Deciding Who Spends Your Money Before You Are Standing There

What each one is actually for

Possible Selves Exercise

The Possible Selves Exercise asks you to write down, in concrete detail, two versions of a future you: the one you are hoping to become and the one you are afraid of turning into. Not adjectives — scenes. What that person's Saturday actually looks like, what is in their flat, what they have stopped buying, what they are no longer awake worrying about at two in the morning. The psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius named these possible selves in 1986, on the observation that people carry around specific pictures of who they might yet become, and that those pictures move behaviour in a way that general goals do not. The reason to write them down rather than merely hold them is that a written portrait can be consulted later, by a version of you in a completely different mood from the one who wrote it.

Values-Based Spending

Values-Based Spending is the practice of putting a deliberate check between wanting something and buying it. Before the purchase completes, you name what you actually care about — not budget categories, but the handful of things you would say your money is for — and ask whether this particular purchase serves one of them. That is the whole mechanic: a written list of what matters, consulted at the till rather than at the end of the month. It is not frugality and it is not a spending cap. Someone practising it may spend more on one thing than a budget would have allowed and stop buying a whole category outright. What it aims to change is not the total but which of your competing wants gets funded — decided by you at a calm moment rather than by whichever want happens to be loudest at eleven at night with a card already saved in the browser.

What you get out of pairing them

If the possible-selves writing is the practice you already have, what you are missing is a scoreboard. A future-self portrait written in January gets checked, at best, next January, and in the eleven months between there is nothing telling you whether you are drifting toward that person or away. Your bank statement is the least flattering and most complete record of what you actually chose in the last thirty days — not what you intended, what you did — and running the portrait against it converts a once-a-year identity exercise into something that gets tested most weeks.

If values-based spending is what you already do, what you are missing is teeth. Most values lists are adjectives: growth, health, family, freedom. Adjectives lose arguments at the point of purchase, because nearly any purchase can be talked into one of them, and the talking takes about four seconds. A specific written person is harder to argue with, because you gave them enough detail to have habits — what they own, what they have stopped buying — and this purchase either fits those habits or it does not. That is a narrower question than whether something aligns with growth, and narrower questions are the ones that survive contact with wanting.

What Possible Selves Exercise rests on

• Concrete goals outperform vague aspirations observational studies
  Specifying a concrete hoped-for or feared image of the future is more motivating and actionable than an abstract aspiration.
• Future self continuity motivates present action observational studies
  Vividly imagining one's own future self increases psychological connection to that self and motivates present behavior aligned with it.
• Gap awareness motivates change plausible mechanism
  Awareness of the gap between one's current self and a hoped-for or feared future self motivates action to close that gap.

What Values-Based Spending rests on

• Self distancing improves judgment randomised trials
  Evaluating a situation from a distanced, third-person vantage point instead of an immersed first-person one improves the quality of judgment about it.
• Friction before purchase reduces impulse spending plausible mechanism
  Inserting a deliberate values-check step between impulse and purchase adds friction that reduces low-value impulsive spending.
• Values alignment check increases satisfaction observational studies
  Checking a planned purchase against stated personal values before committing redirects spending toward choices that produce more lasting satisfaction.

Where they actually meet

Both practices work by putting distance between a decision and the immersed, wanting-it-now self that would otherwise make it alone, one by projecting forward in time to an imagined future self, the other by inserting a values-check that requires stepping back before a purchase completes. The move each is doing, in Kegan's terms, is the same: the self that's running the decision from the inside, hungry, impatient, or simply on autopilot, becomes an object that can be compared against a self deliberately constructed on paper. Held together, each supplies what the other is missing. Possible selves supplies the vivid target the values check can aim at; the spending filter supplies possible selves a small, frequent arena to actually test against, instead of only the once-a-year identity exercise it usually stays.

The principle underneath both

Both practices move a decision away from the moment it is made and into a moment when nothing is at stake. The possible-selves writing does it across time: you construct a person on paper on a quiet evening, and that person stays available for consultation later, when the version of you deciding is tired, or flattered, or halfway through a bad week. Values-based spending does it in sequence: the check runs before the purchase completes rather than after, so the considered answer arrives ahead of the wanting instead of as a post-mortem on it. What they hold in common, on this reading, is not subject matter — one is about identity and one is about money — but a piece of structure. The self currently doing the wanting is not the self given the final say, and that substitution has to be arranged in advance, because it cannot be arranged in the moment by the person who is in it. That describes the mechanism; it is not a claim that it reliably holds. Plenty of people consult the calmer self and overrule it, and both practices are quiet about what to do then.

