190. The Consumption Culture Lie: Why Normal Money Habits Are Keeping Families Stuck

What if the money habits our culture calls “normal” are actually the very things keeping families broke, stressed, and stuck? In this episode, Laura unpacks the consumption culture lie and exposes the everyday money patterns that feel common but quietly steal margin, peace, and legacy-building momentum.

From casual debt and emotional spending to convenience culture, lifestyle creep, and the pressure to keep upgrading, this episode challenges listeners to stop accepting “normal” as the goal. Instead, Laura makes the case for intentional living, value-based spending, and building a family legacy with purpose.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

•  Why so many “normal” money habits are actually harmful 
•  How consumption culture trains families to stay reactive 
•  The emotional and financial cost of debt, convenience, and impulse spending 
•  Why legacy requires intention, not just good intentions 
•  Simple ways to start rejecting cultural defaults and building peace instead 

Ready for your next right money step?
If this episode hit home and you want help sorting through the spending patterns, stress points, and habits keeping your family stuck, book a clarity call at AccelerateYourLegacy.com/claritycall.

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Transcript

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Laura 0:00

Have you ever looked around and realized that a lot of what we call normal with money is actually kind of crazy? Yeah. Normal is keeping families broke, anxious and stuck being normal. That's not the goal. Today I wanna talk to you about the consumption culture lie and why so many normal money habits are keeping families from peace.

0:20

You are listening to the Money and Legacy Podcast with Laura Sexton. I'm helping families pay off debt, grow wealth, and build a legacy without sacrificing what matters most. This is where money feels easy.

