193. Why “I Deserve This” Is Keeping You Stuck

How often do we justify spending with the phrase, “I deserve this”? In this episode, Laura unpacks how that mindset can feel harmless in the moment but quietly keep you stuck in patterns of overspending, comfort-seeking, and short-term decisions that steal from the future you actually want.

This is not about never enjoying your life. It’s about learning how to enjoy things intentionally instead of automatically. If you’ve ever used a hard day, a long week, or the need for relief to justify takeout, a little treat, a new purchase, or a monthly payment you did not really need, this episode will help you slow down and ask better questions before you spend.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

•  What people are often really looking for when they say, “I deserve this” 
•  Why the “you deserve it” mindset can lead to regret more than real enjoyment 
•  How small comforts and automatic spending can keep you financially stuck 
•  Why friction is not punishment — it’s protection 
•  How to enjoy your life intentionally without stealing from your future 

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Transcript

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Audio Only - All Participants-40 0:00

Have you ever noticed how people say, I deserve this, like that little treat or takeout or that drink with friends? How about I deserve a nice car, I work hard, so I deserve something nice. But the question I wanna ask you today is this. What is the phrase really costing you? Because a lot of time I deserve it. It's not actually leading to joy, it's leading to regret. And if we are not careful what we want right now, we'll quietly steal what we want most.

