Surprising psychological effect of tracking your expenses

 Have you ever felt stressed out over finances? You’re not alone. Nearly two-thirds of Americans report that money is a major source of stress. Studies show that insurmountable debt may be even more stressful than divorce or the death of a close friend. 

Financial stress is liable to spill over into other areas of life, too, including family relationships and physical health. Dr. Megan Ford, a licensed therapist and director of the interdisciplinary ASPIRE Clinic, describes how financial issues can infiltrate every aspect of our lives:

“Some clients come in because they’re feeling depressed, anxious, or are struggling with their marriage, and we discover the root cause is money,” Ford says. “Or, vice versa, we discover that financial stress is leading to struggles with mental health and social relationships.”  

But there is good news for anyone worried about money. You don’t have to wait until your income increases or your debts are gone to enjoy relief — the mere act of planning ahead can reap immediate benefits. 

Why money can be so stressful

To understand why budgeting and tracking your spending can boost your mental well-being, it’s helpful to understand why money causes stress in the first place. 

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We all need money to survive, but money is tied to our well-being in less obvious ways, too. First off, financial instability is mentally exhausting. When you’re not sure whether you’ll have enough money to pay down your debts or enjoy an evening out with friends, you simply must think more about how and when to spend your money and time. 

Also, money is tied up in our identities. Financial stability influences one’s sense that they can provide for their family or be financially independent. On the darker side, it can often be conflated with one’s sense of overall value as a human, meaning that financial insecurity can lead to a sense of shame, helplessness, loss of control, and decreased motivation. 

Budgeting can promote confidence and relaxation

At first, many people dislike the idea of budgeting. But according to Ford, it often becomes a crucial part of relieving financial stress for those who try it.

“Budgeting has a negative connotation,” Ford says. “Many see it as limiting or restrictive. But in practice it helps propel people towards their goals.”

Indeed, studies show that the simple act of creating a budget and tracking spending can reduce mental exhaustion and restore a sense of control.

Purposeful budgeting helps people create specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timed goals — that is, SMART goals. The process encourages people to identify what is uniquely important to them, and to commit to concrete steps to achieve their personal goals. Doing so increases the likelihood that you’ll actually achieve your money objectives; decades of research finds that having a clear plan increases motivation and achievement. 

Similarly, tracking spending can help people see their progress, ease anxiety, and restore a sense of control. In addition to increasing self-awareness of when and how you tend to spend your money, simply seeing data itself can be empowering and encouraging.

Tracking helps ensure your spending boosts your happiness

We’ve all heard the cliche that money can’t buy happiness. But research has repeatedly challenged aspects of this idea. A 2011 study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology makes the case that money can buy happiness — if spent the right way

According to the study, we tend to feel happier when we spend our discretionary money on: social experiences (vacations, get-togethers with friends or family); buying time (hiring a cleaning service or paying someone to do another task to free up your time); and others (charity, gifts). 

That said, no two people are alike, and so different kinds of spending are likely to affect people differently.

What kind of spending brings you happiness? The answer might not be immediately obvious. Tracking our spending can help reveal discrepancies between what we spend money on and what we truly value. 

How to budget and track better

Given the immediate mental boost that it can provide, what is the best way to go about creating a budget and tracking your expenses? 

Begin by assessing how you currently spend your money. People generally underestimate their spending, so it’s helpful to pull up any records or receipts you have. Credit card bills and checking account statements are usually easily available online. 

Identify your major spending areas (such as housing, transportation, food, etc.), pull out your calculator, and estimate your average monthly spending in each category. There’s no need to be perfect or overly detailed; instead aim for a rough estimate. 

Draft your budget. After you’ve identified how you tend to spend your money, create a realistic monthly budget for future spending and saving.

Dr. Kristy Archuleta, a professor of financial planning at the University of Georgia, suggests developing a realistic plan that’s tailored to your unique life situation.  

“Science and finance often suggest there is a ‘right’ or ‘best’ decision that clients should make,” Archuleta says. “But in practice, each person has their own lifestyle and goals. It needs to work for them.”

It can be helpful to divide your spending into three categories: necessary spending (the items you must pay for each month), discretionary spending (the items you could reduce if necessary), and long-term goals (where you would like to put more money, like savings or paying off debts). 

Million Stories will be launching its unique budgeting tool at the end of 2022. In the meantime, try out some of these helpful free budget calculators. 

Tracking. Then start tracking. Systematically record how much you are spending, in which categories, and how it matches your budget goals. You can use formal electronic systems like Mint or Quicken, or paper-and-pencil systems to record and review your purchases daily or monthly. 

Regularly tracking your spending can provide helpful information to improve your habits and increase your sense of confidence and control. Simply seeing your daily data is highly motivating for many — you can see your progress and get ideas for improvement. 