Audio Only - All Participants-39 0:33

Hey, legacy builders. Thank you for jumping on the podcast. Today, we are gonna be talking about the consumption culture lie, but I wanna let you know the next couple weeks you are not going to be hearing your normal money episodes. I actually have a couple really awesome interviews that I just cannot wait for you to hear. Now, I was going to add them as bonus episodes, but I am in the middle of a cross country move and I'm trying to pack up my entire house. So instead of sitting here and pushing myself. Beyond my actual time margin. Yes, I do budget my time. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to practice what I preach and I'm going to steward my time a little bit better and share with you these amazing, and I mean, absolutely phenomenal. For today, we are gonna talk about the lie that is consumption culture. I wish normal looked like having money in the bank and doing a really good job stewarding what's been given to us, but normal in our culture right now is having a giant, I love debt score. The credit score. Has its place. I understand why it was created and I understand what it's used for. However, I don't understand why we worship it, like it's the be all, end all. It came around in the late eighties, early nineties. The FICO score is younger than I am. I don't know if that makes me old or if that says that this isn't something to be, you know, heralded as the gold standard of money. The gold standard of money is having money in the bank and having the flex of having cash to pay for stuff. That's the flex my friends. That's what we're after. But in all reality, that's weird. So today I wanna teach you how to be weird. The consumption culture lies us that if we get more stuff, we're going to be happier. Sometimes the more stuff we have, the more stressed out we are, the more responsibilities we have. You know, biggie Small said it best. More money, more problems, but it's not more money, more problems. Because if I had more money and I was stewarding it, well that wouldn't be a problem. But the things that I acquire, those are problems. The more things you have, the more people you have to know you have. You know, you bought a boat, you gotta know somebody that knows how to fix boats. You bought a car and a four wheeler. Guess what? You gotta know those mechanics you just bought. A rental property, you need to have a management company and you need to know a good plumber and you need to, there are a lot of things you have to know when you acquire more things, and we are constantly being told that more is normal, faster is better, and ease is worth any price, but that's a lie. More may be normal in this culture, but most people that have more and more and more and more and more. Have more and more, more debt to go with it because they're not able to pay cash for the things that they're buying. The lie says that, oh, buying's neutral. Don't worry about it. Constant upgrading, totally normal. Wanting less, that's weird, but wanting less isn't sacrifice. Wanting less means I'm just gonna have less to manage. I have less things to put away at the end of the night. I have less mess to clean up. Please. If you're a mother, holler, if you hear me. Culture teaches us to behave like consumers first, but we're called to be builders, owners, stewards of the things around us. You see, we are to create. The world that we wanna live in, not just go with the flow and do what everybody else is doing, but decide ahead of time what we want our life to look like and then work towards that. Now, work that's counter-cultural. There are a whole lot of people that don't wanna have to work. They want you to hand them money and they don't wanna have to do anything to earn it. It's called being a child, not an adult. An adult knows that we go out, we work, I think it's really important in this culture that we realize that we are in charge of our own destiny, but consumption culture doesn't want you to believe that inside of a culture that disciples us how to consume consumption starts to feel normal. And it becomes very hard to even notice how much that is shaping us. So what are some normal money habits that are actually keeping your family stuck? I just got off a budget deep dive with a couple that we're working towards building for them, a budget that gives them margin, right? But we have to work through what feels normal. Those money habits that are actually keeping families stuck. It seems like monthly payments on everything. Now, this couple that I was working with, they told me before they said that they felt hostage by all of their payments, but when we got down to it, they didn't have a lot of payments. They just had a couple really big payments. But a lot of people that I work with have monthly payments on everything, multiple credit cards, multiple cars, some of them multiple homes. Medical payments, store credit cards. There's so many things that they have loans on. It becomes casual debt now. Casual debt, totally normal. 'cause you know what a casual debt is. That's buy now. Pay later. Oh, no, no, no. My friends buy now. Worry later. I feel like that's really clever. It's getting to me. You know what else is really normal emotional spending. I don't feel good, so I'm gonna go out and buy something that's gonna make me feel better. I do have one client that she gets really stressed out. That's her go-to. We are working on that and she's doing so much better on recognizing that emotion first and not going out and spending. I love that for her, and I love that for. Anybody that is in that situation that you notice the desire to spend and instead of filling whatever emotional hole you have with consumption, start filling it with something that's actually going to build you up as opposed to give you stress later. Let me tell you something else that's normal. A normal money habit, constantly eating out and convenient spending. When my