Laura 0:32

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-40 0:45

Hey, legacy builders. Welcome back to the podcast. Before we jump in today, I wanna say thank you because there have been a whole lot of new listeners showing up lately, and that is such a gift. I do not take your time or attention lightly, and I want to steward both of those things very well. And I also wanna say thank you to those of you that are. Reaching out and asking your friends and sharing this with your friends so that they know to listen to the podcast. I am not great at marketing the podcast, and I know that it is getting out there and being shared because of you. And I wanna say thank you. So if you're new here, welcome. I'm really glad that you found your way here, and if you've been listening for a while and sharing the show, thank you. It really does mean a lot because. I am currently in the middle of a moving season. I'm literally moving packing boxes, doing all of the things for me and six other people. I'm going to be batching some episodes ahead of time. I wanna make sure that when I get through that season though, and I start grading some fresh content, I wanna make sure that I'm making episodes that actually help you the most. So I put together a super short listener survey. Don't. Don't hate me, it should take you about two minutes. It's going to help me know what kind of episodes you want more of, what topics would help you the most, and how I can make the podcast even better for you and the people that you are sharing it with. If you fill out the survey and leave your name and email, you will be entered for a $50 gift card. Now again, there are five questions, $50 on the line here, so that could be a very substantial ROI. If you wanna do that, the link will be down in the show notes and I would really, really value your feedback. Okay, so today we are going to talk about the I Deserve IT narrative and why I think it's more expensive than people realize. This one is sneaky, my friends, because it does not actually sound like recklessness. It doesn't sound like being irresponsible. It sounds. Comforting and justified. And that's exactly why it's dangerous, because I deserve it can become one of the easiest ways to give your emotion, permission to spend your money that you did not actually plan to spend. And most of the time people are not even saying it because they're feeling greedy. They're saying it because they are tired. Come with me now. Have you ever said I deserve this when you are overwhelmed, stressed. Burned out. You're searching for comfort, you're looking for escape. You would are desperate for relief and you would love a reward. That's why people say, I deserve this, and here's what I wanna make the case for today. A lot of times I deserve this. It's not actually helping people enjoy their lives. It's actually helping you justify a decision that your future self is going to have to pay for, and that really matters because what you want right now is stealing what you want most. If you're not paying attention, what people are really looking for when they say, I deserve this. Well, it's actually a really interesting question for me to think about because my first gut reaction when I hear somebody say, I deserve this is, no, you don't. Now I know I can get a little sharp about this, so just stick with me. Okay? Because when I. Hear somebody say, I deserve this. I do not usually think that what they're trying to say is, I have intentionally set a goal. I hit a goal, and now I'm thoughtfully rewarding myself in a way that aligns with my values because that completely justifiable and good, and that is what we should be doing. That's not usually what's happening, though. Usually what's happening is something more like, I'm tired. I don't wanna work anymore. I already worked really hard. I need a break. I want comfort. I want relief. I want escape. I don't wanna have to think anymore. Oh my goodness. That's me. That's me at the end of a very long day. So for example, when someone says, I deserve to go out to eat tonight, what they often mean is, I don't wanna cook. That's me. That's me. Last night, in fact, we were coming home from the dentist. It wasn't even three o'clock yet. And I was like, I'm so hungry. I don't wanna have to go home and cook. I would like to go out to eat. Now, I did not say I deserve to go out to eat because I have really pushed against this. I deserve mentality and it's not really part of my lexicon, So when, last night when I decided that I wanted to go out to eat, I was really craving fajitas and I told my husband, I was like, I just want chips and salsa. We're in the middle of this crazy move. Our kids are coming back from the dentist. I'm starving and I don't want to go home and cook. So we chose together consciously, Hey, we still have money and are going out to eat budget. Let's go ahead and use that. There was no, I deserve to go out to eat. While we were there, got me thinking. Oftentimes we'll go out to eat and I'll be like, I'd really like to have a little drink to go along with this. You know what I'm looking for? I'm not looking for, I deserve a drink tonight. I'm looking for some comfort. And so I, I'm really thinking through this and rationalizing what is it that we're saying when we say I deserve.do. When someone says, I deserve a nice car, what they often mean is I work hard and I want something that makes me feel rewarded. I'm not anti enjoyment. I'm not anti reward, anti fun, and I'm not saying you can never have anything nice. I'm not even saying that you should be miserable and living like a monk in a cave and never enjoy your life. Not at all. In fact, I think intentional enjoyment is part of a healthy life, but there is a difference between, I plan for this, I work hard towards this, and I'm choosing this on purpose. There's a difference between that, and I'm tired, I'm stressed, I'm depleted, I'm emotional, so I'm giving myself permission to just do whatever tonight. Those are not the same thing, and if you do not separate