Congratulate yourself for getting started

Finally, pat yourself on the back for taking steps to become financially secure. If you find yourself overwhelmed, take it slow. You don’t have to have to make a perfect budget plan, completely overhaul your spending habits, or save a thousand dollars right away. 

“You have to start somewhere,” Archuleta says. “And small is better than nothing at all.”

https://bigthink.com/sponsored/psychology-of-tracking-finances/

Democrats ‘Charity’ Voter-Registration Scheme

 Senate Democrats plan to pass the Disclose Act, a bill they claim would force “dark money” groups into the light. Never mind the darkness that envelops their own epic voter-registration scam.

A New York Times article this week confirmed a political reality that Republicans have been slow to publicize: Democrats are openly abusing charities to stack voter rolls in their favor. The Times story was ostensibly about “voter registration” groups worried that donors weren’t giving enough to “democracy-related” programs this midterm cycle. Read closely and you notice the story is entirely about Democrats, confirming a longstanding scheme by which foundations and private donors funnel tax-exempt dollars into “charities” that microtarget and register Democratic voters.

Among those quoted was Nsé Ufot, head of the New Georgia Project, which the Times credits with helping “turn Georgia into a blue state” by “registering tens of thousands of voters of color.” Ms. Ufot bemoaned “an overall dip in fundraising” from the likes of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Democracy Fund: “Folks who think Georgia is competitive do not understand what made Georgia competitive.”

The Ufot comments are stunning, given the New Georgia Project is a organized as a charity, donations to which are tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(3) of the tax code. Such groups, as the Internal Revenue Service notes, are prohibited from engaging in “voter education or registration activities with evidence of bias that (a) would favor one candidate over another; (b) oppose a candidate in some manner; or (c) have the effect of favoring a candidate or group of candidates.” Yet here is Ms. Ufot openly fretting that without more Democracy Fund cash, she won’t be able to elect more Democrats.

The left has been growing this “philanthropy” racket for decades, and as a seven-page internal 2019 memo, leaked in 2020, reveals, it is now a giant operation. The memo was from Mind the Gap, a liberal super PAC that pushes donors to give to Democratic campaigns and nonprofits. It explained that in 2020 “the single most effective tactic for ensuring Democratic victories” would be “501(c)(3) voter registration focused on underrepresented groups in the electorate.”

Mind the Gap was brazen about its partisanship: “Provided that such efforts are well-designed and executed, on a pre-tax basis they are 2 to 5 times more cost-effective at netting additional Democratic votes” than advertising. Even better, because these groups are “tax deductible, on an after-tax basis such programs are closer to 4 to 10 times more cost-effective than the next best alternative.” The group said that 90% of the donations it was recommending for voter-registration and get-out-the-vote groups would go to 501(c)(3) nonprofits.

Don’t think these are innocent charities getting “used” by cagey Democratic operatives. Among the groups the memo recommends is the Voter Participation Center, which says it’s creating “a new American majority” by targeting “young people, people of color, and unmarried women” for registration. In 2018, the most recent year for which IRS records are available, it spent 64% of its vendor money on two groups that specialize in microtargeting reliable Democratic votes: Pivot Group ($10.5 million), which says it is “committed to electing Democrats up and down the ballot,” and Mission Control ($3.9 million), which calls itself “the most successful direct mail firm working in Democratic politics today.”

This would be the equivalent of Republicans using “charities” to microtarget and register only blue-collar gun owners, white evangelicals, and adamant pro-lifers. Totally nonpartisan, right? Only it’s hard to find a conservative foundation engaged in such activity, given a fear of IRS consequences. Democrats, by contrast, are so confident the IRS won’t question their “democracy” projects that they are pouring ever more money into this political operation and talking about the game openly.

As liberal writer Sasha Issenberg made clear in a 2012 book, “The Victory Lab,” liberal foundations and charities have been engaged in this scam for ages, describing the Carnegie Foundation’s registration drives even back then as “a backdoor approach to ginning up Democratic votes outside the campaign finance laws.” It’s a particular win for liberal foundations like Mr. Soros’s, which can fully write off partisan vote-getting as “charitable” activity. And luckily for Democrats, charitable nonprofits don’t have to disclose their donors, and the Disclose Act—surprise!—wouldn’t change that.

America’s charitable giving laws have been an enormous force for good, but Democrats are cynically abusing the system for partisan gain. If Congress wants to keep dollars and politicking in the political sphere—and under the remit of the Federal Election Commission—it needs to change tax law to prohibit “charities” outright from taking part in voter-registration or get-out-the-vote drives. The problem isn’t “dark money”—it’s the sham “philanthropy” voter-registration racket, taking place in broad daylight.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-charity-voter-registration-scheme-tax-exemption-soros-democracy-philanthropy-501c3-georgia-11663883529

Are Fake Sugars Causing Real Disease?