What that makes the real goal

Stated as a goal, that stops belonging to either tradition: what you are after is a working arrangement in which a considered decision outranks an immediate one at the exact moment the two conflict. Not more willpower — willpower is the thing you are trying to spend less of, since it is least available precisely when the wanting is strongest. Not fewer wants either; the aim is not to want less. Just an arrangement where the version of you who thought this through last month still gets a vote when the version of you at the checkout would rather they did not. Put that way, a values list and a future-self portrait stop looking like alternatives. They are two ways of getting the same absent person into the room, and there are other ways, some of them with better evidence behind them.

Other practices that serve the same goal

Once the goal is named as getting a considered decision to outrank an immediate one, several other practices are visibly aimed at it, and some carry harder evidence than either of these two. Implementation intentions — the psychologist Peter Gollwitzer's term for an if-then plan written before the situation arrives, of the form "if I am about to add something over fifty pounds to a basket, then I close the tab and look again tomorrow" — have been tested in hundreds of studies and pooled analyses, with consistent moderate effects on follow-through, largely because the deciding is already finished by the time the moment shows up. Commitment devices go further and remove the choice rather than pre-answering it: Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi's Save More Tomorrow programme signs people up in advance to raise retirement contributions out of future pay rises, and real payroll data showed savings rates climbing sharply, precisely because the person who agreed was never the person who felt the money go. A blunt waiting rule — nothing discretionary above a set amount gets bought the same day — is the crudest version of the same structure and the easiest to start tonight. None of these requires a future-self portrait to work; they are all ways of making sure the calmer decision is still present when the hot one arrives.

A tradition that already does this

Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin's Your Money or Your Life, published in 1992, already fuses these two moves into one programme. It has readers work out what they want their life to be for, and then converts every purchase into the hours of life spent earning that money, asking of each spending category whether the fulfilment received was proportional to the life energy it cost. That is a future-self picture and a per-purchase values check running in a single system, decades before either was described in the terms used here — which is worth knowing mainly because it means the combination is a road people have already walked rather than something assembled for this page. What that lineage does not supply is a controlled test. Its support is practitioner accounts and a very large self-selected readership, which tells you the method is livable and tells you nothing about whether it beats an ordinary budget.

Using the Possible Selves Exercise to enhance Values-Based Spending

Before running the values check on a purchase, hold up the two images from the possible-selves writing, the person hoped for and the person feared, and ask which one this purchase moves toward. A values list can feel bloodless in the moment of temptation — does this align with 'growth'? — while a concrete feared self — becomes the person who keeps finding a reason — tends to cut through faster because it's a specific image rather than a category to reason about.

Using Values-Based Spending to enhance the Possible Selves Exercise

The possible-selves exercise is usually written once and then left to fade into a document nobody revisits. Values-based spending gives it a recurring checkpoint: each time the values filter runs on a purchase, it implicitly re-tests whether the hoped-for self from the exercise still describes what's actually wanted, or whether it calcified into an aspiration no longer held. That keeps the possible-selves work from staying a one-time journaling exercise with no return visits.

Standing at checkout, cart already fuller than planned

You're about to buy something a little beyond what you'd budgeted, and the case for it writes itself. Before confirming, you picture the version of yourself the purchase is supposedly for, and ask whether that's the hoped-for self from your possible-selves writing, or the self who just wanted relief from feeling behind for five minutes. Sometimes the purchase survives that question. Often what changes is not the decision itself but noticing there were two different selves proposing it.

When this is worth reaching for

Spending and stated plans have visibly come apart: the exact thing being saved toward can be named, and four hundred pounds from last month still can't be accounted for. This works on discretionary money specifically — the band where a purchase is genuinely optional and genuinely tempting, which for most people is a fairly narrow slice of the statement rather than the whole of it. It's also the right thing to reach for during a transition, while a possible-selves portrait is still fresh: a new job, a move, the start of a course, the decision to change direction. In those windows the future self is vivid enough to be a real reference point, and spending habits haven't yet hardened, so the check has something it can actually change.

Where this does not apply

If the possible-selves writing was skipped or only loosely done, if there's only a vague sense of wanting to do better rather than a concrete future self on paper, there's nothing specific for the spending filter to check against, and the pairing collapses back into an ordinary values list. And for someone in real financial strain, where a purchase decision is about covering rent rather than a discretionary want, a self-image question is not the one the moment calls for.

What the evidence does and does not support

Future-self continuity and self-distancing each carry real observational and experimental support for their separate claims. The values-before-purchase mechanism is plausible and mechanistic rather than outcome-tested. No study has measured whether pairing a possible-selves exercise with a spending filter changes spending behavior more than either alone; that combined claim is unstudied.