the two in your mind, it becomes very easy to let your feelings drive your money. You see there is a difference between a reward and a reaction. I think this is very important because some people hear an episode like this and immediately think so what? I'm never allowed to enjoy anything. I work hard and I am not allowed to have a good life. I don't know why I did that up talking Valley girl situation, sorry. But of course you're allowed to have a good life. You are absolutely allowed to enjoy things, but I want you to enjoy them intentionally. One of my clients this year, her. Word for the year is intentionality So instead of an automatic purchase or an emotional purchase, we have been very intentional. So she got this giant bonus, and I'm so excited. She worked very hard for it. She very much deserved to be rewarded for the work that she had done, right. But instead of immediately going and spending all of that money, what we decided to do was put space between the bonus and the purchase of the next thing. We were very intentional to say, let's enjoy this one first, and then we'll go get another one. Let's enjoy that one and then we can go get another one. So she made a list of all the things that she would like to buy. And then she looked at them and I said, well, can you rank them? Can you decide which one you want first? And over the course of about a month, she removed things from that list. She would've immediately instantaneously bought them. But while she's enjoying the other things, she realized those weren't things that she actually wanted. She was intentional with how she chose to enjoy her reward. So look, if you set a milestone and you decide ahead of time when I hit this goal, I'm going to celebrate with. X, Y, Z reward. That's wonderful. That's thoughtful. It's planned. That is earned in a very real and deliberate way. It's not had a hard day, so I deserve this. That's not a reward, that's a reaction. And reactions tend to be pretty expensive. A reaction? It's when you're not asking questions like, is this actually worth it? Is it worth it to my body and the disruption of my routine to go to fast food? Is this aligned with what I want most when I go out to fast food? Am I having dinner with my family around a table? Did I plan for this now? You probably didn't. You're probably just tired. Is this building the life I want or discomforting me for 20 minutes? Reactions. Don't care about any of your forward, future thinking. Self reactions, just want relief. And if you let relief become the boss of your spending, you're gonna stay stuck. Now I know telling yourself I deserve this sounds morally harmless, and I'm being a little dramatic right now saying that it's actually kind of dangerous, but the juxtaposition there is actually the problem. It sounds like self-care or a little bit of grace, but in practice it often becomes a shortcut around the intentionality that's so necessary. It becomes the emotional steering wheel. We take a backseat and we allow our emotions to make our money decisions. We stop building and we start drifting. And now when we let that happen over and over in the little things, if he gets to show up in the big things. Yesterday at the dentist, you guys probably read in my newsletter about how my kid, my, my 5-year-old really wants to be a dentist. So we were all in at the dentist, but I was talking with one of the dental hygienists. She's retiring after 40 years as, and we were talking about the multiple different reasons on why our kids couldn't buy a house, and one of them was a giant car payment of $986, like, I'm sorry, a thousand dollars a month on a depreciating asset. If you just put that into an s and p 500 index fund, you'll have $2.5 million in 40 years. But instead, we're gonna have a car payment that started out being a $50,000 car and 10 years from now it's worth $15,000. And we could have put it in the market and had 2.5 like, what are we doing here? That's crazy. Financed furniture, luxury upgrades, big vacations that you didn't actually have margin for. That's how reacting and I deserve this start showing up and honestly, a lot of the time it's not even a giant dramatic thing like that. It's tiny things, the drive-through. 'cause you're tired. It's the easiest one for me because I'm always tired and I'm always like, could we drive through? No. Oh, I have to do the hard thing. Right. That extra coffee, because today was really difficult. Is it just me? Target run because you need to get outta the house. That's my husband. He just goes there to have fun. The Amazon order, because it's been a week and it's only Tuesday. That little treat that turns into a pattern. It's just this once that happens three to four times a week. And the reason this matters so much is because those little choices rarely stay little when they become habits. I do not think that the issue here is always the purchase though. Okay? It's how automatic it is. I do not see this in my own daily life anymore. And that is something that I wanna say, it is possible to make a change. One of the very interesting things about this topic. Is that I deserve it. It's no longer part of my lexicon. I've done a lot of work on myself. I've had to challenge the idea of it, and I don't ever walk around thinking, well, I deserve this and I deserve that it, and part of that is because I now see very clearly the most of what we call deserving something. It's actually just trying to justify a comfort that we want right now. It's doesn't mean that I don't ever enjoy things. I absolutely do. I always have fun money in my budget always. Sometimes I have to save it up a couple of pay periods at a time, and I go get my nails done, or I go get a massage. Other times I spend it immediately on something small and I enjoy it in the moment. But the key is that I'm being intentional about it. It's in the budget. It's already been accounted for. I'm not stealing from grocery money or taking from my future or stealing from a a different goal. It's a very different thing from saying I