The Bagel Principle
Why knowing better doesn't always mean doing better.
My client had more money than he would ever spend. A successful business, a paid-off home, a portfolio that had compounded quietly for decades into something genuinely substantial. By any objective measure, he had won. And yet, every Tuesday and Thursday without fail, he drove across town to a specific bakery to buy bagels after 1pm.
Because after 1pm, they were half price.
He knew, on some level, that this was not about the bagels. When I gently pointed out that the time, gas, and mental energy spent orchestrating his bagel schedule had a cost he was not accounting for, he laughed. A real laugh, the kind that comes with recognition. 'I know,' he said. 'I cannot help it. It feels wrong to pay full price.'
That feeling — that visceral wrongness — was not about bagels. It was a money script, written decades earlier, running on autopilot in the background of an otherwise sophisticated financial life. He had learned, somewhere early, that a good deal was proof of good judgment. That paying full price was careless. That thrift was a virtue, full stop, no asterisk for context.
Financial unlearning is the work of finding those scripts. And almost none of us go looking voluntarily.
The $25 Subscription
I am not exempt from this. Not even a little.
My daughter had a streaming subscription she had forgotten about. Twenty-five dollars a month, unused, quietly renewing. When I noticed it, I was genuinely annoyed. Not mildly. I made it a conversation. I circled back to it. Twenty-five dollars felt like a leak that needed patching, a small proof of carelessness that needed addressing.
Around the same time, her cat needed a procedure to save its leg. The bill was significant — a multiple of that subscription cost that I will not specify, but let's say I barely blinked. I handed over my card with something close to relief that the leg could be saved.
“I got more worked up over $25 than I did over a bill that dwarfed it. The difference was not the math. It was the story attached to each dollar.”
The subscription triggered something old in me: the belief that small recurring waste is a character issue, a sign of not paying attention, of letting things slide. The vet bill did not trigger that script at all. It was an emergency. Emergencies get a pass. The logic is completely inconsistent, and I am a financial planner.
That inconsistency isn't a personality flaw. It has a name and a pretty well-documented origin.
Where the Scripts Come From
A research team from INSEAD published a paper this year that stopped me mid-morning coffee. They were studying professionals who worked compulsively and excessively, even when they recognized it was harming them. What they found at the root was not ambition. It was a childhood defense mechanism: a doer identity, built in response to early environments that traded approval and safety for constant performance. The strategy worked as children. As adults, in entirely different circumstances, it kept running anyway.
The financial parallel writes itself. Most of us did not sit down one day and consciously decide how we would relate to money. We absorbed it. A parent who clipped every coupon. A stretch of scarcity that made every dollar feel precious. A first job that taught us, viscerally, that money only came from hustle. A household where spending was a source of conflict and saving was the only virtue.
Richard Rohr, a theologian whose work I return to often, describes this phenomenon with striking precision: our thinking, he writes, is almost entirely compulsive, repetitive, and habitual. We are forever writing inner commentaries on everything, commentaries that always reach the same practiced conclusions. The work of real change, he argues, is not learning more. It is unlearning — noticing the pattern, holding it up to the light, and letting it release its grip.
Financial unlearning is exactly that. And it is the most countercultural thing I ask clients to do.
The Unlearning That Looks Like Wisdom
Here is what makes this genuinely complicated: most of the scripts we carry do not feel like scripts. They feel like values. The bagel client did not think he had a problem. He thought he was being smart. The cash hoarder who keeps three years of expenses in a savings account does not feel fear. She feels prudent. The business owner who refuses to delegate because no one does it quite right does not feel controlled by her past. She feels responsible.
This is why no one does this unlearning alone, and why it cannot be accomplished with a spreadsheet. You cannot logic your way out of a pattern that does not experience itself as a pattern.
What you can do is work with someone who has seen enough financial histories to recognize the shape of a script when they see one. Someone who can ask, without judgment: when did this become true for you? Is it still true? What would it cost you — in real, measurable terms — to keep running this program for the next twenty years?
Imagine the investor who stops hoarding and starts trusting a process. The business owner who lets capital work alongside her instead of trading every dollar for her own hours. The entrepreneur who raises her prices with clarity instead of apology. These are not fantasies — they are the kinds of shifts that happen when someone finds and sheds a script that has outlived its usefulness.
The bagel client, for what it is worth, eventually laughed his way to a different relationship with full-price Tuesday bagels. It took a few conversations. It took someone pointing at the thing he could not see from inside it.
That is the work. And it turns out, it is some of the most joyful work I do.
If you suspect you might be running a script worth examining, I would love to have that conversation. Reach out at mindy@trumanwealthadvisors.com or schedule directly at trumanwealthadvisors.com.