husband and I started this journey, we were spending $2,100 per month on going out to eat, and it was just the two of us. we spend less than half of that on our feeding, our family of seven. This crazy talk, but constant going out to eat. See, that's convenient. I was more worried about convenience than I was about my future. Living in the right now will keep your family stuck. You have to be thinking about the future as well. Here's another thing, lifestyle creep. Every time your income rises, so does your spending. This will eat your lunch if you're not careful. Mm. Here's another one. Assuming your kids need more stuff than they do. My kids need less stuff. In fact, I don't know where half of their stuff comes from. How do they continue to accumulate stuff? I do not know, but they do not need as much stuff as they have. What my kids need is to be bored more often. What my kids need is to learn to steward the things that they have and care for the things they have when they have too much stuff. This isn't in my notes right now, but I'm just gonna go with it when they have too much stuff. They don't care about it nearly as much as if they had fewer things. And if what we wanna teach them is how to steward their things and how to care for things that have been entrusted to them, we serve them better by giving them fewer things. I feel like that's as much for me and my husband as it is for you. Here's something else that's normal. Treating stress with spending. Talked about that just a little bit with emotional spending, but stress spending. I used to do this so much. I used to get so stressed out and I was like, well, I can't do the budget. I've blown it all up. I'm just gonna go, you know, whatever. I'm just gonna go out and spend all my money. Treating stress with spending. Because you're stressed about your money, treating money, stress with spending is like going out. Noticing that you have a flat tire taking a knife and slashing the other three, that makes no sense. You've done more damage for no reason. You haven't helped anything. Here's another normal money habit that's going to keep you stuck. And this could be a really big one, thinking that financial pressure is just a part of life. You do not have to feel financial pressure every day. You do not have to come home from work and feel stressed out because you just worked so hard and you dealt with all those people and you finished all of those projects and you don't make enough to pay your bills. That should not be a part of your adult life. The problem with these normal quote unquote normal money habits, it's not that they're rare. The problem is that they're so common that they feel harmless. You don't even realize that you're stuck in the normal. Because it all feels like that's just what people do. It doesn't have to be that way. You don't have to have a credit card. You don't have to have a credit score to do the things that you wanna do. But society tells us that. And you know why? Because credit cards are an $84 billion a year industry. $84 billion a year is what they make. And you know how they make that money? They make it on credit card fees, transaction fees. And they make it on that interest that they're charging you. And if they're not charging you and you're like, I'm gaming the system, I'm getting the airline miles, I'm not having to pay interest, I'm making money on this. Then they are getting it from that single mom that's struggling down the street. They're getting it from the widow whose husband just died, and she's having to handle money for the first time on a solo income. They're getting their interest off of marginalized families. That don't know any different and they're just doing what they have been marketed to over and over and over again. You ever wonder why Samuel L. Jackson does these commercials? It's not out of the goodness of his own heart. He's getting paid a lot, a lot. Peyton Manning a lot of money. You have to spend a lot of money on millionaires in order to get them to come do what you're doing. It feels common, so it feels harmless, but it's not. So why do normal habits feel so hard to question? Well, because everyone around us is doing them. Marketing constantly reinforcing them. Social media rewards, lifestyle, appearance. Right. The convenience feels necessary when life is full. I don't go into a gas station. You know why? 'cause I have five kids in the car and I don't wanna leave them in the car because we now live in a society. It used to be you have five kids, you leave 'em in the car, you go inside, you buy some snacks, you pay for the gas, you come back out. Nobody thinks anything. But now in Southern California, I leave five kids in the car just to go inside and pay for gas. And everybody's looking at me like I'm beating my children or something. So I pay for gas at the pump of the card, but everything else cash, you can do that. It's not gonna ruin things, but the convenience of it all, it all feels necessary. Another reason why these normal habits feel hard to question is you're exhausted. And that lowers your resistance. You have to do these things. You have to make plans. You have to decide when you are in a good head space. You have to decide when you have margin, and that means we don't overstuff our calendars. This is all, do you see the holisticness of this? It's your whole body, your whole system. Everything comes together where you're intentional with your time, you're intentional with your money. You're intentional with how you steward the things in your life. Now I get it. You don't wanna feel deprived and you don't wanna feel weird. I get that. People look at me funny when I'm like, oh, I don't, I don't do credit cards. And maybe it's the way that I say it when the lady's like, would you like Kohl's? Would you like a Kohl's card so that we can give you money back and you can get 30% off your transaction? No, Martha, I would not like to pay you 18% on this $4 