had a hard day and now I'm letting my feelings make a purchase. And what I've noticed with clients is that when they do have a strong I deserve it mindset, it almost always leads to a place of, well, I really wish I hadn't done that. And that phrase leads to regret more often than it leads to lasting enjoyment. One of my clients this week bought a Disney watch from Macy's. She went into Macy's to buy some makeup. She went in very specifically, this is what I need to do. And she saw this watch and it has Mickey Mouse and it's so cute. And she's like, oh, I need to buy that. And she was like, well, I'm not gonna buy it right now because we're trying to put in space between seeing something and purchasing it. So she gave it 24 hours and she went and bought it. And the time between clicking purchase and the time it showed up at her house, she didn't want it anymore because she realized that she wasn't gonna get any of the enjoyment out of it that she thought she was. So the heart of this whole episode for me is not. I want you to quit doing the impulse things because there needs to be some impulsivity built into your life. I like impulsive giving. That's pretty fun. I like impulsive spending when it's budgeted for. So you're like, Laura, is it really impulsive if it's budgeted for, absolutely. I don't know what I'm gonna spend my fun money on this week, but what I really want the heart of this, I deserve it Mindset. The change. The reason I want you to do that is because it's stealing from your future. This is not a harmless, neutral feeling. It's actually pretty expensive, and not only because the thing itself is wildly expensive, but sometimes it is expensive because of what it keeps you from doing. What you want most is to own a home. We have to be intentional with saving up for that because I don't know if you notice, but home prices are going up. We're going to have to have a bigger down payment. For me, the thing I want most is having a backyard for my kids to play in. And guess what that takes? Intentionality. So if what you want most is something like retiring with peace, building wealth, being generous, stop living paycheck to paycheck, have some margin in the month, have options that every time you allow what you want right now to overtake what you want most. You are making a trade. Most people are making that trade without even realizing it. There are people living in apartment complexes with thousand dollar a month car payments. There are people driving bright, shiny, expensive cars while telling themselves that home ownership is completely impossible. And I wanna shake them. I wanna grab them by their shoulders and shake them and go, no. Maybe it's not impossible. Maybe you are just financing a way. Your future, just because you can afford the payment, does not mean that you can afford the purchase. That sentence right there would solve a lot of people's problems because the payments make things feel possible when they're unwise. Payments, let people pretend that they're affording something when what they are really doing is stretching their future thinner and thinner and thinner. And the hard truth is a lot of people are not enjoying these purchases nearly as much as they imagined that they would. They just get used to the payment. I think a big reason that people clinging to the I Deserve it mindset is fear. Not always conscious fear, but it's definitely fear. I think sometimes people are afraid that they will never get the bigger thing later. The future always feels far away or uncertain and it's intangible, but the little comfort right now that's guaranteed. I know I'm going to feel good when I eat these french fries, so people think I know I can have this now, and I don't know if I'll ever get there later, so I might as well enjoy this. And I think underneath that's a lack of trust. Not just trust in God, but trust in themselves. They don't trust themselves to stay disciplined long enough. They don't trust their efforts will ever pay off. They certainly don't trust that the bigger comfort is actually possible for them, and they don't trust that the sacrifice is worth it. Maybe they've never seen somebody actually achieve it, so they don't think they can do. It's certainly not somebody like them. Somebody like them's never gotten out of the situation they're in. Have you ever heard somebody say, people like me, people like me, and the little man can't get ahead. When you're stuck in that mindset, they're going to settle for comfort. Now, if you keep doing that, you're gonna train yourself to keep choosing the smaller life. Smaller joy, smaller, comfort, impossible future. I do not want that for you. I think one of the biggest keys here is friction. You have to put some space in between the desire and the purchase, and that space is where the wisdom is going to live. The space where intentionality lives, the space is where you get to stop and ask, what is this really about? Do I actually want this? Is it worth it? Is it aligned with my values? Is this something I plan for? Or am I just trying to reward myself in reacting emotionally? I have a client who was very excited about a kitchenware set, knives, pot pants, the, you know, that type of thing. And before we worked together, she would've just bought it. It's not, that she has a kitchenware problem or that she's being irresponsible, but she has a pattern of, I want it. I work hard, I'm going to get it. Instead, we put some space in between that desire and that purchase, and that is the whole thing. Maybe she still buys it, maybe she doesn't. That's not the point. The point is that she's no longer on autopilot. It's no longer see it, click it, buy it, and if you wanna get out of the I Deserve it trap. You gotta get off autopilot. Friction here is not your punishment, it's your protection. Does this mean you're never allowed to enjoy anything? No, absolutely not. You're allowed to enjoy your life. You're allowed to have fun and celebrate and buy the things you like and have the rewards, but I want those things