| Sunday, 23 February 2025 |
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Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
Let me start with a confession this Sunday morning: I’ve always been terrible at budgeting. Not only does it not come naturally to me, I actively despise it. After numerous attempts in my younger days to impose financial budgets, goals, and tracking in my life, I gave up. I’ve never regretted it one bit.
Which is why my brain perked up when I came across this recent post featuring the author of a book that critiques “budget culture”.
“I think less about tactical steps to achieve elusive financial goals and much more about how our culture of money affects the decisions we make about our long-term paths and day-to-day lives. I call the dominant approach budget culture, because it’s rooted in the restriction and shame inherent in budgeting behavior. But, just like diet culture, it’s not about the act of budgeting; it’s about the cultural posture that makes budgeting seem like useful and necessary behavior.
I also do not enjoy to-do lists, which are for me in the same behavioural space as budgets. Outside-in, controlling, normative, and most importantly, scarcity-driven.
We’ll talk about that this edition. I have a feeling I’m going to tick off a few of you today.
But before we get to that, here’s a photo of a Pongamia tree’s spring foliage a few buildings down from The Ken’s offices. Spring is here!
The desert rose (Adenium) plant on my office desk is full of mature buds. Outside, Bengaluru’s “cherry blossoms”, the pink Tabebuias, are also in bloom. Each afternoon, our post-lunch café visits take us past many of these fantastic trees that (alas) seem to have gone from budding to shedding mature light pink blossoms on those who are walking past, all within the space of about a week. I seem to have completely missed the flowering period when the blossoms are still deep pink. Perhaps it’s because of our perennially earlier and hotter summers.
Here’s what we have for you today:
1. Budget culture, to-do lists and scarcity mindsets
2. Community comments 💬
3. Revisiting the antilibrary 📚
4. Living stone 📸
1. Budget culture, to-do lists, and scarcity mindsets
Let’s start with “budget culture”.
Budget culture is the damaging set of beliefs around money that rewards restriction and deprivation — much like diet culture does for food and bodies — and promotes an unhealthy and fantastical ideal of financial success.
In the same way diet culture is quick to blame health conditions on a person’s weight, or prescribe food restriction as treatment toward the goal of being thin, budget culture sees measures like credit scores and debt as signifiers of financial health, and prescribes spending restrictions as the first step toward wellness — defined, at its core, as being (on the way to becoming) rich.
I can see the point she’s making. But the one that really spoke to me was this.
But budgeting and budget culture are actually ways of being controlled through self-monitoring, the judgment from people around you and the apps you use to measure your behavior. Offloading your financial decision-making to a budget and a set of economic goals you didn’t choose undercuts your ability to intuitively decide how to work and use money to live the life you want.
“Being controlled through self-monitoring.” That’s the space “To-Do Culture” operates in too.
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Hari Buggana
Chairman and MD, InvAscent
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Harshil Mathur
CEO and Co-Founder, Razorpay
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Kiran Mazumdar Shaw
Executive Chairperson, Biocon Limited
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Rahul Gonsalves
Co-founder and CEO, Obvious Ventures