💸Why Can’t I Ever Save Any Money?

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You said:

Once while discussing saving money with a former student, he mentioned that as hard as he tried, he could never save any money. He had a good paying job so that wasn’t the issue. Between his spouse, children, and his own buying habits, there never was anything left to save even when they had targeted specific amounts for saving. I told him that money wasn’t good for anything unless you spend it and saving money is simply postponed spending. It isn’t saving for saving’s sake. I asked him what he wanted to save for and he didn’t know. I suggested that not having a purpose was his problem and I encouraged him to think about some things he and his family might want that would be worth postponing current spending.

ChatGPT said:

Here are my thoughts, framed as reflections on what you observed and what it says more broadly about money, behavior, and purpose.

1. You put your finger on the real problem: saving without meaning is fragile

What you told your student gets at something many people miss: saving is not a financial behavior, it’s a motivational one. Budgets, percentages, and targets all fail if they’re not tied to a story about the future. When saving is just an abstract “good thing,” it will always lose to immediate, emotionally satisfying spending—especially in a household with multiple claimants on income.

In that sense, your student wasn’t failing at saving; he was succeeding at prioritizing the present.

2. “Saving is postponed spending” is a deceptively powerful idea

That line reframes money in a way most people have never been taught. Many people treat saving as virtue and spending as vice. But in reality, all money is eventually spent—by you, by someone else, or by time and inflation. The real question is when and on what.

Once you frame saving as delayed spending, the conversation becomes less moral and more strategic:

What am I willing to wait for?
What future version of myself (or my family) am I spending on?

That shift alone can reduce guilt, defensiveness, and shame around money.

3. The absence of a goal reveals a deeper uncertainty about the future

When he couldn’t answer what he was saving for, that likely wasn’t laziness—it was discomfort. Having a goal requires imagining a future that is:

concrete,
desirable,
and different from the present.

Many people avoid that because it forces trade-offs and exposes unspoken disagreements (especially between spouses). “Saving” is neutral. “Saving for this instead of that” is not.

In families, vague saving goals often mask unresolved questions:

What kind of life do we want?
What are we willing to say no to?
Who gets to decide?

4. You implicitly highlighted a family-systems issue, not an individual flaw

Your student framed the problem as his inability to save, but his description—spouse, children, personal habits—suggests a system with no shared priority structure. In such systems:

every expense feels reasonable in isolation,
emergencies are always “unexpected,”
and savings becomes the default shock absorber.

Without an agreed-upon future objective, savings has no advocate in daily decisions.

5. Purpose turns saving from deprivation into identity

What you nudged him toward—finding something “worth postponing current spending for”—is the key transformation. When a goal is meaningful:

saving feels like becoming someone, not giving something up,
small sacrifices feel intentional rather than imposed,
and progress becomes emotionally reinforcing.

In other words, purpose converts saving from a constraint into an expression of values.

6. A subtle wisdom in what you didn’t say

You didn’t tell him:

to cut spending,
to automate savings,
to track every dollar,
or to follow a formula.

Those tools matter, but they only work after the “why” is settled. You addressed the prerequisite problem first, whether consciously or not.

That’s good teaching.

If you want, I can:

connect this to behavioral economics (present bias, mental accounting),
explore how this plays out differently across income levels,
or reflect on how this insight applies beyond money (time, attention, energy).

But as it stands, your instinct was sound: saving fails most often not because people are careless, but because the future has no clear voice in the room.

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