Why do I keep buying courses and planners hoping THIS one finally fixes everything?
You keep buying planners hoping this one fixes everything. That's not a willpower problem — it's your brain doing exactly what brains do under threat.
You spot a planner on Instagram. Clean layout, pastel cover, a font that somehow makes “sinking fund” look manageable. Before you’ve finished reading the sales page, you’ve bought it. And for about forty-five minutes, you feel genuinely better.
Then it arrives, or downloads, or lands in your inbox. You open it once. Maybe twice. Then it joins the others.
If you’re reading this because that cycle sounds familiar, I want to say something before we go any further: you are not bad with money. You are not lazy. What you’re doing has a name in behavioural science, and understanding it is more useful than any planner you’ve ever bought.
What’s actually happening in your brain
The behaviour you’re describing has two components, and they work together in a way that makes the cycle almost self-reinforcing.
The first is hope-buying. When facing a problem that feels threatening or unresolvable, the brain looks for an action that signals resolution without requiring you to sit with the threat. Purchasing something, specifically something framed as a solution, triggers a genuine dopamine response. Research by Brad Klontz and colleagues on money scripts shows that avoidant financial behaviour is typically not about laziness; it’s about the nervous system finding a way to feel safe when looking directly at the problem feels unbearable.
The second layer is what behavioural economists call action bias: the tendency to prefer doing something over doing nothing, even when the action doesn’t address the actual problem. Galit Barnea and Ofer Azar have studied this in decision-making contexts, and the finding is consistent. Action feels like progress. The brain logs “I did something about this” and the threat response quiets down.
Buying a planner is a perfect double hit. It feels like taking action. It’s also, critically, action you can take right now, before you’ve opened a single spreadsheet or faced a single number.
The purchase is not a failure of discipline. It’s your brain enacting a short-term threat-management strategy that happens to wear the disguise of self-improvement.
Why this hits harder if your brain is wired differently
If you have ADHD or any trait that affects executive function, this cycle tends to be more intense, not because you’re more avoidant, but because several things are happening at once.
Novelty sensitivity means a new system genuinely does feel more promising than the old one, and that feeling is neurological, not delusional. Time-blindness makes the future (the future where the planner transforms your finances) feel vivid and real in the moment of purchase, while the past pattern (the eight planners already on your shelf) feels abstract and remote. And emotional dysregulation means the discomfort of not buying, of sitting with the unresolved feeling, can be disproportionately painful.
None of this is character. All of it is neurology.
I say this not to let anyone off the hook for the spending, but because if you’re carrying shame about this pattern, the shame is based on a misdiagnosis. You’re not someone who lacks willpower. You’re someone whose nervous system is very good at finding relief, and the market has become extremely good at selling you that relief in planner form.
Why standard advice misses
Most financial advice at this point would say: “Stop buying courses. Stick to one system.” Which is a bit like telling someone with a fear of heights to just look down.
The instruction is technically correct and functionally useless, because it doesn’t address why the buying is happening. If the purchase is serving a threat-management function, removing the purchase without replacing the function just means the threat sits there, unmanaged. The discomfort increases. Eventually something else fills the gap, sometimes something more expensive.
Standard budgeting advice also tends to present the solution as another product. A different planner. A better spreadsheet. An app with better categories. Which is, if you think about it, the exact same mechanism dressed in a new font.
What the research actually suggests
Thaler and Sunstein’s work on choice architecture, and Kahneman’s research on the difference between System 1 and System 2 thinking, both point toward the same idea: changing financial behaviour is not primarily a knowledge problem. You probably know what a budget is. You probably know roughly what you should be doing. The gap is not information. It’s the cost of looking.
When facing your finances feels threatening, the cost of looking is high. Not financially, psychologically. And human beings are extraordinarily good at avoiding high-cost activities, especially when there’s a low-cost alternative available that provides some of the same relief.
The intervention, therefore, is not “buy less stuff” or “be more disciplined.” It’s lowering the psychological cost of looking.
One specific thing that might actually help
Before you buy the next thing, try this instead.
Open a blank document or a notes app. Set a five-minute timer. Write down every number you’re currently avoiding. Not to fix them. Not to make a plan. Just to write them down in one place.
That’s it. You don’t have to do anything with them. You don’t have to feel okay about them. You’re just practising the act of looking without the act of fixing, because the avoidance isn’t about fixing, it’s about looking.
This is called exposure reduction in the context of financial anxiety, and it’s one of the few interventions that addresses the threat-management layer rather than just the surface behaviour. Klontz’s clinical work with financially avoidant clients consistently points to some form of this: not dramatic confrontation, but repeated, low-stakes contact with the avoided material.
A planner cannot do this for you, because a planner is a promise that looking will be okay once you’ve sorted it out first. That’s the wrong order. Looking has to come before sorting.
The other thing worth knowing
The courses and planners are not all cynical. Some of them are genuinely well made. Some of them would, in a different context, be useful.
But if you’re buying them in the middle of a threat response, you’re not in a position to use them. The information goes in, the nervous system is still in threat mode, and the planner ends up on the shelf next to the others.
This is not a content problem. It’s a sequencing problem. You need safety before strategy. You need to lower the cost of looking before you try to install a system.
I learned this the hard way. I have an MSc in Behavioural Economics. I can tell you exactly why the planning-purchasing cycle happens in someone else’s brain. And I still, at a point in my life when I was managing significant financial stress, bought tools I never used, because knowing the theory does not immunise you from the experience. The brain does what the brain does.
What helped was not another framework. It was understanding the function the avoidance was serving, and finding something less expensive to do that function instead.
A starting point
If you recognise yourself in this post, the Money Beliefs Quiz is a reasonable next step. It takes about five minutes, and it’s designed to identify which specific patterns are running in your financial life, not to sell you on the idea that everything is broken.
Knowing the pattern doesn’t automatically fix it. But it does mean you’re no longer navigating blind, and for most people, that changes what the next decision looks like.
[Take the Money Beliefs Quiz here.]
— Joel