Budgeting The Splurge

You always know when you splurge.

It arrives with its own weather. Ecstasy and regret holding hands, a little fear underneath, that specific nausea of having done something you cannot fully defend. And it never shows up on a calendar. It shows up at 9:40 on a Thursday with the card already out of the wallet.

I paid a professional editor to read Herough Herough. Real money, my money, for a novel that owes me nothing. I did not budget for it. (I budgeted for a few Upwork-priced editors…) I decided in an afternoon to drop the $3k and felt sick and elated in the same breath, which is how I knew it counted.

So the tidy conclusion is that we should plan our splurges. Plan one into the launch. Into the new hire’s first week. Into the customer visit.

Except… Except a splurge you planned is just a purchase with better lighting. The charge comes from the fact that nobody approved it.

Only half of it can be planned. The money can be decided cold, months out, in a quiet room where nothing is happening and nobody is excited. The moment cannot. The moment belongs to whoever is standing there when it arrives, and that person is almost never the person holding the card.

I sat in an offsite once where a team was working out what to build next with AI. Somebody said the big thing out loud. The room did not argue with it. The room sized it. Three months, current resourcing, and the idea went quiet on its own. Nobody killed it. It just got measured while it was still warm.

Another time I tried to thank a few customers who had joined us on a conference panel. Everyone loved the idea. Then it was the cost. Then it was the execution. Then it turned out the gifting platform was mid-renewal. (If you want to watch a good impulse die, lock it in a room with a contract that is up for renewal…) The whole thing came apart in my hands.

The generosity was never what failed. The timing of the ask was. Ecstasy does not survive a quote request. By the time three people have weighed in on the vendor, the thing you felt on Tuesday has grown a Wednesday five o’clock shadow and a routing number.

If you are the one who has to ask… stop asking in the moment. You will lose in the moment, every time, to people who are not wrong.

Ask in January for a night in April you cannot describe yet. Ask for a number instead of a plan. “I want four hundred dollars a quarter and I am not going to tell you what for until afterward” is a deeply strange sentence to say to your boss… it is also the only shape of the ask with a pulse, because in January the money is still abstract and nobody is defending anything.

(I remember reading a story of a company that gave it’s employees no-questions-asked-$200-coupon. And they penalized them for NOT using them. That‘s how you plan for the splurge!)

A budget is the most honest document a company publishes. It says, in numbers, which outcomes it actually expects. Fund the crisis and not the celebration and you have told your whole team what you think is coming.

The only part of that customer thank-you that ever reached anybody was a letter. I wrote it and put it in a hand. It cost postage, took an hour, and passed across no one’s desk on the way. No one knew I did it. Which is either a very nice thing about letters or a very unkind thing about everything else in the building…

Stay Positive & When Did You Splurge Last?