law partner once told me that people can tolerate nearly any situation so long as they have notice of it. That is to say, if you match or exceed the expectations, people will be fairly satisfied. But once you drop even a little bit from one’s expectations, tempers flare.

If you think about it, everyone view life through the prism of their expectations. Some reviews of Pixar movies are lower those of trashy movies because the reviewers expected more. The FIRE Festival was mostly a scandal because it (fraudulently) failed to live up to the lofty expectations of its attendees.  Marketing deals exclusively in the realm of expectations, usually subconsciously. When we buy this makeup, we are thinking of being as beautiful as the model in the ad. Visiting a staged house helps us envision what it would be like to live there. Vacation brochures make us feel like we will finally find inner peace in Tahiti. And then we buy, buy, buy, and we never get the perfect feeling shown in the advertising. And yet we continue to buy, chasing the next advertising promise.

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