 So much of medicine is practiced within a shroud of mystery. When it comes to artificial sweeteners, an enigma that long has confounded me is: Why would anyone want to drink a Diet Coke? I’ve learned to allow my patients to have strange tastes in beverages. Should I be tolerant towards their drive to consume artificially sweetened foods and drinks, though? A new study joins a mixed bag of older research which suggests that I should not. I don’t think my Splenda-swilling patients have cause for alarm, however.

The work, published in the British Medical Journal, tracked over 100,000 French adults prospectively for more than a decade. Dietary consumption of several artificial sweeteners, primarily aspartame (Equal/Nutrasweet), acesulfame potassium (Sunett/Sweet One) and sucralose (Splenda), was determined via questionnaire, and then health outcomes in regard to heart events like anginal pain, stent, or heart attack, or brain events like TIA or stroke were followed both through participant report (with physician confirmation) and national health records.

A rather nice study design, and ample size over a long enough study period to accumulate a significant number of events. True, as with any observational trial, there is risk of missed or mis-labeled events, mis-classified participants, statistical massage with multiple end points, and, of course, the potential for confounding: people who choose to reach for Splenda packets in lieu of the honey jar might just be inherently more or less healthy than their peers in ways that are hard to control for even when demographics and lifestyle differences are taken into account.

What they found was a rather modest increase in cardiovascular events among those who consumed artificial sweeteners. Indeed, it barely reached statistical significance for the composite measure:

The results are hardly surprising. Earlier meta-analyses have found mixed results for artificial sweeteners in metabolic health; among the small randomized controlled trials for artificial sweeteners — often run by industry — there is a slight positive trend, while larger observational studies trend towards worse outcomes.

What might be the mechanism for this? It runs counter to the indoctrination of the American public since the 1960s that sugar-free treats are a fine part of a weight-loss diet. However, most things in the world that seem too good to be true turn out to truly not be that good. Whatever you think of their taste (I find them all abominable, personally), from a health perspective, artificial sweeteners have their fair share of flaws.

A theory often postulated is that artificial sweeteners deleteriously alter the gut biome. A randomized controlled human study found that four non-nutritive sweeteners (saccharin, sucralose, aspartame and stevia) indeed altered bacterial composition in the gut, and sucralose and saccharin caused worsening response to actual sugar loads. Please note the inclusion of stevia in that study – “natural” non-nutritive sweeteners are not exempt from these concerns.

It’s also been hypothesized that fooling our brain and bodies with false sweetness could lead to problems. Sweet taste receptors in our endocrine system might be fooled by artificial sweeteners, leading to disruptions in the release of critical metabolic hormones like insulin and incretins. Our behaviors centered around seeking out other carbohydrates might be altered, too; directly, if our brain does not give us “reward” feedback that it’s time to rest and stop seeking more food when we are not consuming actual calories, or indirectly, if we develop a worsening sweet tooth by accustoming ourselves to sweetness at every meal.

So, what’s a doctor to do? Well, the simplest advice is to avoid sweetened foods. I am now aware that this makes me a food-shaming monster, but let’s be real: I want people to live long and healthy lives, and high-sugar foods simply are not part of that plan. Fruit? Not in excess, and make sure it’s whole fruit (fiber-rich skin and all); we worry about high amounts of fructose gumming up the liver and perturbing metabolic health, too. Honey? It’s almost half fructose, so not as healthy as you might think. Good old table sugar, sucrose? It’s a mixture of fructose and glucose; the latter leans heavily on insulin to control blood glucose after a sugar load, and I don’t believe anyone thinks this is fine for your health.

The best approach for most people is to eat a predominantly savory diet. A motivated soul stuck on highly sweetened foods can slowly wean themself down if they’re patient. Two packets of Equal or teaspoons of sugar can become one, can become half, can become zero, over enough time, and — lo and behold — coffee is still delicious.

I know, I know: this stuff is hard. Some people don’t have the time or the bandwidth in their over-booked lives to add another challenge. Consider this advice aspirational, then.

Along those lines, back to the study. It’s worth noting that the absolute increase in risk of consuming artificial sweeteners was quite low, even if the relative risks hold statistical water and can be generalized outside of French 40-somethings . In their middle aged cohort, high consumers — who averaged about 2 packets of sweetener per day — had about 1 cardiovascular event every 290 person-years, while non-consumers spaced out their events only to about every 320 years. The average middle aged person would need to live over 3000 years to reap the benefits of that responsible choice to forego Nutrasweet. Put from a physician’s or nutritionist’s perspective, we’d have to counsel 60 patients each with 50 years of tread on their tires to avoid artificial sweeteners in order to prevent one cardiovascular event.

We’ve got bigger fish to fry. Hold the honey glaze on mine, please.

https://doctorbuzz.substack.com/p/are-fake-sugars-causing-real-disease