The Jesse Mecham Show

Did you make a resolution to have a "no buy year" this year? How's that going? While Jesse loves the idea of a no-buy year, mainly because he loves to experiment with money and behavior, he admits the concept of it is flawed. A "no buy year" typically means you refrain from making any non-essential purchases so that you can save more money. As Jesse explains, though, saving money really means being good at spending money, and the w...

Football season is nearly upon us, and Jesse is thinking about the pigskin again. And money, of course. When you look at the great sports movies, they usually revolve around a struggling team -- often a team of stragglers and dubious athletes -- and a great coach who motivates them, helps them find their desire to compete, and puts them in positions to maximize the abilities they do have. You can do the same thing with your money. ...

Saving vs spending... there's no question which one is more fun, right? Obviously, spending! By comparison, saving feels like a chore, something you ought to do, the responsible thing to do, but is definitely less fun. After all, you get something when you spend -- an item, an experience, a service. With saving you get, well, just more money in a pile somewhere.

As Jesse points out, no one says "I have a saving problem" but you h...

You've probably heard the term "moving the goalposts," that is, a deceptive argument strategy in which you change the question, the criteria, or the standard by which you are evaluating something. The metaphor comes from sports, and it's a good metaphor for personal finance. Early in our adult lives we make a lot choices because money is scarce -- you choose to live with roommates instead of your own apartment, you skip buying some...

Personal finance is personal, as the saying goes, and the only constant in life is change, to employ another saying. On that note, Jesse issues a challenge in today's episode: change your plan! Add a category, put some money in it, delete a category, shuffle some dollars around... just make a change. This is a reminder to yourself that the beauty of a plan is it's flexibility. As life changes, your plan can change along with it.

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Flying airplanes is serious business. Mistakes are costly, not just because of the cost of the aircraft; if you're flying people, their lives are on the line. Jesse knows this better than most, having two brothers who are pilots. One day he overheard them talking shop and narrowed in on a common occurence they had teaching student pilots to fly -- these pilots were afriad of "hooking," that is, making a mistake on a flight and havi...

Jesse has ranted about credit cards and their pernicious way of separating you from your money, both literally and metaphorically -- obfuscating the way you spend and distancing your priorities from the point of sale. Today he warns against the newest form of this pernicious spending: buy now, pay later programs. It's like a credit card you don't have to sign up -- just purchase an item, and via an app like Klarna or Affirm, you ca...

For some reason when the topic of money comes up, many people immediately want to jump into Excel and start exercising the so-called rational part of their brain. Money seems to demand sober, quantitative analysis, devoid of emotion which obfuscates the mathematical truth of the situation. Yet we rarely make decisions in a purely rational manner; emotion plays a large, if not bigger role, than rational thinking in how we choose to ...

We talk about how YNAB is the ultimate weapon against money stressors -- as you gain control over your spending, learn to give every dollar a job, and bring your spending in line with your priorities, the stresses decrease and are replaced by a growing confidence. There are other psychological "costs" of money, such as the anxiety and mental overhead created by second guessing your choices.

Should I buy this? Can I even afford it...

Jesse reflects on his interactions with YNAB'ers at the recent Fan Fest in Minneapolis, and how spendfulness manifested in many different ways. One important takeaway for Jesse was that while practicing spendfulness could mean taking a cool international vacation, or buying something fun and interesting (and those are totally valid things to spend money on!), it could also mean having the freedom and peace of mind to take risks and...

In 2017 the Mecham family decided to live in Manhattan for three months to experience the city, soak up the food and culture, and just have fun doing something different. While they were there they chose to maximize their opportunity to eat out -- Jesse went back and counted over 140 different establishments during that 90 day stay!

After that experiment, Jesse and the family decided to try the complete opposite. No eating out fo...

It seems obvious that you should save money. It's the right thing to do, after all! But even the words that we use talk about saving money have problems -- should, ought --  loaded with moral baggage. Jesse reminds us that even money earmarked for savings is still spending, just spending that has been deferred to a later date, retirement for example. That money still needs to have a job, however. Saving for what in retirement? Util...

When you really want to buy something, what do you do? Do you wait for 48 hours to cool off a bit and think it over? Or perhaps do you create a category for it in YNAB and fund it with a few dollars, just to see how it feels? Having the urge to buy something is not a bad or shameful thing, but there should be a process for weighing that purchase against your other priorities. That's what YNAB does -- it makes money more real by giv...

This week Jesse and the rest of the YNAB team are working hard prepping for the upcoming Fan Fest in Minneapolis, so today we are rebroadcasting an interview that originally appeared on Dr. Will Cole's Art of Being Well podcast. In this interview, Jesse talks about how money stress not only leads to poorer mental health, it has real physical impacts on the body as well.

We hope you enjoy this interview. If you'd like to follow Dr...

It's no secret that money is a major factor in relationship conflicts. Whether it's misaligned values, a feeling that one partner is sabotaging the other's goals through their spending, or a desire to keep up with the Jones'... money has the potential to start or fuel a lot of conflict. But it doesn't have to! Often money arguments belie fundamental communcation problems, and YNAB can help by clarifying for both partners what the g...

To many, the word "budget" brings to mine restrictions, guilt, punishment, and a general feeling of dread that they don't have control over their money, much less hit their budget goals. But this idea that a budget means setting hard limits on spending in various categories, then looking back every month to see if you were "good" or "bad" in adhering to those limits... it's all backwards!

Jesse has another way to look at "budgeti...

Judging from the difficulties many adults have managing their money, we don't do a great job collectively of teaching our kids about money. Jesse doesn't consider himself an expert on this, but he does have seven kids, and thus seven chances to instill good money habits in his own children. In today's episode he shares how he teaches his kids about money using the YNAB method, scaled down in language and concepts that younger child...

Spendfulness is the new word around YNAB, but the concept goes back to the beginning of the company... and even before the company itself. In today's episode, Jesse recounts the very early days of YNAB, when the budgeting method was just a spreadsheet. Jesse realized that the spreadsheet was enforcing a set of behaviors, or "rules," around money and that those rules were the foundation of what is now referred to as the YNAB method....

Jesse has a long history experimenting with money. From rating every meal he and the family ate out, to "hyperbudgeting," to not budgeting at all... he's run an experiment almost every year for the last several years to see how his habits affect his financial planning. In today's episode Jesse recaps the experiments he's done, how they went (good and bad), and reminds us that personal finance is, well, personal.

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