Better Financial Health in 15 Minutes (or less!)

Financial FOMO’s Hidden Costs And How To Reclaim Your Money

• Stacey Hyde

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The fastest way to lose your financial footing is to chase someone else’s life. We pull back the curtain on financial FOMO—why comparison warps judgment, how hype hides risk, and what it really costs to keep up with curated feeds, trendy purchases, and hot stock tips. Drawing on hard-won lessons from private banking, we unpack the “big hat, no cattle” problem: high incomes paired with high debts and very little true wealth. The images look impressive; the balance sheets tell another story.

From retirees eyeing RVs they won’t use to investors tempted by message-board momentum, we explore how to spot lifestyle mismatches and promotional noise before they drain your energy and your cash. You’ll learn simple, durable guardrails: ask basic questions about profits and customers, set a written investment policy, and resist becoming exit liquidity for someone else’s hype. More importantly, we show how to replace the anxiety of missing out with the joy of missing out—protecting the people, routines, and small luxuries that actually make your days better.

This conversation is a practical guide to designing a values-first budget. Start by naming what you love—golf, fishing, tennis, Mahjong, community theater, unhurried dinners—and protect that spending. Then prune the rest: unused subscriptions, status upgrades, and impulse buys that don’t serve your life. Peace of mind follows when your plan funds what matters, your emergency buffer is real, and your calendar still has room for date night. The win is not the flash; it’s the freedom. If that resonates, hit follow, share this with a friend who needs it, and leave a quick review to help more listeners trade FOMO for contentment.

Envision Financial Planning. 5100 Poplar Avenue, Suite 2428, Memphis, TN 38137. (901) 422-7526. This communication is strictly intended for individuals residing in the United States. Advisory Services offered through Envision Financial Planning, a Registered Investment Adviser.

SPEAKER_00:

Hi, I'm Stacy Hyde, and I'm back with another episode of Better Financial Health in 15 Minutes or Less. And today I want to talk about financial FOMO, fear of missing out, and what the hidden cost of chasing what everyone else buys. Because I think that's what people don't pay enough attention to. You know, they see something bright and shiny, they want it, but they fail to take into account how it's going to impact them. So you may feel like everyone else is winning it money. You pull up their Instagram feed and they're at some super cool restaurant or cool vacation or they've got some new car or something like that. Or the talk at lunch is about some hot stock that everybody's made all this money on, and you just feel like you're missing out. And we call that financial FOMO. But chasing what other people have can be a disaster for your own finances. So we need to understand why we're wired this way and what the risks are for chasing it. Because I used to work a long time ago at a bank. And so I supported the what they called the private banking clients. And what I saw there really proves that this was true. Because so many of those people they had really high incomes, but they also had a lot of debt. And we refer to that sometimes as big hat, no cattle. So it looked like they were extremely successful, but what they didn't have was equity. They made a lot of money, they owed a lot of money. And at the end of the day, they didn't really have anything because the bank and Uncle Sam had a lien on everything that they had. So sometimes you don't want to keep up with the Joneses because they're broke. And I think that's what we need to think about. And I think what's interesting to me is we think that okay, FOMO only happens to young people. You know, we hear a lot about the impact of social media on teenagers, but we see it in retirees. You know, somebody wants this RV because their friends got an RV. I'm like, do you like to go camping? How do you feel about not being in a hotel? They're like, oh my God, I'd never do that. I'm like, you don't want an RV, you should just fly there or um maybe rent an RV first to try it out and see if you like it. Because RVs cost the same as a small house, and the they also are notoriously uh bug-ridden, meaning that they break down and have a lot of quality issues, especially in a new one. So it's things like that that you need to make sure that it's right for you and your lifestyle. And then it can also, on the investing front, it can cause you to buy a stock just because somebody said it was a good idea without really researching, you know, do they have profits, do they have customers, or do they have one customer and there's some risk? Or is it something that somebody just read on an internet page that's really, if you've ever watched The Wolf of Wall Street, being talked up by a group so that they can sell what they have, and then once people have bought it, then the price drops because they were the ones putting out the good news about the stock. So you really want to make sure that it suits you and it works for what you're trying to do. So, you know, because you don't really see a lot of posts saying, hey, I just increased my 401k contribution from 10% to 12% and paid off all my credit card balances. You don't see that on there, you just see the bright shiny things that people bought. So I think you should embrace what I'm gonna call Jomo, the joy of missing out, missing out on the regret, the like sick at the pit of your stomach that you um just bought something, and now you have all these payments, which means you can't do um date-night with your spouse or your significant other once a week, and that's what y'all love to do, but now you can't afford to do it because by the time you pay the bill that you just took on, it doesn't leave time for the restaurant and the babysitter and that sort of thing. So I think you need to track contentment. And one of the things that um if you're around me for a long time, I am very um adamant in my belief that there's something that you just love to do, and it's not addictive or negative or anything like that. Like if you love to fish or you love to golf, or play, in my case, play tennis, um play mahjong, whatever is, act in community theater. That's not the stuff that you want to cut back on. That's what you want to make sure that you free up money to do. So when you look at your budget, you want to look to see where am I spending money that's not really about what I like to do. And that's what you want to uh take out of your budget, not the stuff that you love. Because you can't buy happiness, but you can buy peace of mind, and that peace of mind generally comes by not buying as much stuff. Um, and that the return on that peace of mind and the return on not having that stress and being confident that you know that there's even if something unexpected happens, you're gonna be okay financially. That is that's priceless, and so that's what you want to focus on is what do you want? You know, yeah, I my friend got a new car and it's super cool. Guess what? I just love my Subaru, and it does everything I need it to do. Is there some feature I wish it had? Sure, but I don't want a car payment, I don't want to buy a new car. Mine works just fine. And so you have to decide what's important to you and embrace that because whatever somebody else is doing, it may what you don't know is it may or may not be working for them. So focus on you and what you and your loved ones need in order to live your best life, and then post pictures of that. And I'm sure that there'll be a lot of other people that are like, wow, I want to, I want to do that or I want to go there. And I think that's that's winning at life. So thanks for tuning in. This has been another episode of Better Financial Health in 15 minutes or less.