What if your income isn’t the constraint you think it is?

There was a period in my early twenties when I got very good at living on very little. I had some savings but no income, as I was between jobs. I was not entirely sure yet what I was looking for, so the search took longer than it should have. Somewhere in that stretch, I discovered something that surprised me: I could make my money last—and I mean really last.

I got very good at optimizing what I spent. I stretched each dollar further than I thought possible, and at first that felt responsible. Then, I noticed something less flattering. The better I became at living on less, the less urgency I felt about finding my next role. I was still looking, technically. I just wasn’t doing the hard parts of looking. I had made my own uncertainty comfortable enough to live inside.

That experience changed how I think about frugality, and not in the way most people would expect. I still believe in spending thoughtfully. What I no longer believe is that “spend less” is a complete financial strategy on its own. Sometimes learning to live on less solves the wrong problem. It made me more comfortable, but it didn’t make me more ambitious.

Scarcity narrows what you can see

There’s real research behind what I experienced. Psychologists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir have studied how scarcity changes cognition, and one of their central findings is something they call tunnelling: when something feels scarce, attention narrows sharply around it. That narrowing can make you efficient in the moment. It can also make everything outside the tunnel harder to see, including the bigger opportunity sitting just past the thing you’re busy conserving.

Money is one of the clearest examples of this, and the instinct it produces is familiar: to make the existing amount stretch. Cut something, defer something else, work with the pie you already have.

Those are genuinely useful skills. The problem starts when we begin treating the size of the pie as fixed, because most of personal finance is built around that assumption.

Every answer becomes subtraction

Spend more here, spend less there. Want to save more? Cut your expenses. Something too expensive? Find a cheaper version. All of that is very good advice. But that’s only half the equation. The half we skip is: what would I need to change to make this possible?

That question is where having a growth mindset—the idea that ability develops through effort rather than existing as a fixed trait, becomes genuinely useful when applied to money. Not the social-media, everyone’s-a-motivational-speaker version of that idea. I mean something more practical: your current income isn’t a fixed boundary. It’s one variable in a bigger decision, and variables can change.

Bake another pie

I like to think of it as having more than one pie.

Most of us treat our income like a single pie, fixed in size, and every decision becomes a question of how to slice it. Spend more here, spend less there. But income doesn’t have to be one pie you keep dividing more carefully. Sometimes the better question isn’t how to cut the slice differently, but whether you can bake a second pie.

This isn’t about the coffee. Skip it tomorrow and you’ll have a mediocre morning and mild caffeine withdrawal. That’s the whole cost. Skip a trip you genuinely wanted to take with your family, and the cost is different in kind—not just in size. It isn’t a headache. It’s a missed opportunity, and one that doesn’t come back around the next day the way coffee does. That’s the whole reason the subtractive rule works beautifully for small, recurring expenses and fails for the few that shape a life.

I notice this most with travel. It’s one of the larger discretionary expenses in my life, the kind that stretches a budget, and isn’t only a financial decision. It’s quality time with my family, a wider sense of the world for all of us, memories that don’t show up on a balance sheet but shape a life more than almost anything a spreadsheet does track.

I could cut a few dinners out, downgrade a streaming plan, skip the smaller things, and it still wouldn’t be enough to cover it. So, the trip forces a real choice. I could ask myself what else we need to give up to make it work, applying the same subtractive rule I use on everything else. Or I could ask a different question: if this genuinely matters to us, what can I do to bake a second pie?

There are two ways to answer that question, and they aren’t the same. The tactical answer solves for the trip: pick up a few gig shifts, sell something, grind out the difference, and the moment the trip is paid for, the second pie disappears. Nothing about your life has changed. The structural answer solves for something bigger: what if the trip is the prompt to finally learn the skill you’ve been putting off, take on the kind of client work that pays better, or ask for the raise you’ve earned but never requested? That version of the second pie doesn’t vanish once the trip is booked. It becomes a new, permanent part of your income, one that pays for the next trip too, and the one after that.

The specific mechanism doesn’t matter as much as which of those two questions you’re asking. And I want to be clear this isn’t an argument against budgeting. Budgeting is still the responsible starting point for almost every financial decision, and I’m not suggesting otherwise. 

What I’m describing is really a different kind of budgeting, one where you’re not only asking how to divide what already exists but also asking whether you can create more of it. It’s the same discipline, just approached from a different direction.

Where the line actually is

This is reserved for the expense that matters enough to justify the effort, not most of what we spend on day to day. The difference is between “I want this, so I’ll just earn more,” which is a justification, and “this matters enough to me that I’m willing to do something deliberate to make room for it,” which is a decision. The first is how lifestyle creep gets its foothold. The second is how life gets bigger.

What finally broke the pattern

I didn’t talk myself out of that comfortable, low-urgency stretch. Someone else’s presence in my life did it for me. I met someone I could see a future with, and it was one of those unmistakable moments where you look at your own life and think, I need to get my act together. Nobody said anything. The stakes of staying comfortable just became obvious in a way they hadn’t been a month earlier.

I still think about that period sometimes. Not with embarrassment, just a strange kind of clarity in hindsight. At the time, it felt like discipline. It took someone else showing up in my life for me to see it as something closer to coasting.

The rule that doesn’t apply to everything

That subtractive rule is right for almost everything we spend on. It just isn’t right for the few things big enough to change the direction of a life. When applied there, it doesn’t just fall short, it convinces you the bigger thing was never possible. But really, you were just using the wrong tool on it.

That’s the pause I want this piece to create. Not another rule to follow. The next time a big expense forces the usual question, what do I cut, notice the second, harder one sitting right beside it: or what could I build?

Most decisions will never need that question, the ones that could change your life probably do.

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