The Well-Off People Who Can’t Spend Money

Tightwads drag around a phantom limb of poverty, no matter what their bank account says.

August 6th, 2024, The Atlantic

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David Fox has plenty of savings. He earns hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Recently, he allocated $60,000 to buying a new car—but when he arrived at the dealership, he could bring himself to spend only $30,000 on a used model.

Despite making a conservative choice, he had panic attacks for a week afterward. “I have this feeling that the bottom is gonna fall out,” Fox told me. “What if there’s not enough? What if, what if, what if … So instead of going out and enjoying my success, I kind of just batten down the hatches and prepare for the worst.”

Fox falls into a category of people that the University of Michigan marketing professor Scott Rick has spent years studying: “tightwads,” or people who have trouble spending their money. In various studies that he’s conducted, Rick has found that tightwads do not scrimp because they lack money. They are not any poorer than spendthrifts (people who overspend); tightwads actually have better credit scores and more money in savings. (Perhaps because they never spend it.) Instead, they’re afraid to spend money that they do have. Tightwads’ issues reveal how our financial choices can be more psychological than economic. If you feel anxiety about your finances, it might not be relieved by making more money.

Irrational stinginess is a strange problem to have, akin to complaining about being too beautiful. Some tightwads are hesitant to talk about their issues, because when they do, people react by saying, “Poor little rich boy,” as Fox put it. In a society with so much income inequality, it’s obviously better to be well-off and anxious than to be poor and desperate. But the tightwads I spoke with have very real agita—panic, guilt, stress—over their financial situation, even though there’s no real reason for them to worry. They drag around a phantom limb of poverty, burdened with the sneaking sense that something isn’t right, no matter what their bank account says.

“Our spending, in some cases, is tied with our identities,” Abigail Sussman, a marketing professor at the University of Chicago, told me. “And so, if I think of myself as somebody who doesn’t splurge on things, spending on something like a new couch that maybe would make my life more comfortable … could interfere with my perception of my own identity.”

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