transaction. Thank you though. No, I do not do credit cards. I could be nicer about how I do it. Another reason why this all feels like something you shouldn't question, 'cause you've never been shown another way. That's why you're here. That's why you're listening to this podcast. I have an alternative way, and I wanna show you how to do it, because this isn't about judging people. I maybe I'm judging Kohl's because they have this thing where that lady that's checking me out and I'm buying, I literally went in the other day and bought a $3 item, and they're like, you want a credit card? No, I don't. That doesn't make any sense. But she's forced to do that. She's forced to ask me, you know why? Because Kohl's makes more money off their credit cards. Than they do off of their merchandise. Listen, I'm not judging you, or, the person that works at the register that's asking me to buy a card, I What I'm asking you to is wake up. To what has been training us and decide today to be trained by something other than the celebrities feeding you. You gotta have debt, you gotta have debt, you gotta have debt for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So this is what culture is costing your family. It's costing a lack of margin, not only with your money, but also with your time, and also with your emotions. But being so obsessed with debt and being normal, there is a stress that never actually leaves your body. You are weighed down by decision fatigue. Please don't ask me what's for dinner. I do not know. I don't wanna cook dinner again for the rest of my life, but I'm a mother and I'm an adult, and it's my job to decide what's for dinner from now until eternity. Being stuck in this consumption culture causes tension in your marriage. I consumption culture, it feels like freedom to get whatever you want, but you have less freedom to pivot. To give money away to save money for the future and less freedom to rest. You know what's even worse, and what kills me is when moms don't have the freedom to quit their job and stay home with their kids when that's what they really want to do because they have chained themselves to debt. They have unwittingly. Gone out and said, here, shackle me to you so you can tell me what I can and cannot do. Come here. Toyota Motor Company. You're the one that gets to decide what I do with my money consumption culture. It's not the business guys. Consumption culture leads to less intentionality 'cause we're just gonna do whatever and we'll just swipe the card and we'll pay attention later. Consumption culture leads kids into learning to be consumers. As well, guys, what do we want our children to be? Learning? Money is constantly disappearing without building anything meaningful, without us thinking about what we wanna do. We're just letting our kids follow us along into a black hole of mindless spending and swiping. And often the biggest cost here, it's not the financial cost, it's the emotional cost. It's the weight of everything on our shoulders. I hate that. Credit cards and cars and consumptions. I hate that these things are weighing you down and keeping you from your desired future. Very few things make me angrier than realizing that we have been trained and taught and manipulated into thinking that we are free and we can do whatever we want as long as we pay the banks for the opportunity. That's not freedom. That's slavery. I don't want you with your cuffs around my wrist telling me what I can and cannot spend my money on every month, because they are, that's what they're telling you. They're telling you, Hey, either pay this loan or we're coming for your house. So what do we do about it? What do we do? How do we make a change? We realize that what we want to do ultimately is that we want to build a legacy and then we start moving towards that. So we have to choose our values first. We have to decide who we wanna be, what we wanna build, what kind of life do we want to end up with. We have to reject consumption culture. Because it's gonna keep your family from building a legacy. If we don't reject it, instead of directing your money into, adhering to your values, money's just gonna get spent. And we don't know what happened to it. Instead of having a long-term vision, we are catering to our short term desires. We're not being purposeful at all. We are staying reactive in the moment. I hate being a reactive mom. I hate it. I would like to take a moment and respond instead of being reactive and impulsive. Nobody likes my responses. When I'm reactive and impulsive, I interrupt my children. I hate that because I hate to be interrupted. And I just respond with the first thing and then I, then I wish I could take that back, but I can't. 'cause it's already outta my mouth. Right? Like, have you ever been there? Have you ever been at the very first day of spring break and you threatened to take TV away from your children and you have to actually follow through with not letting them watch TV for four days? Has it? Just me. This has been the longest spring break ever and it's Tuesday. When you want to build a legacy of generosity and future building, legacy building, right? That's what we're doing here. You wanna do some investing, there's no room for it when you're just stuck in consumption Culture. Your legacy requires intention, but consumption culture runs on impulse. Friends, you have to pick one or the other. You can keep doing what you're doing. And keep getting what you're getting. Or you can change the recipe. You can do something different. Normal's not working. So the better question becomes what should replace it? What replaces normal is being weird. It's a full rejection of consumption culture. It is a lie that has been permeating out there, and we're going to reject. So the first thing we have to do, we have to choose value over impulse. You have to decide who you wanna be and align yourself with that. And as soon as you do that and you focus, focus, focus