Last week, I talked about how my money plan helped me leave consulting and start Tessera. This week, I want to talk about how money can be a tool for other people, too.
Not everyone wants to leave their job and start a company. Maybe you want to take a trip you’ve been dreaming about. Maybe you want a house that fits your family. Maybe there’s something small in your everyday life that you really love.
I think it’s important to plan your life around your actual life, and not just around the fact that you need money.
I know coffee is the classic example, but let’s use it anyway. I’m not going to tell you not to buy coffee every day. Maybe it’s the one thing that brings you joy before work. Maybe you’re friends with the barista. Maybe that coffee shop makes your drink in a way you haven’t been able to figure out at home. All of those are completely valid.
But it can still be helpful to think about the trade-off. If you’re spending around $200 a month on coffee, that money could also contribute to a night in a hotel on a trip you really want to take. Maybe you’d rather have the coffee. That’s fine. The point is to know what you’re choosing.
I do an exercise like this with clients. We go through their spending and highlight the things they feel like they can’t do without. Those are the things we keep. Everything else isn’t automatically gone. It’s just up for discussion. Is this something you actually care about? Is it something you’re doing out of habit? Is it just the easiest option?
My husband and I had to ask ourselves the same thing about eating out. When we were living in different cities and driving back and forth between Austin and Houston, we were spending around $2,000 a month on it.
We were both working a lot. We’d work all day Friday, one of us would drive, and by the time we got where we were going, neither of us wanted to make dinner. So takeout was the easy thing to do.
At first, we talked about it like we were being lazy. But really, we were tired, and we hadn’t figured out another way to handle Friday nights. Once we realized that the restaurant spending we cared about most was going out with friends, we started doing something different on the nights we were traveling. One of us would make a meal before the other arrived, so dinner was ready when they got there.
That small change helped us spend a lot less on eating out. It wasn’t just about deciding to spend less. We had to change the routine that was leading us to spend money on convenience.
The trade-off can look different for everyone. Maybe you want a bigger house where everyone has their own room and there’s space for the kids to play. Maybe that means fewer trips or fewer little luxuries. If that house is important to you, maybe that’s a trade-off you’re happy to make.
I want you to be able to buy more of what you want. That means figuring out what you want enough to keep, and what you might be willing to trade for something else.
So when you look at your spending, ask yourself: What do I really want to keep? What am I spending on because it’s the easiest thing to do? And what else could that money help me do?
About Hannah
Hannah Klein is the founder of Tessera Ventures, where she helps people build financial systems that work in real life. She studied engineering at Stanford, earned her MBA at UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business, and spent several years as a management consultant at BCG. She started Tessera after seeing how many smart, successful people felt overwhelmed by money and thought they were the problem.
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