How to Spend Money Mindfully

“When eating a fruit, think of the person who planted the tree.”
- An old Vietnamese saying

Often, the best way to use your money is not to use it at all. Like they say, as consumers, we spend money we haven’t earned to buy things we don’t need, just to impress people who we don’t even like. So, yes, I think the first thing to do is to save the money and use it to buy freedom rather than even more gadgets.

But this doesn’t mean you should live as a monk and give up all of your worldly attachments. You need food. You need clothes. You need shelter. And, although not everyone agrees, I think you need art. And to make things still more complicated, we have a huge developing world that is still far behind in life standard and depends on doing business with us to grow.

From time to time, you need to spend money. But how do you do that the right way, with meaning?

I believe the answer, and the way to a more meaningful money usage lies in the quote I started this post with: think of the person.

1. When buying food, think of the person who cultivated the crops.
2. When buying clothes, think of the person who sewed the shirt, the person who made the fabric, the person who grew the cotton, the person who designed the print.
3. When buying a book, think of the person who wrote it.
4. When buying a CD, think of the band that played it, the person who wrote the songs, the person who recorded it.

What happens when you start practicing this idea is revolutionary:

1. When you don’t let yourself buy a bag of coffee from a bulk manufacturer, you will find a whole new world of single estate coffee brands.
2. When you don’t let yourself buy food from farmers you don’t know anything about, you will start to learn more about how farming works, and where food comes from. And pretty soon you’ll be mostly buying real, organic food, maybe from farmers’ markets.
3. When you don’t let yourself buy meat that comes from an anonymous big corporation, you will learn more about where meat comes from and what it takes to bring a steak to your plate. This might even turn you into a vegetarian — or at least make you appreciate your weekly piece of meat a whole lot more (this is the stage I’m in right now).
4. When you learn more about what contributes to the price of a piece of clothing, you will stop buying clothes that you’ll throw away after just one or two uses. You will take better care of the clothes you decide to buy because you know their story. You begin to look into fair trade and companies such as People Tree.
5. This applies to every item you decide to buy: when you know something about the people and stories behind the product, you end up appreciating the item on a much deeper level. This will be the first step towards breaking free from today’s throwaway culture.

This change of mind means you will be spending more money on single items, so these items will have more worth for you. You will feel good knowing that the people who contributed are doing good work and getting paid for it like they should. And you will be buying less of the throw-away clutter you will never really need.