to be worth it when you have them. I don't want them to just be convenient, and that's the difference. So here I am not trying to be a killjoy, but trying to make joy intentional. I want your joy to be daring. I want you it to be full and rich and abundant. Sometimes I think people hear me talk about discipline and being intentional, and they, immediately go to, oh, she's gonna deprive me. Your discipline is not your deprivation. Discipline is what creates the ability to enjoy things without regretting them, and that's the beauty of it. Sometimes, I don't call it a budget. I call it a spending plan, because when you plan for the thing, you enjoy the thing. When you save for the thing, you enjoy the thing. If it fits your value, you're going to enjoy it. And when it aligns with your bigger goals, you get to enjoy it on a bigger scale. See, the issue is not the enjoyment. The issue is whether your enjoyment has become automatic, emotional, and disconnected from the life you actually want. I think sometimes people are afraid that if they do not grab that small comfort now, they're never gonna get the big comfort later, but that's backwards. Often, the people who eventually get the bigger comfort later are the ones who are willing to say no to the smaller comforts. Now, I want you to hear this plainly, my friend. You control your own destiny more than you think you do. 97% of millionaires in America believe that they control their own destiny. You get to decide what it is that you want most, and if you do not decide that clearly, your emotions will make the decisions for you. The I deserve it mentality keeps people stuck in the mediocre life. It keeps them in the middle where they're always justifying, reacting and making payments. They're always wanting relief and grabbing for the quick comfort. And they're never quite building the bigger life they say that they want. I want you to get the house. I want you to have the backyard. I want the peace and the margin and the retirement and the generosity and the freedom. I want that for you. That's why I do this podcast. That's why I'm here for you, friend. And if you don't think that's possible, I would love to jump. On a call with you and just explain to you how it's possible. Look at your situation and tell you what little things you can tweak to make that freedom possible for you. That's gonna require you to stop worshiping every desire that shows up in the moment. Not every desire deserves a yes. Not every feeling deserves a purchase. Sometimes the most loving, wise, mature thing that you can do is say, I do want that, but I want something else more. And that is power maturity, stewardship. Whatever word you wanna put on it, that's ownership. So if this episode is hitting home, here is what I want you to do First, start noticing your language. Pay attention to how often you say or think things like, I deserve this, I earned this, I need this. It's just something little. I've had a hard day. It's been a long week. This is not to shame yourself, but it is to notice because we have to notice it first before we can ever make a difference. Second, put space between your desire and your purchase. It doesn't have to be a no forever, but stop saying yes immediately every time. It's the second that you want something. Third, build intentional enjoyment into your budget. Fun, money, celebration, money. These are some of my favorite categories and I do have it named that. His fund. Her fund. Our fund. That's how I have it labeled because that's what I wanna spend the money on. Fourth, ask yourself this very important question, is it worth it? Or just convenient? Now, you don't have to ask yourself that question if you've already decided that you're going to wait 24 hours before making a purchase. But if it's one of those in the moment, spur of the moment, we're pulling up into the drive-through, is it worth it? Or is it just convenient? And that question is going to preach to your soul, hopefully, will really dig into those spur of the moment questions. And fifth, you've gotta get brutally honest about what it is you really, really want most. Because there's often a trade happening whether you name it or not. Do you want the payment or do you want freedom of choice? You get to decide. The phrase I deserve, it has been costing you more than you've realized. It's been stealing your margin and your peace. There is no discipline because you deserve it. You are not able to build the life you actually want. If everything you do is based on, because I deserve this, so what if instead? You figure out what it is that you want most and then align all of your decisions to that. Because you are allowed to enjoy your life and you are allowed to have nice things, but I want you to enjoy them on purpose. What you want right now can steal what you want most, and I would much rather see you build something beautiful than stay stuck in the mediocre muck of always needing comfort. Now, if this episode is hit a nerve. Ooh, I wanna hear about it. Maybe you're realizing that your spending is not really about the thing, but more about stress and comfort and convenience or emotion. That's exactly the kind of thing that we work through with me and my coaching clients. I've told you about a couple of them today. If you want help figuring out where your money is leaking, what your real priorities are, and how to build a plan that lets you enjoy life without sabotaging your future, I would love to talk to you. You can reach out for a clarity call using the link down in the show notes, connects with Laura Clarity. Call down there or you can go to accelerate your legacy.com/clarity call. And if you've not yet filled out the survey that I mentioned the very beginning of this episode, which you probably haven't, it's super short. It will help me serve you better, and you will be entered to win the $50 gift card if you leave your name and email. All right, legacy builders, that's it. Go be intentional. Go enjoy your life on purpose and go out and make a difference.