Are you guilty of trying to keep up with the Joneses? We all are sometimes. Let's look at that phenomenon and see what we can learn from it. Show transcript: Hey there. I'm Dawn Starks, author of Simplify Your Financial Life and your host for the SimpleMoney Podcast, where we make personal finance simple. Welcome. This is Episode 150: Let's Talk Financial Comparison: Keeping up with the Joneses. You've heard of keeping up with the Joneses, right? Well, I'm here to tell you that the Joneses are not completely useless. We can learn a lot from watching our behavior when it comes to those next door neighbors, or friends or family members who we might consider to be the Joneses. You know, those people who always have all the newest things, they have the newest technology, maybe the new cars, great clothes, just all the gadgets. And it's the kind of thing that makes us really jealous. And it makes us want to follow suit. It makes us want to buy those things, have those things, BE LIKE THEM. So when we think about comparison, it's really a bad situation, right? I mean, it's lethal. It's not good for us to be comparing ourselves to others in any way, whether it's the stuff that we own or the way that we perform in our job or the way that our life has turned out or the way our Instagram post looks compared to some other people's Instagram posts, and so on. You know, it's just, it's not good. It really can eat away at you. And so when we're watching what our friends and our family, and even perfect strangers, when we're watching what they're doing, especially on the internet and we see what they're buying and we see how they're living, then we can get very, very jealous. And just envious of that. So in the worst situations, we actually jeopardize our own financial wellbeing by stretching our spending and, like, blowing our budget in order to keep up with those Joneses, in order to stay even with the perceived balance between what those people are doing and what we're doing. It's like we want to keep, you know, we want to maintain face. We want to maintain our position in the world. So we want to have what everyone else has. So when we do that, we can actually jeopardize our budget and jeopardize our financial success for our family and our household. So I could tell you just don't do that, right? Just don't compare yourselves to the Joneses. Don't try to keep pace with them. It's a losing battle. And what good will come of it? Nothing. So I could just tell you that, right? But it's very difficult. It's easy for me to tell you, but it's not so easy to do because it's just kind of human nature, right? So I think that, you know, ideally we could all stop and think about this for a second and say, you know, this is kind of silly. It's silly to compare ourselves to other people, but as I said, it's human nature. And so, instead of trying to tell you, "Just stop doing it," or ask you to just think to yourself that it's silly and that you need to stop doing it, let's learn from our reaction to those Joneses. So let's look at a few different things and see what we can learn about our behavior and about what those Joneses are up to. So I have four ideas for you to chew on. So you can do this the next time you're drooling over what your neighbors or your friends, or your friends on social media have purchased, or the travel that they're doing or whatever it is. You can think about these then, or you can think about these now in order to prepare yourself for those inevitable opportunities when you will be thinking about what other people have that you do not. So let's talk about these four ideas. And so idea number one is that ostentatious spending could be compensating. So what do I mean by that? Well, have you ever read the book The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley? In that book - and it's a great book, if you haven't read it, it's fairly old now, I think it was probably written
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