in every dollar, every moment, everything about you focuses in on what your values are, and then you build that. You gotta make a plan before you spend your money. Guys, it's called a budget. It's called a spending plan. It's called whatever you wanna call it. But you gotta plan it first. It's not tracking. That's not what we're doing. We're not going back and looking what we spent last month and like trying to say, oh, well I stayed within budget. No, no, no. We're going to be intentional. Intentionality. This is the name of the game question. Every recurring expense, the budget, deep dive, I just did. There weren't a whole lot of recurring expenses. There were some. What I see on so many is, multiple, multiple streaming accounts. Why do we need all of those a lot of families I work with, they have recurring expenses for sports or instruments or all kinds of things their kids don't wanna do anymore. Question it. Why are we doing this? Why are we choosing these things? Are we choosing these things or are we just doing it because we've always done it? Question every recurring expense. If you want to reject consumption culture, you have to, you have to normalize waiting, being patient. It is a value that has been way underrated in this culture. Nobody waits for anything anymore. We do too many drive-throughs. Be patient. And you know what that starts with? That starts with putting your phone down and looking at the world around you. That starts with being in line at the grocery store and not picking up your phone. And I'm, I am guilty of this, but I'm working on this very hard when I go to the bank to get cash, because we do that in my family. When I go to the bank to get cash, I will not pull my phone out. I wanna be looking at people, I wanna be hearing the songs. I wanna be paying attention when I'm at the grocery store. I don't need my phone once I'm at the checkout line. While I'm shopping, yes, I need my phone 'cause my grocery list is on it. But once I'm in the checkout line, I do not need my phone. I need to be looking around observing people. There are people out there in the world that need to be noticed, would do anything to be noticed. Notice them. Put your phone down. Normalize waiting. Stop equating convenience with necessity. It's not necessity. It is not necessary for it to be convenient. Sometimes having to work for things makes it so much better. Almost every time you have to work for something you appreciate it more. Teach your kids that not everything that they want needs an instant. Yes. Sometimes the waiting, sometimes the working towards it, almost always, the working towards it makes it so much better. An instant yes, just satisfies the dragon inside of us. It doesn't actually let our outward self grow. I need you to decide that peace matters more than your appearance. It does not matter what thousands of people on TikTok think of you. What matters is peace in your home and the legacy that you are going to leave because you chose to be a little bit weird. You don't have to fit in. You just need to be present for the people that matter in your life. The last way that we res reject consumption culture is that we build rhythms that make intentional choices easier. We do it ahead of time, guys. We set up our family business meetings and we make sure that our calendar aligns with our values. We make sure that our money aligns with our values. We get intentional with our choices ahead of time. So those. Those choices when we're feeling emotional or tired or hungry are so much easier because we already made them ahead of time. No, this does not mean that you need to become miserable or extreme or anti fun. It means we're giving ourself margin and we're building peace in our life, and maybe it's a little bit less convenient, but it's well worth it. So what is one simple first step that I can take this week? Simple notice we're normal spending is happening without even thinking about it. That's the easiest thing you can do. If you want to take it a step further, sit down and ask, is this actually serving our family? Do that with a lot of things on your budget. As you're sitting there and you're looking through your recurring expenses, you're challenging those and deciding, do we need to keep doing this? Ask if it's actually serving your family. Chances are it may not be. Pick one category to challenge. What about your Amazon? What are you spending there? Is this actually the best way to do it? Is it just convenient or are you actually saving money? Think about it. Your kids extras. Do we need to be doing all these things? Is it actually serving the children? Is it harming the family? Challenge everything, but for this week, just pick one. Define one family value and compare. How you're living up to it. Compare your spinning against it. Decide where you want to be. Counter-cultural. So what if the goal is not to live like everybody else financially, but to build a family that actually feels peaceful, intentional, and free? I want that goal for you. For me, I'm trying with my family. Every day it gets a little easier and every day we build better. If you're. Realizing that what you've called normal is actually keeping you stuck. That's exactly the kind of thing that we work through together in the Money Mastery Coaching Program. And if this episode hit home and you want help sorting through the habits and the pressure points and the spinning patterns that are keeping your family stuck, go ahead and reach out to me for a clarity call. All you have to do is scroll down in the show notes or go to accelerate your legacy.com/clarity call, because sometimes the next right step is simply getting clear on what has become normal and deciding it is not. Alright, friends, we talked about consumption culture. Thank you for consuming this podcast. But go be intentional with what you do with your time, your money, and the legacy you're building. Go out and make a difference.