Beyond Budgets: Teaching Spending Awareness

Who likes a budget? (Accountants don’t count.) Seriously though, budgets are rigid and restrictive and can make you feel like a failure before you’ve even gotten through a month.

Coming into a large sum of money is overwhelming. Knowing who to trust feels impossible. But the greatest challenge? The complete lack of spending awareness.

If a budget is just a budget, it feels like restraint. When something goes wrong, a line is overspent, a person reacts – which typically results in feeling like they’ve failed, and eventually they will just quit. And let’s be real, if a person feels as though they have ‘so much money’ (like a student athlete receiving NIL) it is hard to convince them that this unreasonable, difficult budget is even worth following in the first place.

With a strong financial foundation, a person is aware of their financial spending. They can be proactive instead of reactive. They understand that a mistake doesn’t mean failure. It means make adjustments and move forward.

A person learns how to spend with purpose, to simply give every dollar a purpose prior to spending it rather than live within the control of a budget. Everyone loves to spend money. (Don’t you like to spend your money?) It is shocking the positive transformation you witness when you transition to teaching how to spend money with awareness rather than live within the confines of a budget.

Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert talk about this in When Helping Hurts: well-intentioned help can cause harm when we address symptoms instead of root causes. Teaching budgets without teaching spending awareness is exactly that – treating the symptom, not the cause.

Trust me, there is no greater gift you can give a college student than the tools to navigate the most terrifying financial question: ‘Now What?’

The financial foundation isn’t about restricting spending. It’s about understanding it. Give your students that awareness, and watch what changes.